The Case of the Missing Childhoods

Written Communication Oct 2013

Anne Haas Dyson University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

Writing studies has been an intellectual playground dominated by the “big kids.” If we are to understand how writing becomes “relevant” to children as children, then we must study them, not for who they are becoming, but for who they are in life spaces shared with other children. This essay on the methodology entailed in studying writing in young school children’s worlds rests on a cultural studies perspective on childhoods and plays with a sociocultural perspective on literacy development. The methodological challenges entail (a) researcher positionality that allows a dynamic, multilayered view of classroom contexts; (b) data collection decisions allowing one to trace the trajectories of official and unofficial (child-controlled) communicative practices and their interplay; (c) a socially embedded view of the semiotics and functionality of literacy; and (d) a global consciousness that constrains a long-standing rush to generalization based on observational studies of Western, often privileged children.

Journal: Written Communication
Published: 2013-10-01
DOI: 10.1177/0741088313496383
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality race and writing multilingual writers

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

Yoon (2020)

(Re)Fashioning Gender Play on the Kindergarten Stage: The Complexities of Shift…

Research in the Teaching of English
Anderson et al. (2017)

Seeing Academically Marginalized Students’ Multimodal Designs From a Position o…

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