Diversities in Early Childhood Education

Rethinking and Doing

Celia Genishi, A. Lin Goodwin, Celia Genishi, A. Lin Goodwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135908966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection, edited by leaders in the field of early childhood and multicultural education, is a valuable resource for those studying and working with young children. Chapters emphasize the relationship between theory, research, and practice, and provide illustrations of equitable and inclusive practices that move us toward social justice in the critical field of early childhood education. Drawing from the current literature on ability, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, languages, race, and sexual orientation, the book presents a forward-looking account of how diversity could improve the educational experience of children from birth to grade three.

Part I

Rethinking Identities of Children in
Transformed Curricular Contexts

2

On Listening to Child Composers

Beyond “Fix-Its”

ANNE HAAS DYSON

When she started school, Maxine Hong Kingston did not speak to her teachers—but she did paint. She made houses and flowers in the sunlight, and then she covered them all with black paint. Her teachers saved her paintings, one black curling paper after another; they worried over them and then called her parents. The adults did not know that, for Maxine, those paintings were not signs of sadness or doom but of joyful possibilities. At home, she spread her pictures out and “pretended the [black stage] curtains were swinging open … sunlight underneath, mighty operas” (Kingston, 1975, p. 192).

In a related way, the surface structure of young children's brief written texts may obscure children's language resources, symbolic manipulations, and communicative intentions. The texts may have figured into grand adventures, or perhaps silly jokes or love letters, or even turns in collaborative play among tablemates. And, like Maxine's teachers, we as educators may find it hard to gain access to these textual operas, so to speak.

Our access may be especially constrained in these back-to-basics times, when accountability measures, like achievement tests, reinforce a tight focus on surface features of print (e.g., capitalization, punctuation, spelling, standardized usage or “grammar”). Even the instructional practice of “conferencing,” a commonplace of teaching writing, can be so focused: A teacher and child sit together, read the child's written text, and then begin the main business of attending to “fix-its” (i.e., errors of convention).

The term “fix-its” was borrowed from the classroom I came to know in a recent study of child writing; the room was in a basics-focused city school serving a racially and culturally diverse community (Dyson, 2006). In this chapter, I draw on that study to illustrate the challenges of—and the resources to be found by—looking behind the paper curtain, as it were, of young children's composing.

In the sections ahead, I first introduce the project classroom, Mrs. Kay's first grade in a Midwest urban school, and also the theoretical lens that guided my efforts to understand young children's writing. Then I bring center stage one of Mrs. Kay's young opera composers, Tionna. Beginning with a teacher–student conference, I gradually consider the vernacular voices, the multimodal tools, and the communicative practices that reveal Tionna's opera.

Ultimately, like other authors in this collection, I aim to support reflection on how we as educators might transform our teaching practices so that we may better build on, and respond to, the diverse resources of our children. In teaching children to write, one way of doing this is to look and listen beyond the words on the page and thereby allow more of children's language, cultural, and textual knowledge and know-how to enter into and inform official efforts to help them compose.

Convention and Conversation: Learning to Write in Mrs. Kay's Class

“It's a basketball game!” came the shouts from Mrs. Kay's class as she drew a hoop on her large pad. Mrs. Kay turned to her children, bunched together on the classroom rug, and reported that she had gone to her son's basketball game the night before. “He scored 15 points … so we were very excited,” she said.

The children responded with questions about the game itself: “What was the score?” “Were there any dunks?” Mrs. Kay responded in turn and then, on a large chart pad, began writing about watching her son play basketball.

In a similar way, Mrs. Kay (or her student teacher, Ms. Hache) began almost every writing period by modeling her own writing. “You know what?” she might say before telling them about an upcoming or experienced happening, and almost all children listened intently as her voice wrapped them up in her enthusiasm and, quite spontaneously, elicited their questions. She usually connected her own experiences with those of their families or of her projections of their future. “When you're a mom or dad,” she told them, “you'll see when you go to a basketball game, … the kid that you watch the most is your own.”

Mrs. Kay's writing, then, was situated within her experiences and also within her relationships with her students. She adopted a conversational stance, using all of the symbolic tools at her disposal to interest the children in what she had to say; and despite her frequent admonitions not to guess what she would write, guess they often did, slipping into the composer role with her.

As Mrs. Kay moved into her actual writing, the “basics” came into clearer view. Using Standard English, she called her children's attention to her periods and capital letters, to the spacing and arranging of letters and words. And every afternoon, when Mrs. Kay sat down with one child or another for a writing conference, she concentrated on “fix-its,” that is, on violated conventions (e.g., errors of grammatical usage, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling). Mrs. Kay was an authority on the proper ways with words and, as her student Mandisa explained to me, she “help [ed]” the children know if their texts “sound right.”

Mrs. Kay was aware of the listed basic skills for first grade, of the looming Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and of the expectations of the second-grade teachers (and her feeling that she would be blamed if the children were found lacking). The basics were particularly important in schools like Mrs. Kay's, which was applying (successfully) for federal support through a state Reading First grant. Like all schools so supported, the children in Mrs. Kay's school were primarily from low-income homes; they identified with diverse ethnic heritages, among them black, Mexican, white, and American Indian—all terms used by the children. Eighty-five percent of the school's children qualified for the federal school lunch program.

I observed the writing period and, indeed, the entire afternoon in Mrs. Kay's class on average twice a week over the course of an academic year (approximately 5 to 6 hours a week). I was interested in the nature of the enacted basics and, most importantly, in how the children responded to basic instruction.

During my time in Mrs. Kay's class, I came to know Tionna, 6 years old and of African American heritage. It is her production of “The Big Present” that is reconstructed in this chapter. I chose this production because it vividly and comprehensively illustrates the varied dimensions of children's composing highlighted herein: the children's repertoire of human voices, their multiple symbolic tools, and their guiding communicative practices. These dimensions were, in fact, basic (i.e., foundational) to children's entry into school writing.

Before the opera begins, I offer a little theoretical stage setting below.

Looking behind the Paper Curtain

The following is Tionna's “The Big Present” piece:

This christmas I am geting a big big Preszint I got it from my mommy and is big.

As you, Tionna's (and my) readers, examine the above text, perhaps you notice Tionna's spelling, her lack of periods—and is that a missing word in that last line? What else is there to notice or to know in order to appreciate and instructionally respond to this text?

To answer this question—and to push beyond Tionna's paper curtain, I call attention below to how young children, like all speakers and writers, use texts to have a say in their world, and then to the repertoire of communicative media through which they find a place for writing.

The Social World: Writing as Conversational Turn Any text—any configuration of signs, oral or written—takes shape within a social world. And one way of conceiving of that world is to imagine it filled with the human voices of everyday life. So a young child, like Tionna, grows up surrounded by voices, among them, those of family members, community institutions, media figures, teachers, and, of course, other children. As the language philosopher Bakhtin (1981, 1986) explained, these voices are infused with the intentions of typical communication practices, from joking and storytelling to advice giving and one-upmanship. When young children speak, they appropriate from the voices of other people to take their own communicative turn and thereby become an active participant in the social world that surrounds them.

In this dialogic and, more broadly, sociocultural view of composing words and worlds, language in use and situational context are inseparable. There is always the social world beyond what is articulated in spoken words or graphic symbols. Thus, just like Mrs. Kay, Tionna and her peers drew from and enacted voice-filled relationships as they gained control over writing. One way, then, in which to push back Tionna's textual curtain is to hear her text against the landscape of voices in the wider world of her family and community and also in the ongoing situation.

The Symbolic Repertoire: Writing as an Interweaving of Media As young children find their way into the relatively new medium of writing, they lean on familiar symbolic tools (Vygotsky, 1978). Accompanying their “writing” may be drawing, talking, dramatic gestures, sound effects, and even singing (Dyson, 1989, 2003).

Young children's use of diverse media belies the instructional common sense, evident in Tionna's classroom, that “drawing” is merely a kind of planning (e.g., “Make your quick sketch first”) and talking a displaced communicative tool (“Don't tell me; write it”). Mrs. Kay, in fact, demonstrated the limits of this stance. Her drawing was not so much a plan as a depiction of the spatial layout of the setting of interest (for example, the respective basketball hoops of the two playing teams, the bleachers for the fans). Moreover, Mrs. Kay exploited talk, not only to represent ideas (which might not be written) but also to interact about them with her children, to monitor or regulate her unfolding writing, and even to perform her writing for the class, as her spoken voice infused her written one.

Another way, then, to push back Tionna's textual curtain is to observe her unfolding composing, whatever the medium. One cannot appreciate the fullness of any child's text by plucking the writing from an accompanying multimedia production.

So now, against the backdrop of circulating voices, and given the orchestral possibilities of a rich symbolic repertoire, it is time to begin “The Big Present.”

The Opera: “The Big Present”

During writing time one December day, Tionna wrote that text about her big present. The text is, in a sense, a paper curtain, presenting the linguistic remains of Tionna's communicative event. And it was this paper curtain that drew Mrs. Kay's attention and led to an impromptu conference.

The Conference: A Focus on the Textual Curtain As the children were writing, Mrs. Kay had been making her rounds, asking this child or that one questions to extend the writing or guide the sounding out of spellings. Sometimes, though, she sat down for a more extended conference about a matter of concern. In the case of “The Big Present,” Mrs. Kay's attention was particularly drawn by Tionna's last line, which seemed to have a grammatical problem: a missing word.

Mrs. Kay bent over, her hand resting on the table, and asked Tionna to reread her page. Tionna did so, and then Mrs. Kay responded:

Mrs. Kay: Does that make sense, “I got it from my mommy and is big”?

Tionna does not respond, and so Mrs. Kay returns to Tionna's text, pointing to the and.

Mrs. Kay: “a::nd” (hopeful pause)

Tionna still does not respond.

Mrs. Kay:	What word could you be missing?
Tionna:	“The.”
Mrs. Kay:	“It.”
Tionna:	(reading) “And it's.”

Tionna then adds an editorial caret and writes it; the text now reads and it is big.

Mrs. Kay: Good for you!

Problem solved … or was it? In the section below, I begin to push back the paper curtain, allowing readers to hear more clearly the echoes of family and community voices reverberating in Tionna's.

“I's” or “Is” Big? Cultura...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Changing Images of Early Childhood
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor's Introduction
• Introduction
• Part I Rethinking Identities of Children in Transformed Curricular Contexts
• Part II Rethinking Policies and Programs
• Part III Rethinking Teacher Education and Professional Development
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index