Reading The Brothers and Sisters: A First Response

Early in The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write: Popular Literacies in Childhood and School Cultures, Anne Dyson shares her desire to “provide conceptual substance for a different theoretical view of written language development, one that normalizes variations in … childrens’ literacy resources and learning pathways” (p. 5) and to “disrupt an imagined singular developmental path to school success” (p. 6). This is an attractive enough goal to get me reading: one gets tired of hearing the powers-that-be talk about the utterly fallacious model of error-free learning and constant assessment being sold as the answer to America’s “crisis in education.” Dyson’s unflinching and bold assertion that we’re all different and we’re going to learn and develop differently—and there’s nothing you can do about it—flies in the face of the era of standardization.

What I respect even more, though, is her moral reason for advocating for such a broad theorization of children’s written language development. As she ends Chapter 5, after sharing the richly rendered stories of first graders using popular culture and other “unofficial resources” to participate and find meaning in the “official world” of school, she points out that the children’s literacy journeys “make no sense if one imagines written language as neatly bounded from learning other symbolic systems, nor if one assumes that children are dedicated apprentices, hovering exclusively around designated experts” (p. 134-135). Her alternative theorization of literacy asks us to see writing as a “potentially satisfying tool for children’s present lives as children” (p. 135). Through the stories of Wenona, Marcel, Noah, and the other brothers and sisters, she asks us to see children as “opinionated, active agents with a human right to a decent, satisfying present—a childhood” (p. 27).

I think I’m so struck at Dyson’s focus on a “satisfying present” because of the level of contrast her perspective provides against the ideology that dominates my professional world—school (and literacy) as preparation for something else. We talk of “College and Career Readiness Standards” as if the four years spent in high school don’t have value in their own right. Framing school as site of preparation does a disservice both to the kids, whose presents/presence are devalued against what distant adults want out of their futures and to the institution of school itself, as it accidentally reveals that its value isn’t in “being there,” but only in an imagined, homogeneous future that only some of the kids will have access to.

So, her viewpoint and research agenda are aspects of the book to admire, but what I love about the book is her particular focus on the use of popular media texts as “toys for a kind of dress-up play” (p. 29). I remember repeatedly drawing TIE fighters and Death Stars all over papers at school when I was a kid (verifying my European American maleness, Dyson would have you know [see p. 74]). And as I saw Colin using Star Wars and dozens of other pop culture resources to support his development as a reader and writer, Dyson’s research brought together previously disparate threads of interest—in language development research, my own past as a reader and writer, and the present and future of my son.

Like the “voices [of popular media] woven into the fabric [of the Brothers’ and Sisters’] everyday lives through the childhood practices they engaged in both inside and outside the school’s physical spaces” (p. 134), thinking seriously about the way textual resources from pop culture shape identity, affiliations, and literacy development has made my life, to use an old-fashioned term, more coherent.

Coherent. That reminds me of the concluding scene of A Little Night Music. I think I may write about that next.