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DOCUMENT RESUME ED 384 069 CS 214 926 AUTHOR Dyson, Anne Haas TITLE Writing Children: Reinventing the Development of Childhood Literacy. Technical Report No. 71. INSTITUTION National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy, Berkeley, CA.; National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy, Pittsburgh, PA. SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC. PUB DATE Apr 95 CONTRACT R117G10036 NOTE 44p. PUB TYPE Viewpoints (Opinion/Position Papers, Essays, etc.) (120) Reports Research/Technical (143) EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Adults; Case Studies; Grade 2; Ideology; Language Acquisition; *Literacy; Primary Education; *Social Influences; *Writing Instruction; Writing Research; *Young Children IDENTIFIERS *Emergent Literacy ABSTRACT 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 psychological worlds of privileged adults. This essay 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, children's differentiation of ways of using language are linked to their differentiation of their own place--potentiel or actual--in the social world. To more fully explore these new visions, the essay also offers a concrete illustration of writing children as social and ideologically complex beings. The essay discusses the case of "Sammy," a second grader in an urban school whose writing reflected his own struggle to figure out his place in the social world. It concludes by considering implications for both professional writing and classroom pedagogy. (Contains 119 references, and one figure and one table of data. An appendix lists the sex and ethnicity of the children in the second-grade classroom.) (Author/RS) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ********************************************************************** 0 National Technical Report No. 71 Writing Children: Reinventingthe Center Development of ChildhoodLiteracy Anne Haas Dyson for April, 1995 the Study of U.E. DENAPIENENT OP EDUCATION Odom of Educational Remove% and improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Writing ST(Tho documentas been reproduced as moved from the person of oreanitalion oftanahng 0 Minos Chaves hese awn mall to improve reproduction Quarry Pants of was or oposons stated in th4 dackr mint do not necsairrly represent officio OEFII position or poses University ofCalifornia at Berkeley Carnegie Mellon University BEST COPYAVAILABLE Technical Report No. 71 Writing Children: Reinventing the Development of Childhood Literacy Anne Haas Dyson April, 1995 NATIONAL CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WRITING University of California Carnegie Mellon University Berkeley CA 94720 Pittsburgh PA 15213 (510) 643-7022 (412) 268-6444 The publication of this report was supported under the Educational Research and Development Center Program (R1I7G10036 for the National Center for the Study of Writing) as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in this report do not reflect the position or policies of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement or the U.S. Department of Education. This publication was produced on an Apple Macintosh Hsi computer with portrait display monitor and an Apple LaserWriter Unix printer donated to the National Center for the Study of Writing by Apple Computer, Inc. EDITOR Andrew Bouman, University of California at Berkeley PUBLICATION REVIEW BOARD Peggy Trump Loofbourrow, University of California at Berkeley, Chair Jill Hatch, Carnegie Mellon University, Assistant Chair James E. Lobdell, University of California at Berkeley, Assistant Chair Charles Fillmore, University of California at Berkeley, Advisor Jill H. Larkin, Carnegie Mellon University, Advisor Millie Almy, University of California at Berkeley Nancie Atwell, Boothbay Region Elementary School, Boothbay Harbor, Maine Carol Berkenkotter, Michigan Technological University Lois Bird, Palo Alto, California Sheridan Blau, University of California, Santa Barbara Michael Cole, University of California, San Diego Colette Daiute, Harvard University Richard P. Duran, University of California, Santa Barbara JoAnne T. Eresh, Writing and Speaking Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Andrea Fishman, West Chester University Celia Genishi, Ohio State University Donald Graves, University of New Hampshire Robert Gundlach, Northwestern University Anne J. Herrington, University of Massachusetts George Hillocks, University of Chicago Michael Holzman, Irvington, New York Sarah Hudelson, Arizona State University Julie Jensen, University of Texas, Austin Janice Lauer, Purdue University Andrea Lunsford, Ohio State University Susan Lytle, University of Pennsylvania Martin Nystrand, University of Wisconsin Lee Odell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Sondra Perl, Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York Gordon Pradl, New York University Gladys M. Pritchett, Kent State University Victoria Purcell-Gates, Harvard University William Smith, University of Pittsburgh Jana Staton, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D.C. Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University Betty Jane Wagner, National College of Education Samuel D. Watson, University of North Carolina Gordon Wells, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ABSTRACT Adult ways of writingof constructing textual visions ofchildren 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 essay 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, children's differentiation of ways of using language are linked to their differentiation of their own placepotential or actualin the social world. To more fully explore these new visions, this essay 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. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Support for this work was provided by the Spencer. Foundation and by the Educational Research and Development Center Program (grant number R117G10036 for the National Center for the Study of Writing) as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in this report do not reflect the positionor policies of the Spencer Foundation, OERI, or the U.S. Department of Education. This article began as a dialogic response to Marty Nystrand (and,more particularly, to Nystrand, Greene, and & Wiemelt 11993]), and I thank him for his encouragement of this manuscript. ii Writing Children: Reinventing the Development of Childhood Literacy Anne Haas Dyson University of California at Berkeley IA) new breed of developmental theory ... will be motivated by the question of how to create a new generation that can prevent the world from dissolving intochaos and destroying itself. I think its central technical concern will be how to create in the young an appreciation of the fact that many worlds arepossible, that meaning and reality are created and not discovered, that negotiation isthe art of constructing new meanings by which individuals can regulate their relations with each other.... Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 149) We have never taken fully seriously the notion that development is, in large measure, a social construction, the child a modulated andmodulating component in a shifting network of influences. William Kessen, "The American Child and Other Cultural Inventions" (1979, p. 815) The very grammar of Bruner's cpening quote suggests aremarkable change in the landscape of developmental theory over the last 20 years (Bruner & Haste, 1987). Such theory is no longer a reified or detached account of human nature, but a construction "motivated" by human concerns. As such, it reflects adults' cultural desires as well as childhood's biologicalgivens: a new theory, says Bruner, will beexplicitly linked to "technical"I would say "pedagogical "concerns. In this essay, I take "fully seriously," to use Kessen's words, the notionthat we do indeed inventor writechildren.Our visions of ourselves and of our children are inextricably linked: welabel adults and children as categorical opposites and then use the concept of "development" to construct a path from the childhood of our past to thematurity we seek in our present. It is for this reason that understandings of adulthood and childhoodchange historically and cross-culturally (Thorne, 1987). Itis also for this reasonthis motivated linking of adulthood and childhoodthat visions of the "normal" developing child traditionally have carried socially hierarchical messages. As Kessen (1979. p. 818) writes, "Tolstoy said that there is no proletarian literature; there has been no proletarian child psychology either." Throughout the century, constructions