CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The experiences of eight children from around the world as they learned written language, and the ways in which these students used composition to confront social, societal and pedagogical barriers, are explored in a new book by a University of Illinois scholar.
The new book “Child Cultures, Schooling, and Literacy: Global Perspectives on Composing Unique Lives” was published by Routledge.
“Child Cultures, Schooling and Literacy: Global Perspectives on Composing Unique Lives,” published by Routledge (2016), is a collection of case studies that explores the experiences of young children from five continents. The collection originated from qualitative studies presented at a working conference organized by literacy researcher Anne Haas Dyson, the book’s editor.
The authors examine the challenges faced by schools and students in Australia, England, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico and the U.S. The reader meets children from various cultures, identified by pseudonyms in the book, who confront obstacles in learning written language, including overcrowded, under-resourced schools and institutional policies mandating that instruction be delivered in languages that the students don’t speak.
“Each case provides relevant information on the official writing curriculum, and, most centrally, a narrative portraying the child’s participation in official and unofficial composing curricula. These are the heart of the book,” Dyson, a professor of education policy, organization and leadership, wrote in the book’s introduction.
A primary theme across the cases studies in the collection is the ways in which children create their own childhoods, whether real or imagined, through writing and drawing. The studies also examine students’ use of sanctioned or unsanctioned cultural resources in their compositions, such as superheroes from popular culture, vernaculars and languages which the children use at home but not in school.
Dyson, who wrote two chapters of the book, shared her research with a central Illinois boy called “Ta’Von,” a student with whom she has an ongoing relationship. At the time of the study Dyson wrote about in the book, Ta’Von was in preschool and first grade. Dyson described how Ta’Von, one of two African-American children in a majority white class, used his written and artistic compositions to promote his inclusion by establishing friendships with his classmates and facilitating their acceptance of his cultural differences.
Similar issues of inclusiveness and relationship-forming emerge in another case study, that of a second-grade girl in India, whose imaginative compositions touting her “friendship” with her teacher and boasting of her mother’s support of the child’s education stood in stark contrast to the realities of the girl’s life as a daughter of a lower-caste, impoverished family.
Although all of the case studies feature children who are on the fringes of the society in which they live, Dyson prefers to focus not on their deficits, but on the children’s potential, and she advocates flexible curricula and school policies that accommodate students’ differing language resources and experiences.
“The academic nature and rigid nature of curricula for very young children make it very hard to see all of their potential,” Dyson said. “We should approach children as little bundles of energy full of potential. We have to make institutions that are open to children, where the teaching is about getting to know those kids as people, as social beings and as language users, so we can build on who they are and what they have.
“The oldest learning principle is: You build on what you know,” Dyson said. “And you can’t build on what the child knows if the teacher doesn’t know what the child knows.”
Convening scholars from across the globe to share their research about children’s literacy and the insights their compositions provide into their lives first occurred to Dyson several decades ago, early in her career when she was teaching bilingual children at a Texas school – a societal group that was overlooked in then-current scholarship about the stages of literacy attainment in children.
Dyson said her irritation with the limited scope of literacy research at that time prompted her to return to college to obtain a doctorate and sparked her desire to host a conference one day with scholars who shared her interest in the literacy activities of students who are outside the educational mainstream, especially multilingual children.
Editor’s notes: To reach Anne Haas Dyson, call 217-244-5040; email ahdyson@illinois.edu
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