Looking back at Multiple Worlds

Suzy uses writing to prompt Sam to write to her when he is at camp again in Moonrise Kingdom.

As I was watching Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson’s new film about a group of children who use written language to form social bonds in the midst of adults who try unsuccessfully to impose their values and structures upon them*, I thought of Anne Dyson and the book of hers I’d just finished, The Multiple Worlds of Child Writers: Friends Learning to Write (1989).  It wasn’t just thematic connections though, that brought her book to mind.
*Note: I consider this an accurate if incomplete description of the film’s focus.

Wes Anderson is someone who, like Dyson, I discovered well into his career.  I saw The Royal Tenenbaums when it was first released and then had the rewarding dual experiences of looking forward to future works to compare them to what I’d already seen and going back to see how earlier movies such as Bottle Rocket and Rushmore did and didn’t set the stage for the movie that made me intrigued enough to choose follow his work and career.

At last summer’s institute, I read The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write, the first single-authored book of Anne’s I’d read.  Like The Royal Tenebaums, it features a cast of zany and diverse children (though technically adult children in the Anderson film) and possesses the stylistic hallmarks of Anne’s best work: an articulate theoretical background, loving and richly rendered case studies of several focal children, and a concluding chapter that weaves together all the threads she’s developed throughout.

Since then, I’ve read Children, Language, and Literacy: Diverse Learners in Diverse Times (co-authored with Celia Genishi) and another single-authored book, Writing Superheroes.  So it was with interest that I went back this summer to Anne’s first book, Multiple Worlds, both to see what that book had to offer on its own terms and for a sense of how it forms a foundation for the later work that I’ve grown to admire and learn so much from.

One way in which Multiple Worlds feels familiar is its portrayal of several focal children, selected not because they share traits or behaviors in common that allow Anne to say something is true about most children, but rather because they are so different that she can argue that not that much is true about most children.  She introduces the focal children by writing:

Jake was the playful collaborator and weaver of symbols; Manuel was the reflective keeper of symbolic and social boundaries; Regina, another symbol weaver, was one who sought to cast others as audience for her efforts; and Mitzi ws one who seldom crossed sumbolic boundaries but whose texts seemed to reflect her social world.  Each child’s history highlighted different aspects of the process of learning to negotiate among multiple worlds…. (p. 105)

Those multiple worlds, as she theorizes them, involve the symbolic worlds from various media that children experience, the significant but smaller-scale social worlds of the classroom, and the larger “beyond the classroom” world that kids live in and know about, to varying degrees.

Jedi literacy update

Today Daniel will be showing the video I made for the 2010 Summer Institute, A Jedi’s Guide to Reading & Writing, in which I explore the ways in which Star Wars supports his literate development.

Though two years have passed and other pop culture obsessions have intervened, not much has really changed. When I talked to him this morning, he reported that he was reading a new Star Wars book he’d just gotten from the library. Though Calkins (1994) disparages such nonsense — “When we suggest that they choose their own topics for writing, they often write about superheroes or retell television dramas” (pp. 15-16) — I take a more Dysonian approach and continue to celebrate scenes such as the one below…

George Lucas could not imagine an epic battle such as the one that surrounds this child’s literacy development.

How ethical is your writing curriculum?

My good colleague Carol Casbeer & I have framed our secondary ELA session at the Chancellor’s Academy around NCTE/IRA publications or policy statements that articulate beliefs about reading, writing, and literacy assessment.  Our goal is to help teachers mesh beliefs and understandings about literacy education with their practice, giving their work a foundation that can withstand calls for quick fix results or whiplash-inducing curricular changes.

Hopped up on Diet Coke and a dream, I eagerly await Anne Dyson to use her hair to imitate how children think they will get home. Photo courtesy Caleb Curtiss.

It was particularly fitting then, that some of us got to hear Anne Dyson’s talk that asks us to consider our work in terms even beyond beliefs: she contends we need to be aware of the ethics embedded in our curriculum and instruction.  Her current research focuses on a dominant scripted writers’ workshop approach (curriculum that happens to be in use in Champaign) and highlights ways that this curriculum frames “good writers” or “good students”–and how children’s social lives operate under a different (sometimes oppositional) ethical system.

The curriculum calls for real stories crafted from the children’s lives; they must write as themselves–“the you that is NOT Spider-Man” (a quote from her talk highlighting the ways in which students are forbidden to imaginatively combine pop culture references and their own persona and experiences).  Opportunities for peer collaboration are predetermined and teacher-directed; children run the risk of being labeled as “bad” for attempting to insert themselves into each others’ narratives.  Single-authored true stories are the goal; process behaviors that lead to any deviation from this standard are unethical in the classroom world, despite the strong drive of children to engage in such playful collaboration around text.

Dyson’s vibrant (and always humorously performed) examples illuminate so clearly the mismatch between official and unofficial values in this curriculum.  After her talk, I tried to identify the ethics and potential mismatches in my writing curriculum (I say my  because we have no formal writing curriculum for grades 9-12).  I found it difficult to use her examples as a model since almost of all of what she discussed involves questions of which life experiences are fair game and how collaboration can and cannot be enacted as part of the process.  In high school, both of these elements are mostly absent (which has ethical implications itself), so I kept asking what do we label as “good,”and when are kids considered “bad”?

This was a depressing question to consider.  When compared to the approach used in elementary school, so much of the life of the process and content has been stripped away that all that is left is the writing itself and the curricular objectives we were using to cover with it.  Questions about what they should be writing have been silenced by the overwhelming tendency to use writing to assess understanding of reading.  Considering secondary writing instruction a matter of ethics seems almost absurd.

From this, I draw a challenge: over the next school year, as we begin to construct a framework of 6-12 writing instruction.  Just as we can use documents such as the NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing to shape a curriculum from the ground up, we need to think about what we’ve lost by glossing over ethical issues regarding collaboration, process, and topic choice by acting as if the way we currently teach writing is the singular, “natural” way that high school students need to write.

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.