Learning across time and text: ten child writers in the years from first grade to middle and high school

Abstract

Becoming literate isn't something that happens in a single year, classroom, or experience. Drawing on case studies of ten children's writing practices across the years from grade one to middle and high school, this study examines literacy development from the perspective of the learner: as a stream of experiences unfolding across time and space. Rather than limiting the conceptual frame to notions of 'school literacy' as a function of 'home literacy', the researcher examines how children learn to write by and through participation in multiple 'communities' or 'cultures' of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Brown et al., 1988). The research aim is to build an understanding of how learning takes place through long-term encounters with multiple communities whose boundaries and composition can be at times fluid and permeable.

Using life history methods (Gergen, 1988; Gluck & Patai, 1991; McCall & Wittner, 1990), collective memory work (Haug, 1987), collaborative writing sample analysis (Taylor, 1990; Atwell, 1987; Tierney et al., 1991), and 'side-by-side' assessment (Atwell, 1987) the researcher engaged student writers in a five-year series of 'power sensitive conversations' (Haraway, 1988). Acting as 'legitimate peripheral participant' (Lave & Wenger, 1991) the researcher entered the students' multiple worlds of literate practice through participant observation in significant literacy events (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983), open-ended interviews (Briggs, 1986) with concerned others, and collaborative analysis of institutional documentation available in school records (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Drawing on these 'biographic literacy profiles' (Taylor, 1990) participants traced their trajectories through the multiple communities of practice that shaped them as literate persons over extended periods of time. Moving from an activist stance (Fine, 1992), researcher and participants collaboratively constructed narratives of literacy-learning aimed not to 'freeze' their findings, but to move them beyond the text as agents of possible futures (Fine, 1992).

Research of this nature re-politicizes writing and literacy pedagogy in terms of the socio-cultural contexts that both enable and constrain student writers. Its implications extend beyond writing instruction into research, theory-building, curriculum redesign, literacy assessment, teacher training, and community resource planning and policy-making.