Anne Haas Dyson

Writing superheroes : contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy

Studying Childrens Social and Textual Lives - Appropriated and Disputed Heroes The Blobs and the X-People - New Perspectives on Old Representations The Trials and Tribulations of Emily and Other Media Misses - Text as Dialogic Medium The Coming of Venus Tina - Texts as Markers and Mediators of Tough Talking Kids Transformed and Silenced Lovers - Texts as Sites of Revelation and Circumvention The Negotiating Teachers - On Freeing the Children to Write.

Writing Children Reinventing the Development of Childhood Literacy

Adult ways of writing—of constructing textual visions of—children are linked to their ways of envisioning themselves and, more broadly, to their perceptions of fully “developed” adults. Thus developmental visions have traditionally taken for granted the social and ideological worlds of privileged adults. This article aims to make problematic such writing by reviewing new visions of language and of development that acknowledge human sociocultural and ideological complexity. Within these visions, childrens differentation of ways of using language is linked to their differentiation of their own place—potential or actual—in the social world. To more fully explore these new visions, this article also offers a concrete illustration of writing children as social and ideologically complex beings. It concludes by considering implications for both professional writing and classroom pedagogy.

Where are the Childhoods in Childhood Literacy? An Exploration in Outer (School) Space

Research on childhood literacy has tended to idealize selected practices of a romanticized childhood; it portrays that childhood as providing the most relevant literacy resources and as launching ‘the child’ most directly into school literacy success. Herein, I argue that the prominence of this assumed direct route is theoretically problematic; moreover, it overshadows the very crosscultural childhood qualities–and the particular, localized childhood symbols and practices–through which children construct written language as a useful medium. In order to make this argument, I draw on data collected in a yearlong ethnographic project in an urban primary school in the USA. In the project, I examined children’s appropriations of diverse cultural material for school composing. In the analysis, I used the productionof a text as the unit of analysis. Through studying these minimal units, I untangled the intertextual threads that linked the children’s present literacy activity to their experiences; for instance, as (pretend) radio singing stars and, beyond that, as radio consumers (or video watchers, superhero enactors, church goers, and so on). I focus on key events from two children’s case histories to illustrate how recontextualization processes (i.e. processes of transporting cultural material across social boundaries) undergirded developmental pathways into school literacy. Children’s illustrated potential to adapt cultural resources in response to changing conditions–to be playful–seems key, not only to furthering literacy development, but also to furthering sociocultural lives on a fragile, ever-changing planet.

Staying in the (Curricular) Lines Practice Constraints and Possibilities in Childhood Writing

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed “at risk,” are tightly focused on the written language “basics.” What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of child writing in an urban school site. Using a sociocultural and dialogic frame, she examines first graders interpretations and negotiations of official writing practices, detailing how these (a) shaped their written language use, including use of time and space, multimodal tools, and expected voices and modeled ideologies and (b) pushed to the sidelines or left in the unofficial child world aspects of their knowledge and know-how, including a breadth of communicative practices and a diversity of graphological symbols. The author concludes with reflections on instructional links among official writing practices, childrens literacy experiences, and the “basics” in contemporary times.

Transforming Transfer: Unruly Children, Contrary Texts, and the Persistence of the Pedagogical Order

It is odd, very odd, to be writing about transfer, given that my imagination has been preoccupied of late by young schoolchildren like 6-year-old Denise, the author of the preceding text. Denise liked to play KMEL (the local hip hop radio station) and, along with her friend Vanessa, often displayed her sense of the rhythmic rhyming style of the current youth scene. She sometimes transferred this material from her unofficial school activities to her official ones, including her daily writing workshop entries. The text shown is an entry about an upcoming family move, and those familiar lines about family and sisters were quite deliberately taken from Whoopi Goldberg in the film Sister Act II (Steel, Rudin, & Duke, 1994).

Donkey Kong in Little Bear Country: A First Grader's Composing Development in the Media Spotlight.

Young children may make extensive use of media texts (e.g., movies, cartoons, songs) in their storytelling and play. Their experience with such texts may become evident as children learn to use and produce written texts. Through their writing, media material, such as the video creature Donkey Kong, may mingle with school material such as the literary creature Little Bear. In this article, I examine how media use informs child composing by drawing on data collected in an ethnographic project in an urban first grade. I focus on the influence of visual media involving animation. By untangling the complexities of 1 childs case history, I illustrate how the media figure into the most basic processes of writing development, processes of differentiation of, translation across, and reframing within symbolic forms and social practices. I conclude with a consideration of the teaching challenges posed, and opportunities offered, by the childrens media use.

Individual Differences in Beginning Composing: An Orchestral Vision of Learning to Compose.

This article draws upon data collected in a five-month study of primary grade writers to illustrate dimensions of variation in how young children orchestrate or manage the complex writing process. The observed children, all members of an integrated urban public school classroom, varied in the degree to which they focused on the diverse message forming and encoding demands of the writing activity and in when they maintained that focus. These differences may have existed, in part, because of differences in how the children made use of the available sources of support for their composing; that is, they differed in the degree to which other symbolic media (pictures and talk) and other children shaped their individual writing efforts. The childrens composing behaviors were consistent with their apparent intentions and with their styles as symbolizers and socializers in their classroom. Viewing differences in childrens ways of composing from the perspective of linear or uniform conceptions of writing growth may mask the holistic sense of each childs behavior.

The Case of the Singing Scientist: A Performance Perspective on the "Stages" of School Literacy.

This article, based on a year-long project in an urban K/1 classroom offers a case study of a young child who used school writing activities to perform rather than simply to communicate. A performer differs from a mere communicator in both the nature of language produced and in the kind of stance taken toward an audience. Although the childs language resources contributed to his success with written language, they did not always fit comfortably into the “writing workshop” used in his classroom; in fact, his assumptions about written language and texts conflicted in revealing ways with those undergirding a workshop approach. Thus, the study helps make explicit many unexamined assumptions of current written language pedagogies, particularly those involving the nature of literary sense, the relationship between writers “audience” and their “helpers,” and most important, the links between oral performance, literacy pedagogy, and the use of the explicit, analytic language valued in school.

Writing childhoods under construction: Re-visioning ‘copying’ in early childhood

This article problematizes a hegemonic vision of children and writing, one undergirded by an individualistic ideology; this ideology informs a curricular emphasis both on mastering ‘basic’ skills and on crafting for self expression. To this end, the article focuses on the slippery phenomenon of ‘copying.’ It begins with a consideration of two previous studies of ‘copying,’ illustrating how visions of children, of composing, and of copying itself change with theoretical tools, methodological decisions, and responses to changing educational discourse. It then turns to the current study, which draws on data collected in two classrooms in low-income urban neighborhoods, a kindergarten and a first grade. Data analysis revealed how copying mediated relationships. Collegiality, textual choreography, complementary authorial roles, and co-constructed dramas were all on display. The article thus illustrates, not the composing of individual selves, but the complex participatory dynamics by which writing becomes relevant to small children.This article problematizes a hegemonic vision of children and writing, one undergirded by an individualistic ideology; this ideology informs a curricular emphasis both on mastering ‘basic’ skills and on crafting for self expression. To this end, the article focuses on the slippery phenomenon of ‘copying.’ It begins with a consideration of two previous studies of ‘copying,’ illustrating how visions of children, of composing, and of copying itself change with theoretical tools, methodological decisions, and responses to changing educational discourse. It then turns to the current study, which draws on data collected in two classrooms in low-income urban neighborhoods, a kindergarten and a first grade. Data analysis revealed how copying mediated relationships. Collegiality, textual choreography, complementary authorial roles, and co-constructed dramas were all on display. The article thus illustrates, not the composing of individual selves, but the complex participatory dynamics by which writing becomes rele...

Whistle for Willie, Lost Puppies, and Cartoon Dogs: The Sociocultural Dimensions of Young Children's Composing

No greater challenge currently faces the schools than articulating what a literacy curriculum for sociocultural diversity might look like. And yet the literature on young school childrens composing has dealt only peripherally with this issue. In this theoretical essay, the author argues that, even for young children, composing of both oral and written texts (i.e., planning, responding, revising) is a distinctly sociocultural process that involves making decisions, conscious or otherwise, about how one figures into the social world at any one point in time. Drawing on data from an ethnographic project in an urban school, she allows young childrens composing processes sociocultural depth and breadth by highlighting variation in the kind of oral and written language genres a child uses, in the kinds of discourse traditions a child draws upon, and in the kind of relationships a child author enacts with others. The author concludes with a discussion of the implications of a sociocultural perspective on young childrens composing for literacy teaching and learning.