Child Cultures, Schooling, and Literacy

Global Perspectives on Composing Unique Lives

Anne Haas Dyson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317567226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Through analysis of case studies of young children (ages 3 to 8 years), situated in different geographic, cultural, linguistic, political, and socioeconomic sites on six continents, this book examines the interplay of childhoods, schooling, and, literacies. Written language is situated within particular childhoods as they unfold in school. A key focus is on children's agency in the construction of their own childhoods.

The book generates diverse perspectives on what written language may mean for childhoods. Looking at variations in the complex relationships between official (curricular) visions and unofficial (child-initiated) visions of relevant composing practices and appropriate cultural resources, it offers, first, insight into how those relationships may change over time and space as children move through early schooling, and, second, understanding of the dynamics of schools and the experience of childhoods through which the local meaning of school literacy is formulated. Each case—each child in a particular sociocultural site—does not represent an essentialized nation or a people but, rather, a rich, processual depiction of childhood being constructed in particular local contexts and the role, if any, for composing.

Section 1
Stories of Composing in Childhoods

1
Introduction: Gathering Textual Children

Anne Haas Dyson

Late March in the upper Midwest is not, it must be said, gloriously appealing to outsiders. However, to Midwesterners (at least this one) it is indeed glorious— the snow and ice are melted (with a little luck), the sidewalks and roads are not health-hazards, one’s breath does not condense in the air. It is a time of anticipation, the trees anxious for their leaves, the ground ready for brave crocuses, the grass promising to turn green any day. To outsiders from milder climates, though, the trees are bare, the grass brown, the yards colorless expanses— and all those farm fields just so much dirt.

So it was when the visitors arrived in my current university town—academic friends, travelers with roots in varied places across the globe (see Figure 1.1) I worried a bit about the scenery, or its lack. I needn’t have. The visitors arrived in good humor, with warm grins, all in sync with the season, as they were full of anticipation of what we would do. Moreover, each traveler brought a textual child, that is, a story of a young child (three to eight years), in early schooling, faced with new possibilities—and challenges—of composing. The children hailed from Australia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the UK, and the United States, particularly New York City and right here in central Illinois. Listening to these stories of children enacting their entry into school composing, situated in sometimes startling different places, and analytically comparing individual experience—these were the tasks we would do together (along with enjoying each other’s presence).

Below I explain the inquiry that fueled our collective work and then turn to the specifics of the working conference that brought the visitors together.

Figure 1.1 Conference Participants

On the Relevance of Writing in Childhoods

Writing should be … relevant to [a child’s] life.

(Vygotsky, 1978, p. 118)

Going to school is the official work of young children, at least ideally, although gender, poverty, and war may complicate or deny children their place in the schoolroom. Children are to become literate and, thereby, productive citizens. All around the world, literacy is part of contemporary childhoods, although enacted to different degrees and in varied ways in diverse political, sociocultural, and economic conditions (UNICEF, 2012).

Children’s writing is particularly interesting in this regard. As a curricular area, it is a window to societies’ ways of socializing children into literacy through schooling. As a symbolic tool, it is also a potential window to experienced childhoods themselves. To build on the Vygotsky quote above, any symbolic tool, to be viable, must assume a niche in the symbolic repertoire of a particular sociocultural group, including those consisting of children. Indeed, some kind of graphic symbol-making is an aspect of children’s play throughout the world, whether children are creating images and words using sticks in the mud, No. 2 pencils on primary grade paper, or a finger and a touch screen (Matthews, 1999).

The question arises, then, does and how does composing become “relevant” to children who, as small bundles of energy, are drawn, as children are, to each other, to play, and to create some sense of meaning and control in their worlds (Corsaro, 2011; Nelson, 2007)? Herein, we ask this question about children in particular geographic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic circumstances. The responses are due to that international group of scholars, brought together for a working conference on young children’s composing. The goal undergirding the conference was a desire for understandings of child composing that are globally responsible and responsive, grounded, as they would be, in those case studies accompanying each participant; that is, in the lives of unique children in diverse home places.

In this chapter, I describe in more detail the work that began in the conference. In the process, I note the project’s assumptions about the nature of literacy, the multimodality of composing, and the variability of childhoods. In the closing pages, I provide an overview of the chapters to come. Through those chapters, we will thematically knit together the distinctive cases and, thereby, provide insight into the sociocultural, economic, and institutional factors that support and constrain children’s pathways as composers of texts, of relationships the texts mediate, and, indeed, of selves as participants in their worlds. I begin below with the importance of case studies themselves, calling on some “Numberly” children to help me explain our work.

Experiencing Child Diversity through Case Studies

“Everyone liked numbers” in what we might call Numberly Land, a world detailed in a picture book by William Joyce and Christina Ellis (2014, n.p.). Like many administrators and politicians influencing schools, the residents of this Numberly Land live in a world of numbers. That world is orderly, neat, easily grasped. In a similar way, numbers provide an orderly way to understand the progress of nation states toward an educated populace, or the progress of one kindergartener on the designated tests that describe progress along some linear pathway of skills and knowledge.

Now in this Numberly Land, there are disgruntled children, five friends, who know something is missing. Through their hard work and play with what they were given—numbers—they construct letters. And those letters form words, and the words transform their world. By the end of the book, the five Numberly friends are colorful individuals linked in relationship to each other.

I have retold this Numberly story because it is, I think, an allegory for how we understand children and their entry into written language use. Be our attention on the statistics UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) reports, providing percentages of young children on the literacy track for this country or that one, or on the results of a school’s testing regimen, measuring if this child or that one has stepped up to the next level of “literacy skill,” one way we “know” children is through numbers. Such numbers are useful for monitoring and comparing literacy in broad terms. But composing is often left out of the numberly report and, moreover, children are left out too—the intentional little ones with worries and joys, resources and relationships, and particular familiarities with the squiggles and images on buildings, paper, and perhaps screens that may (or may not) be part of the practices of their everyday life.

Moreover, in schools across the globe, young children are viewed primarily from the point of view of the official curriculum; they do, or do not, do as they are told. Herein the emphasis is on the agency of children themselves, or what Sherry Ortner calls “embedded agency” (1996, p. 13): individuals interact within, and respond to, the sociocultural, economic, and power structures embedded in their daily lives. Thus, childhoods are socially constructed by societal institutions, including schools designed for children by adults; however, those institutions do not dictate children’s experienced lives (Olwig & Gullov, 2003). In schools, where children greatly outnumber adults, relations and semiotic practices inevitably evolve in child places underneath, overlapping, and outside of the official curriculum (e.g., lunch time, recess, before- and after-school play).

Hence, participants in the conference brought detailed stories of children and composing. The cases themselves were of children who, in their local school places, would be deemed “at risk” or some equivalent term. Children deemed “at risk” reveal a society’s ideological notions of the “proper” childhood and, at the same time, the kinds of resources, including languages, deemed of most use for school success. Such identification is specific to a geographic and institutional site. Still, variation in economic support, social class structures, gendered and racialized inequities—all are evident if we compare across and within global sites. We, however, are not comparing sites. We are comparing individual children’s situated experiences. And children, like those five numberly peers, have needs for making sense and making friends that may lead them down paths not imagined by school (Corsaro, 2011; Dyson, 2003, 2013).

These case studies, presented in Chapter 2, embody the understanding that composing is, from the beginning, multimodal in its representation and communication (Dyson, 1989; Kress, 1997) and situated in culturally and socially meaningful practices (Collins & Blot, 2003; Street, 1984). That is, young children’s composing may consist of some combination of drawing, talking, gesturing, singing, and writing; and all that semiotic activity may be within a playful context enacted with other children. Thus, our interest is not only in official curricula but also in child-reinterpretations of official tasks and, moreover, in child-initiated occasions for composing. Indeed, in some of their official school worlds, there was no composing. The children might, for example, copy words from the board; but this did not mean composing as a form of imagination and play never occurred, as readers will see. Conversely, a curriculum that encouraged “composing” could leave a child voiceless, if, for example, a child’s experiential or linguistic resources were deemed without academic value. All is not always as it might first appear.

Within the cases, then, children are seen through an official curricular lens: How did children measure up to their school’s expectations? However, they are also seen through an unofficial lens grounded in children’s social relations and practices. How did school appear when viewed from a child’s perspective? In the latter view, companions, avenues for play, and unanticipated cultural resources appeared. For example, Esther Lisanza studied in the former English colony, Kenya; in her village school, children were denied the use of their home language in favor of English, but they sometimes “smuggled” their language in through songs and through unofficial church-related drawing and talking.

The case studies are better conceived of as “cross-contextual” rather than “cross-cultural” (Gillen & Cameron, 2010, p. 14). That is, each case—each child in a particular sociocultural site—does not represent an essentialized nation or a people but, rather, a rich, processual depiction of an experienced childhood in particular local contexts and the role, if any, for composing. Those rich case studies made apparent diverse perspectives on what “writing” may mean in official school worlds, how children’s visions of relevant composing practices may relate to official views, how those relationships may change over time and space as children move through early schooling, and, ultimately, into how children may experience the local meaning of school literacy. Below I provide a brief description of how we proceeded.

Working (and Playing) in the Working Conference on Composing in Childhoods

When conference participants gathered for their first full day together, the task at hand was storytelling. We heard case studies of young children in particular physical, cultural, and institutional circumstances enacting their entry into written language use with teachers and peers (see Table 1.1). A case study of a child and her or his composing entails much more than marks on a page. Each child was in a particular institution regulated in varied ways by government guidelines for curriculum and testing, and informed by a particular ideology of childhood, literacy, and progress.

Moreover, the case studies took shape within political histories in which colonialism and oppression, articulated through the complexities of race, gender, and social class, continued to echo in contemporary provisions for education (Wells, 2009). This political history could be evident in the preferred language of the school and, indeed, in the materiality of a particular physical setting—some children’s classroom space was relatively expansive, with places for constructive and dramatic play and for playing instructional games on computers; another’s “classroom” was out under a tree, as children sat with slates on their laps; still another’s was in a classroom space stuffed with desks for 89 children. There were those classrooms stocked with materials, and others in which the one textbook

Table 1.1 Case Study Children

Child’s Name	Country Resides In	Level of Schooling	Language(s)	Researcher
Gareth	England	Reception Class (first year of statutory schooling)	English	Jackie Marsh
Ta’Von	The United States (Illinois)	Preschool and Kindergarten	English (with features of African American Language)	Anne Haas Dyson
Danti	Indonesia	Early Childhood Center Class B (intended for 6- to 7-year-old children)	Indonesian, Sudanese	Sophie Dewayani
Gus	Australia	Kindergarten, Reception, First Grade, Second Grade, and Third Grade	E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Section 1 Stories of Composing in Childhoods
• Section 2 Thematic Threads of Continuity and Contrast
• Section 3 On Composing Childhoods
• About The Contributors
• Index