Journal of Early Childhood Education Programs

007-031 ECL356990 Dyson_Article 156 x 234mm 19/02/2010 11:44 Page 7
a rt i c l e
Writing childhoods under

construction: Re-visioning Journal of Early
copying in early childhood Childhood Literacy

The Author(s), 2010.
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vol 10(1) 731
A N N E H A A S DYS O N University of Illinois at Urbana/ DOI: 10.1177/1468798409356990
Champaign, USA
Abstract This article problematizes a hegemonic vision of children

and writing, one undergirded by an individualistic ideology; this
ideology informs a curricular emphasis both on mastering basic
skills and on crafting for self expression. To this end, the article
focuses on the slippery phenomenon of copying. It begins with a
consideration of two previous studies of copying, illustrating how
visions of children, of composing, and of copying itself change with
theoretical tools, methodological decisions, and responses to
changing educational discourse. It then turns to the current study,
which draws on data collected in two classrooms in low-income
urban neighborhoods, a kindergarten and a first grade. Data analysis
revealed how copying mediated relationships. Collegiality, textual
choreography, complementary authorial roles, and co-constructed
dramas were all on display. The article thus illustrates, not the
composing of individual selves, but the complex participatory
dynamics by which writing becomes relevant to small children.
Keywords childhood cultures; copying; individualism; writing development
Excuse me. Hello. Talk!

Kindergartener Alicia is sitting across from her friend Ella during writing
workshop time. They had been chatting from time to time about their efforts,
especially about Alicias rendition of the fairy Tinker Bell (a popular Disney
character). But Ella has become unusually quiet. Alicia tries to rectify the
situation. Hence that Excuse me. Hello. Talk!
Alicias evident discomfort marked the atypical absence of peer talk during
writing time in her classroom. Through such talk, social expectations were
built, relationships were sustained, and composing became a potential
mediator of childrens relations and practices; in this way, composing
figured into the production of their own shared childhoods of the
7
j o u r na l o f e a r ly c h i l d h o o d l i t e r ac y 10(1)
communicative and often playful practices that constituted their lives as

children responding to adult-governed time and space (Corsaro, 2005;
James et al., 1998). Indeed, as I will illustrate, childrens products could
bear traces of their sometimes choreographed efforts to textually link their
social selves; these traces included shared topics and phrasings and even
imagined worlds.
And yet, it is not so easy to see childrens evolving worlds in formation
behind their papers, in the quiet conversational buzz formed by a multi-
tude of ongoing conversations, in the alliances and antagonisms formed
moment-to-moment and evolving over time in classrooms. Indeed,
childrens talk and play, key guides to their worlds, have become harder to
find than when I first went searching for childhoods in the covers of JECL.
Influenced by federal and state mandates for test-driven learning
progress, structured literacy programs push aside time for child-initiated
talk and play as they seize control of early schooling (Genishi and Dyson,
2009; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009); as in Alicias school, these programs may
be district-paced, with scripts for teachers lessons. Such programs are
particularly evident in schools serving children deemed low income, who
are disproportionately children of Color. In these programs, writing begins
as an individual task requiring diligence and independence. It does not
begin as community participation allowing social and playful children to
find new means for being together.
In Alicias kindergarten, the district-adopted writing program fore-
grounded writing as the crafting of personal experience, and that crafting
was to meet benchmarks for certain writing skills (e.g. sounding out
spellings, using periods and capital letters). Within this program, Alicias
conscientious and caring teacher, Mrs Bee, worried about those aforemen-
tioned choreographed connections between childrens papers. They looked
like copying, which, as she explained to her children, is:
not good. Thats illegal. You cant copy my story . . . And I saw some of you
copying your neighbors story yesterday.You cant do that.You have to have your
own . . . real story about you . . .
Nonetheless, childrens interest in each other yielded talk that could inter-
weave individual efforts into social dramas. To see and hear those dramas,
we as researchers and educators have to look from particular theoretical
angles that bring into focus not a lone text or a singular child but willful
children. And because they are willful, full of intentions, we have to look
beyond institutional expectations to child expectations (Talk!).
An interdisciplinary group of scholars has recently been searching
for childhoods-in-formation. As Cook (2002: 5) explains, one aim of
8
dys on : w r i t i n g c h i l d h o o d s u n d e r c on st ruc t i on
childhood studies is to dismantle the epistemological hegemony that has
regarded children as being merely in transition, as nothings and nobodies in
the here and now. These studies illustrate that, within institutional struc-
tures, children exercise agency in selectively attending to, resisting, and
transforming the world as they interpret it (e.g. Corsaro, 2005; James and
James, 2008; Thorne, 2005).
In this article, my goals are two-fold. First, I aim to contribute to this
dismantling of a hegemonic vision of children by examining the poten-
tial gap between official and child agendas during composing time. To this
end, I examine the slippery phenomenon of copying. I draw on data
collected in two classrooms in low-income urban neighborhoods, one
centered in Mrs Bees kindergarten, the other in a first grade, Mrs Kays.
Although their classrooms were different in many ways, both teachers were
under pressure to teach basic skills (e.g. letters, sounds, spelling, punctu-
ation, grammar) within a writing workshop (or process) model. And in
their localized model, apparent copying could be the manifestation of
enacted social relations and playful literacy practices.
Second, I aim to consider how our vision of children the somebodies
we portray changes with our theoretical tools, methodological decisions,
and responses to the ideologies and politics of education. I thus frame the
current study of copying with discussions of two previous ones. In so
doing, I respond to my assignment for this anniversary issue, to situate
current research efforts in the light of previous ones. In that any one
researchers work is a response to ongoing professional and political
conversations, I hope that framing the current study of copying with
examples from earlier ones reflects changing conversations about young
children, composing, and, indeed, about copying itself.
Perspectives on copying, visions of childhoods

In entering school, children are also entering an official construction of
childhood (Cook, 2002). For example, uniform curricula are undergirded
by visions of attentive children properly progressing along linear roads,
passing institutional benchmarks, their lives catalogued in test scores and
checklists. But, intentionally and unintentionally, childrens relations with
each other may give rise to playful moments and unofficial (child-
governed) practices that cause tensions with the adults in charge (Dyson,
1993, 2003; Engel, 2005; Glupczynski, 2007; Gutierrez et al., 1999;
Thorne, 2005).
In order to see childrens agency, though, it is necessary first to separate
the official classroom curriculum, and its underlying vision of proper child
9
behavior, from childrens experience of that curriculum. This was the

ultimate goal of the first consideration of copying discussed below.
The active child in a literate world: The myth of copying

In the 1970s and early 1980s, developmental psycholinguistics in particu-
lar was foregrounding the childs active construction of written language,
just as it had the childs active construction of oral language (e.g. Brown
and Bellugi, 1964). Young children were portrayed as seeking out and
experimenting with the written language existing in their worlds. Their
approximations of the written system revealed their attention to specific
features of print and their grappling with the relationships between written
symbols and spoken meanings (e.g. Chomsky, 1971; Clay, 1975; Ferreiro,
1978; Read, 1975).
Most influential studies focused on the children of the relatively
advantaged (e.g. Bissex, 1980; Read, 1975). Children deemed culturally
disadvantaged had been featured in texts emphasizing the need for explicit
literacy instruction; low-income children were assumed to be without
learning resources (Bereiter and Engelmann, 1966). Ethnographic
approaches to literacy, while not unknown (e.g. Basso, 1974; Heath, 1982),
were just beginning to get some attention in educational scholarship; in
such work, written language was situated in the relational fabric of a
communitys shared life.
Against this backdrop, consider five-year-old Dexter, a kindergartener
from a low-income family, self-identified as Black, in a southeastern US
public school. There was a daily writing program in his class. That program
viewed copying as an instructional activity and a logical precursor to inde-
pendent writing, a classic if now problematic view (Russell, 2006; see also
Moats, 2004). Thus, far from an illegal action, copying was a required task.
Informed by the ongoing professional conversations, I studied how
Dexter and his peers participated in classroom writing occasions, includ-
ing copying. The basic unit of analysis was the individuals writing event,
that is, all verbal and nonverbal behavior accompanying a childs produc-
tion of a text. The study of these events revealed the myth of copying as a
precursor to writing (Dyson, 1984, 1985).
Copying from the board was assumed to be a simple task, but it could
be enormously difficult and physically taxing, even arguably abusive. The
only children who could easily copy were those with a relatively sophisti-
cated understanding of how print displays language (e.g. through direc-
tionality, and a matching of spoken word and graphic marks between spaces
[Clay, 1975]). Nonetheless, such children tended to write wrong: they
used their verbal recall of the displayed words to guide their writing, hence
10
eliminating the need for frequently lifting and twisting their necks to see
the board . . . and increasing the possibility of making spelling errors.
Dexter, though, was just learning the alphabet and grappling with letter
formation. He lifted his head, angling it so he could focus intently on each
graphic each letter in question, sometimes stopping in the middle of a
formation to see what to do next. He often spent a full minute on one letter.
Still, he was attentive to the language spoken by his peers during copying,
and he began to use speech appropriate for the task, even if its functional
use seemed dubious.
Consider, for example, Dexter copying the date, the very first part of the
days copying task; note his use of what seems to be speech for monitoring
his progress:
Dexter is copying April 11, 1983.
He says A, apparently to himself, and then copies A;
he says P and copies p
and then C while copying r.
Similarly, he says G and copies i
and then Y while copying l.
When he copies the first 1 (of the number 11), he observes Ive got about 3
ones. He counts them:
1 (pointing to the letter i), 2 (pointing to the letter l), 3 (pointing to the
number 1).
Next he copies 8, saying G as he does so; he makes 8 as if it were a lower case
g or, perhaps, the lenses of a pair of glasses. In fact he says, Ms [Teacher], this
spells glasses.
Viewed from the institutions conception of writing and its learning, Dexter
was slow, unable to even copy off the board; the next year he was in Special
Education, copying, not dates and sentences, but whole paragraphs. Within
the institution Dexter became nothing special, just another poor child not
suitable for regular schooling.
And yet, Dexters behaviors suggested his alertness to writing as situated
in a kind of event. He copied not only the board but also his peers self-
regulatory talk while copying; moreover, his copying was not necessarily
tied to the official message (e.g. the calendar date) but to meaningful people
and objects from his everyday life. For him, P spelled pizza; D spelled Lester,
the dummy of a popular African-American ventriloquist (whose album he
had at home); and N spelled his grandmama (Helen). As Nelson (2007),
11
echoing Vygotsky (1978), so clearly explains, what is meaningful to young

children is what is relevant to their lives, and so it was with Dexter and
print.
As a researcher, I documented Dexters agency within the structure of the
curriculum. Like the children populating the professional literature, he too
was making sense of written language and its connection to meaning.
Although he was attentive to his peers, the analytic focus kept Dexter center
stage as a singular character engaging in the school world.
The professional conversation had changed dramatically some 15 years
later when copying again caught my attention. This copying, though,
resonated in a whole different social field (Hanks, 2000). In the dialogic
discourse of cultural studies, copying became, not a reproductive task, but
an intrinsic part of the production process. In a classroom with an open-
ended composing period, and equipped with this new theoretical angle, it
was possible to train an analytic eye, not only on individual children as
active agents, but also on social children as cultural producers.
Contemporary children in a multi-voiced world: Copying as remix

By the 1990s, child agency was situated in a more complex, more social
view of development. Ethnographers of communication and cultural
psychologists theorized development as socially-supported participation in
the communicative practices of their cultural worlds (Miller, 1996; Rogoff,
1990; Vygotsky, 1978). Those practices included the literacy ones of home
and school (e.g. Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Heath, 1983; Schieffelin and
Gilmore, 1986; Street, 1984, 1993).
Practices have norms, expected ways of participating. Children learn these
norms by borrowing and revoicing words from others whose voices they
have heard in similar situations (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). Thus,
all acts of [speaking and] writing, Bakhtin argues, bear the traces of the previous
contexts in which our words and images have circulated . . . [This dialogic
process] runs directly counter to strong traditions . . . that stress the value of
[texts] . . . as arising from the original creation of an autonomous individual
. . . [Text] [m]akers may be individual or collective . . . [But] value originates
from the relationship of the work to the larger cultural context. (Jenkins et al.,
2002: 161)
Consider the textual poachers Jenkins (1992) discusses, using a term

borrowed from De Certeau (1984). Those poachers are media fans who
borrow copy, as it were characters and plot lines, ways of dressing,
walking, and talking from the commercial media; with this semiotic stuff,
they write themselves into a new social community. They remix their
12
borrowed words and images for new cultural productions (e.g. new scenes,
zines, paintings, comics). They recognize each other as members of a shared
world by the intertextual links between themselves and the cultural
context (in Jenkins case, the world of the Star Trek television series).
From this cultural studies stance, children can be seen as participants in
a newly globalized commercial world. Given writing tools and social
companions, they selectively copy, not from a teacher-provided message,
but from the shared pleasures of commercial media and other readily acces-
sible material (e.g. Dyson, 1993, 1997; Marsh, 1999; Marsh and Millard,
2000). They recontextualize that material within their composing events
and, thereby, participate in the production of popular culture and, indeed,
their own peer worlds.
Informed by the ongoing professional conversation, I studied a group of
first grade friends in an urban school, the self-named Brothers and Sisters,
all African American, all from low-income families; these were the children
featured in that first JECL article. The unit of analysis was, once again, an
individual childs writing event. Within events, though, I focused on
childrens recontextualization, their remix, of the stuff of popular culture
from its referenced source for oral enactment in social play and for trans-
lation to, and transformation of, daily composing.
To illustrate, fake sisters Denise and Vanessa, aspiring singers, often played
girl group radio stars out on the playground; they sang remembered and
invented raps and soul songs (taking lead and back-up singer roles). In the
classroom, Denise and Vanessa often drew on the rhythmic poetry of
popular music (and, sometimes, that of official school poetry). Indeed, they
sometimes accompanied or interrupted their composing with singing.
Their products could contain borrowed lines for their own amusement, as
in Denises piece about a much-anticipated family move:
I am going to move
on Wednesday We
are family I got all my
sisrs and me
sisrs and Jake [her brother] too. (Dyson, 2003: 1556)
Those italicized lines about family and sisters were borrowed from Whoopi
Goldberg in an oft-referenced film, Sister Act II (although they were
originally sung by Sister Sledge). The written version did not contain the
rhythm of the original, of course that was supplied by the singing and
giggling Denise (who lived with her mother and brother no sister).
In this project, then, a study of copying yielded a vision of children in
relationship to school composing, yes, but also in relation to a shared
13
cultural landscape. Paths to literacy participation could be forged with a

range of childhood material deemed relevant by children themselves . . .
. . . but potentially deemed officially problematic, given societal ideol-
ogies of worthy child texts (Marsh, 2003). Such official sanctions need not
take place and did not in the Brothers and Sisters project, but they did in
the current copying project. In this project, copying from the media
proved problematic (because theyre not really real, to quote Mrs Bee),
but so did copying the experiences of other children. Tension about
copying brought into focus an official individualistic ideology about
composing. And it also highlighted children-in-relationships, attending to
each others writing as they crowded on the analytic stage. The social dramas
in progress included more than the development of child writing; they
included the development of child cultures themselves.
Childhood cultures: Copying and the ideology of ownership

In the contemporary scene, the burgeoning involvement of youth in
popular culture has yielded a scholarly interest in participatory cultures.
Such cultures shift the focus of literacy from one of individual expression
to community involvement (Jenkins, 2006: 6; see also, for examples,
Fisher, 2003; Kirkland and Jackson, 2009). Participation in literacy prac-
tices, then, is supported by social skills developed through collaboration
and networking in playful, artistic contexts (Jenkins, 2006: 6).
This view, though, is at odds with the current push toward regulated,
even scripted literacy instruction, which now includes writing. This is
evident in both basics-driven approaches to writing pedagogy, with their
emphasis on learning surface-level conventions (Moats, 2004), and more
meaning-focused approaches, with their emphasis on self-expression
(Calkins and Mermelstein, 2003). Indeed, individualistic ideology has long
dominated progressive and process writing pedagogy at all school levels
(Dixon, 1967; see discussion, Smith and Stock, 2003).
In both Mrs Kays and Mrs Bees classrooms, the writing programs were
hybrids: they emphasized writing as the crafting of personal experience,
even as they stressed the learning of benchmarked skills. The explicit focus
on real life stories, as Mrs Kay called them, contrasted the childrens social
play during, and through, composing. In some instances, such play, when
repeated, gained schematic features and spread as new children appropri-
ated the play (Hanks, 1996); in this way, new genres or communicative
practices developed and became aspects of local peer culture. As will be
illustrated, these mediational uses of composing could provide textual
evidence of what seemed to be illegally copying your neighbor; described
more thickly (Geertz, 1983), that textual evidence spoke of childrens social
14
agency and their search for companionship, power, and pleasure. Their texts
literally belonged to a relationship, not to an individual (Bakhtin, 1986).
Studying childhood cultures in formation would seem logically to
require an analytic focus on practices themselves, that is, on socially-
organized, recurrent, ideologically-infused and goal-driven manipulation
of symbolic media (c.f. Corsaro, 1981, 2003). However, with young
children, composing practices may be quite nascent and unstable. For that
reason, I turned to the identifiable forms of peer interaction during
composing, or what are referred to herein as participation modes (c.f.
Goffman, 1981; Goodwin and Goodwin, 2006; Philips, 1972). These
modes recall Hanks (2000: 171) description of the social frameworks that
allow texts to articulate a voice: they have a reconstructible framework of
participants for, to, and through whom the text speaks.
The remainder of this article focuses on how composing becomes
situated in enacted child relations and suggests how, thus situated, partic-
ular child composing events could solidify into peer practices. In this
project, copying in the official school world was seen as interfering with,
not promoting, writing. Copying was still theorized as a dialogic process
but it was a much more contested process, grounded in local ideologies of
ownership.
Below I briefly describe Mrs Kays and Mrs Bees classrooms and the kinds
of data they yielded. (A detailed description of the study in Mrs Kays room
is available in Dyson, 2006, 2008; the study of Mrs Bees room is discussed
in Dyson, in press, which also presents an overview of participation modes.)
Researcher Copying Children

Ramell: Hey! You copied offa mine! (with pleasure)
Dyson: Im seeing what you did.
Sadie: Why dont you see what we [Briana and I] do?
Simeon: Why you aint doing mine?
In Mrs Bees and Mrs Kays classrooms, I constructed my own relationship

with the children by copying them. This copying was not viewed as a
violation of their ownership but as evidence of my interest in what they
did. I could not copy everybody at any one moment, given my ethnographic
need for an evolving narrative with some coherence (see Emerson et al.,
1995). But I could show an interest in other ways, including by literally
(photo) copying their work. This very article, then, is evidence of my own
relationship building through copying.
I copied children by jotting their behaviors in my notebook as my trusty
audio recorder captured their voices; I spent long hours constructing field
15
notes from written jottings, audio recordings, and products. Often one
childs production could not be understood without situating it in other
childrens productions.
I did this copying twice weekly, over the course of an academic year in
Mrs Kays room and, then, a year and a half in Mrs Bees. In each site, certain
children were copied more than others, because they provided entry into
varied friendship groups in their classes. Among these children were
Tionna, Lyron (both Black), and Ezekial (Mexican) in Mrs Kays first
grade, and Alicia and Latrez (both self-described as Black) in Mrs Bees
kindergarten.
Both Mrs Kay and Mrs Bee taught in schools serving low-income neigh-
borhoods, and each followed curricular mandates for writing. Mrs Kay, who
was White, had taught for many years in her urban Michigan school. Her
first grade served children with varied cultural identities, including African
American, Mexican American, American Indian, and White. She had 16
children who attended throughout the school year, although others trans-
ferred in and out. Despite the curricular mandates, she allowed time daily
for at least two outside recesses (weather permitting) and an in-classroom
activity period for self-chosen activities (e.g. building with varied construc-
tion materials; sculpting with play doh; drawing, writing, and crafting with
paper, scissors, and glue).
As was expected in her school, each day Mrs Kay modeled composing.
She quickly sketched her story and then wrote a personal narrative. As the
children wrote their own life stories, she circulated and then spent time
editing individual childrens products with them, emphasizing grade-level
grammar and punctuation skills. Finally, she provided time for each child
to read their work to the class.
To my surprise, there were no children in Mrs Kays room who were still
figuring out the alphabetic system. Kindergarten was, in fact, the place
where children were to learn initial literacy skills, like letters and sounds,
and, if they struggled, they were subject to retention.
A state away, in Illinois, Mrs Bee entered a public school for the first time
as a kindergarten teacher. In her small urban school, most of her children
(of whom there were 21 the first year, 22 the second) were African
American, as was she. Having spent years teaching preschool in a rural area,
she had not expected the pressure she faced to get her kindergarteners
reading and writing. She followed official guidelines, which allowed no
play period other than a short recess after lunch.
Within the mandated composing curriculum, kindergarteners were to
learn to write readable sentences with phonologically-sensible if not
conventional spelling. The writing program itself was structured in ways
16
similar to Mrs Kays, although Mrs Bee had a scripted and paced commer-
cial program (i.e. it unfolded according to a district-wide schedule). As in
Mrs Kays room, special emphasis was placed on true personal narratives;
and, by the winter months, children were encouraged to draw minimally,
if at all, and to sound out their words. But unlike Mrs Kays more experi-
enced writers, most of Mrs Bees children initially were learning letters and
trying to draw the graphics of their own names; few were attuned to the
alphabetic system.
Despite the differences, in both classrooms, the official emphasis on
personal narrative discouraged (unless specifically assigned) fictional
stories, including copying other peoples experiences, whether from the
media or from a peer. And yet, in both classrooms, the children did engage
in social talk and imaginative play during composing; true experiences
were regularly appropriated. Moreover, inductively analyzing my own
copied data yielded descriptions of those previously-mentioned partici-
pation modes those ways of interacting that could result in perceptions
of copying. The modes included articulated collegial interest in each others
symbol-making, deliberate coordination of composing, and, emphasized
herein, roleplay involving complementary or improvisational collaboration.
The illustrative vignettes below vary in social and textual complexity. In
the interest of time and space, I include the most nascent examples, which
are from Mrs Bees room, and the most complex, which are from Mrs Kays.
I make no claim that the vignettes reflect a set developmental order;
children in each room exploited local opportunities for composing. I also
make no claim that children do not sometimes simply copy because they
need help; they do.
However, I do claim that, by focusing the research angle on analytically
described relations, it is possible to see how childrens social and textual
attunement to each other may give rise to participatory childhood cultures.
This attunement has moved center stage, rather than awaiting a turn in the
wings, as in Dexters study. Moreover, relative to when the Brothers and
Sisters acted on their expansive stage, the tight focus here on enacted child
relations in regulated curricula allow ideological tensions to sound more
strongly.
Composing relationships, constructing childhoods: The ins

and outs of copying
When children composed, they were not sitting in closed off cubicles but
rather around a shared table. Indeed, in each room, the table was
constructed by pushing together individual desks. Sitting side by side, child
17
voices contributed to shared talk about their efforts. And that talk revealed
how cognizant they were of, and interested in, each others productions.
That collegial interest, articulated in talk, is foundational to other relational
modes considered herein.
Moreover, collegial talk could, in and of itself, lead to apparent copying.
One childs talk about a text or a drawing (i.e. a sketch, in official terms)
could engender responses from others who, lo and behold, had similar
experiences. Such linking was common in both classes, but Mrs Bee worked
harder to intervene. Unlike Mrs Kay, who was often helping individual
children edit, Mrs Bee circulated, helping with encoding and urging her
children to think, sketch, and write. Thinking did not involve copying
somebody elses experience or topic.
One day early in the year, Latrez drew a circle on his paper and
commented,
Latrez: I seen a balloon when I went on my
Cici: I seen a air balloon! It was up in the sky.
Latrez: It was the color blue. Yeah, it went all the way in the sky.
Cici: It was over by my day care.
(raising voice) Mrs Bee, we seen the air balloon!
Della: Me too! I saw the air balloon.
As Me toos arise from the room, Mrs Bee reacts:
Everybody didnt see an air balloon now. Only the things you really did see.
Despite Mrs Bees caution, air balloons sprouted up on the childrens

papers, sometimes remaining air balloons and sometimes veering off,
growing appendages, and becoming something else again. The prolifera-
tion of air balloons suggested that everybody did see air balloons . . . or,
perhaps, wished they had, or maybe just thought they were appealing.
Literal truth did not seem high on their priority list (or so I judged from
the many stories from these Midwestern children about getting bitten by
sharks). In a similar way, many topics spread among children. They were
not copying in the official sense; they were conversing and borrowing from
their talk.
Children could, though, deliberately coordinate their topics. Doing the same
thing as ones peers dressing the same, watching the same shows, playing
the same games this is a marker of affiliation (c.f. James, 1993). The same
sort of relational work could happen in composing. For example, kinder-
garteners Tia, Charis, and Monique had been doing Shame, Shame, Shame,
a handclap game. Charis came up with the idea of writing about the game,
and the other girls responded immediately:
18
Monique: Yeah! Thats what we can do.
Charis: Come on! Lets get to work. Lets write Shame.
As they worked out the spelling, Tia said with great joy, This is fun!. But
when the girls thought Vashon was going to write Shame too, Monique was
quick to react:
Monique: You cant write about [it], cause you copying!
Inherent in her comments was the notion that the topic belonged to a
relationship to the text-mediated activity of the three girl friends; Vashon
could not join in.
The kindergarteners were just being socialized into the school notion that
composing belongs to an individual. Still, if the children made any appro-
priation of the official injunction against copying, they seemed to interpret
it as a matter of who claimed the ownership first, just as they claimed rights
to any valued object that was not private property (I got it first!). And as
just noted, we could also claim a topic first.
In and of itself, then, this coordinating was a kind of loosely-defined
practice, initiated by a call to play. Indeed, Tionna, in Mrs Kays room, said
just that Can I play? when she wanted to join in the action-packed
textual war play (to be discussed). Both collegial interest and deliberate
coordination were embedded in complementary and improvisational
collaboration. In Mrs Kays room, these relations gave rise to socially- and
textually-complex play practices that spread throughout the class. Still, they
were evident in nascent form even in Mrs Bees room.
Complementary relations: Composing reciprocity

In complementary composing, children did more than share a topic; they
separated their roles as social players and, thus, as composers. Their roles,
and their mediating texts, were contingent on each others. Complemen-
tary relations could be as simple as one child including another in the
pictured family car, and that other child responding in kind. Complemen-
tary relations, though, also could become quite complex, as social roles and
textual action expanded. Birthday party planning in Mrs Kays room
developed into an elaborate set of practices undergirded by complemen-
tary relations. Still, in Mrs Bees kindergarten, the reciprocity that under-
girded that practice was evident, as illustrated most dramatically by Latrez
and his friends Ernest and Charles in December of the year. The three boys
are sitting by each other, when Ernest says that he has drawn three kids who
are coming to his birthday sleepover. Latrez looks intently at Ernest, who
asks Charles, not Latrez, for his name:
19
Ernest: Hey Charles, how you spell your name? . . .

Charles: C, H
Ernest: (to Charles) How you write a H?
Latrez: (piping up) H is like this. Its up (moving his finger straight up and
then finishing the letter in the air)
Im gonna have a birthday party.
Mrs Bee tells Latrez to do his work, as she sits down to give Ernest some
help. Ernest tells her that he is trying to write Charles come over to my
sleepover.
Latrez: Put my name in there [in your text]!
Latrez wants his name in Ernests textual space and, thereby, in his birthday
plans. He cannot put his own name there; he has to get Ernest to put it
there.
So, on his own paper, Latrez writes Ernest (a word easily visible on his
peers paper). And then he says:
Latrez: Im gonna have a birthday party. On March 4. And somebody can come
over . . . Ernest, on March 4, you want to come over to my birthday,
on March 4?
Mrs Bee has Ernests attention, and she makes it clear that Latrez should
mind his own business (not realizing that Ernests paper is his business).
In any case, Latrez looks elsewhere.
Latrez: Charles, when you have your birthday party can I come over?
Charles: Yeah.
Latrez: Thanks.
And then he erases Ernests name and draws a castle he lived in long, long
away. In his picture, he goes through the castle door all by himself and
there, in the castle, I had a birthday party. And I got a surprise.
In just such a modest way, an individual childs writing, like Ernests,
opens up a valued, dialogic space. Latrez strategically announced his birthday
plans in the hope that Ernest would then respond in kind. He was illegally
copying in the local sense: he took Ernests topic anticipating a party and
made it his own. But it was more complex than that; he was trying to
network with Ernest (Jenkins, 2006: 6); and he was using writing to
mediate that networking. But this kind of contingency Ill include you, so
you include me is difficult when official texts are to belong to an indi-
vidual who should mind his own business and do his work.
Nonetheless, Mrs Kays children were able to take just this sort of recip-
rocal action in their complex birthday practices. The birthday parties were
20
not actually held; the practices involved the planning of those parties (Dyson,
2007). In modeling her own texts, Mrs Kay often wrote of her plans for
family fun. The children borrowed the popular notion of birthday parties
and made an imagined world in which they, like Mrs Kay, were busy with
plans for fun times for parties. To do so, they had to be alert to the contin-
gent nature of their writing, that is, to the need to build action together
and, thereby, make a coherent world (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2006: 225).
The play started modestly, with one child, Elly, drawing and writing a
sentence or two about an upcoming birthday party (e.g. held at a pool, a
hotel, even the state of California) and then announcing who would
come. As this topic spread in a collegial way, party planners listed the
names of invitees in their texts, and those invitees could then write, in
complementary fashion, that they would be going to so-and-sos party. The
opportunity to read publicly ones text to declare oneself as an invitee
may have helped fuel this writing action (and could have led to an official
discussion of public reading about private parties, since everyone was not
included).
This basic reciprocal process itself led to oral negotiations, as unlisted
children announced their desire to come to the party. The planner could
write again about the party, this time with a revised list of names (although
once Mandisa, apparently overwhelmed by all the children desiring to
come, wrote that she was sorry but there were not enough prizes for
everybody). Jon initially wrote that five boys, including Lyron and Ezekial,
were coming to his party. As the girls at his table insisted on being invited,
the names listed in his birthday pieces changed. Invitees wrote of their
pleasure. Elisha, who had urged Jon to include her, seemed thrilled; she
wrote that she was
going to Jons Birthday. and we will git to hit the
pehota [piata]. and I will give it my best hit. and I will git all the candy out
and. I wish there will be mony in it.
Ezekial too was pleased:
Im in vited to Jons birday. Jon likes Joshua and I for friends. We got fiend sip
[friendship].
The joint anticipation of birthday parties was a mark of affiliation, even
friendship, as Ezekial suggested. And, even though the parties were
fictional, their realness was never questioned in the official world.
Moreover, the resulting texts, organized by the complementary mode, were
not as obviously copying as were texts shaped by the coordinating partic-
ipation mode. Still, undergirding the practice was the collegiality and the
21
choreographing of texts displayed in the relations of even Mrs Bees very

inexperienced writers.
The dialogic nature of the party planning practice gave rise to other,
interconnected practices, appropriated from in- and out-of-school. The
official social and material organization of writing (i.e. individuals
produced texts in bound journals) worked against the use of varied
genres, including the distribution of birthday invitations. But, since Mrs
Kays children had a free activity period, they had time and space to
compose brief invitations or straightforward lists of invitees, to exchange
phone numbers on bits of paper, and to orally negotiate who was going to
pick up whom on the big day. A lively network of practices, contributing
to a complex peer culture, thus took shape.
Collegial interest, shared cultural resources (like the popular notion of
birthday parties), a dialogic spreading of a practice, childrens transforma-
tion of writing from individual task to social participation these were all
visible in the most socially- and textually-complex participation mode:
improvisational collaboration.
Collaborative relations: Improvisational play

In improvisational collaborating, not only were childrens roles contingent
on each other (e.g. party giver, invitee), so too were their very words, which
evolved dialogically. In Mrs Bees room, dialogic improvisations tended to
happen on the back of an official paper or perhaps on the side (although
there they would be erased). These might be verbal duels, as when a child
drew a funny picture of a peer, who responded in kind, or exchanges of
declarations or accusations of who liked whom (or loved whom, as indicated
by a heart). Sometimes children briefly collaborated on one page, as in this
excerpt from Willo and Alicias play on the latter childs paper:
The children are getting ready for Mothers Day; they have a very particular
assignment to write a letter to their mothers. Alicia, sitting across from her
best friend Willo, announces her intentions:
Alicia: Im gonna write [draw] my mommy and my dada.
Willo: Im your sister.
Alicia: I can put you here with my mama and my dada.
Alicia does just that, and when I ask her to tell me about her page, Willo
pipes up and explains, Were playing sisters, on paper. Later, when Alicia
adds her writing, the name Willo is clearly evident amidst the seemingly
arbitrarily chosen letters. (For fuller discussion, see Genishi and Dyson,
2009.)
A more socially-complex form of play entailed each child taking a turn
22
in their play on their separate papers; it thus involved not only collegial
interest, but also efforts to coordinate with, complement, and improvise a
world with another. The most dramatic illustration of this happened in Mrs
Kays room when the Pine Cone Wars were transformed from a playground
game into more visually-explicit play during writing time. (For a fuller
ethnographic description of these wars, see Dyson, 2007, 2008.)
The playground form was a chase game, named for the pine cones that
teams of children held and sometimes threw as they chased each other
about. The playground wars initially became narrative drawings, filled with
space ships and planetary battles inspired by commonly shared cartoon fare.
The drawings were socially organized as a playful duel between Lyron and
Manny, two enthusiastic Pine Cone players. The improvisational nature of
the boys collaboration is clear in the following sample vignette:
Manny and Lyron, seated kitty corner from each other, are doing their respec-
tive quick sketches (which takes them most of the 45-minute writing period).
They each have their own journals, they are each drawing, but they are clearly
playing together:
Lyron: Manny, your men and my men are fighting with their swords.
Manny: Well I still got men up here on Earth. Lyron, look it! . . . Look how
many people that are from Earth.
Lyron: Manny, heres me and you on the bridge fighting, on my bridge . . .
I kicked you off the bridge.
. . . [omitted data]
Heres where one of your guys jumped one one of my guys . . .
Elly: (a tablemate who has been listening) Lyron, you better watch out
and you better not cry because looky what he [Manny] has coming.
Writing was not particularly relevant to the childrens narrative play; after
all, the writing was to be real. After spending most of the writing period
warning each other of what sort of doom was about to befall them, each
player wrote some variant of So-and-so and I will have a war [on the play-
ground]. I will win. He will lose. Their texts were complementary, but they
were written quickly without any apparent dialogue.
Composing-time battles soon spread collegially throughout the class. At
Manny and Lyrons table, Tionna was the sole girl who decided to play war;
she planned, though, to play with her friend Mandisa, who sat at another
table. However, her decision to play upset her friend Lyron:
Lyron: Me and Manny have our own war. You guys dont even know about
war. (Note Lyron is categorizing Tionna as one of the guys, that is,
as one of the girls.)
Tionna: Yes we do. I watched the war on TV.
23
Manny: Youre just copying offa us.

Tionna: We got the girl war. No boys are allowed.
Youre just copying offa us, accused Manny. In other words, you girls are
not in the relationship and do not belong in the relationship, precisely
because you are girls. Do not take what is not rightfully yours playing
war.
Tionna, though, took offense, referring to her knowledge about real war
from the TV. Soon a gendered war erupted. And in that war, writing became
a more central mediational tool. The gendered war had erupted in verbal
conflict, and thus it became a kind of verbal one-upmanship.
For example, Manny wrote in part:
The gerls will lorste [lose] . . . We [boys] have two big casle. They have ten little
tents.
But Tionna wrote:
We are tofe girls we stol there money . . . Thay oldy have one tent we have a lot
of Cacle
Mrs Kay had not reacted to the real texts about upcoming war play. Now,
though, the childrens gendered play was displayed in writing, not located
off-center-stage in a picture. Moreover, the children were loud, letting each
other know what was about to befall them. Mrs Kay heard and saw. So she
told her children about real war, about how, whether they won or not,
people were killed and that was it; they did not get up to fight again. She
banned war texts because, explained Lyron, she thought they were writing
about real war, not fake war. Once again, war became strictly a playground
game among friends (now, though, one fused with gendered chase games).
Mrs Kays action was not unreasonable, although, as discussed elsewhere,
it did preclude the childrens own engagement in critical discussion of their
texts and in their notions of who has the right to write (Dyson, 2008; for
discussion of such pedagogy, see Comber, 2003). The highlighted point
herein is that the complex social dynamics of the childrens writing was
unremarkable within the writing curriculum. Collegiality, textual choreog-
raphy, complementary roles, and co-constructed dramas, fueled in part by
the generative power of Tionnas claim of the right to play these were all
on display. They gave evidence of the social agency of children, of their
exercise of both camaraderie and power, and of the dialogic dynamics
contributing to a participatory childhood culture.
Our conceptions of young childrens writing, steeped in normative
models and ideologies (Comber, 2003), make these dynamics invisible or,
at least, unimportant, just as they may hide the powerful resources of
24
popular media and even the agency of individual children, like Dexter,
whose textual alertness was no match for rigid pedagogical tasks.
Writing relationships and childhood worlds: Contextualizing

copying
The lifelong adventure of gathering meaning from experience is in the service
of two overriding motivations: to make sense and to make relationships . . .
What is meaningful . . . is what is relevant . . . (Nelson, 2007: 1415)
As teachers and researchers, we tend to see young children only in the light
of a schools learning objectives. Individuals stand as tall as possible against
the benchmarked yardstick so that their upward progress can be measured.
Currently, goals are becoming more tightly regimented, more narrowly
focused, as play itself is being squeezed out of the curriculum. Proper
children listen up, attend, follow directions, and learn in a newly reinvig-
orated behaviorist stance. Even in progressive writing pedagogies, individ-
ual child authors are urged to focus inward (unless told otherwise by the
powers that be); they are to think about their lives, to sketch, and then
to create meaning by writing their own life stories.
These social constructions of proper children are most visible in schools
serving low-income children. They are ostensibly fueled, in part at least, by
a desire to be even-handed in the expectations visited upon young learners.
But these social constructions are problematic fictions (Lewis and Watson-
Gegeo, 2004: 3). They neither allow for the diversity of experiences children
bring to school literacy events, nor for the diversity of ways children
respond to any one activity. This diversity exists because our children are
not homogeneous; the extent and nature of their experiences with written
language are shaped by cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic factors,
along with personal interests and situational dynamics (Barton and
Hamilton, 1998; Genishi and Dyson, 2009; Heath, 1983; Levinson, 2007).
Moreover, as Nelson (2007) suggests in the preceding quote, dominant
fictions do not allow for childrens agency, for the way in which their
meaning-making and their learning is informed by their sense of what
is relevant to the immediate situation. From the beginning of school,
children, like Dexter, link the symbols highlighted in school with events
and relations from outside of school (pizza, his favorite dummy, and his
grandmama). But as childrens school lives become all bound up with
their peers, so too does their writing. That is, it becomes relevant to
childrens relations and practices as children.
To illustrate this, and to deconstruct the image of the proper child
composer expressing some inherent self, I have focused on the slippery
25
phenomenon of copying. The nature of what is copied, the intention ener-

gizing that copying, the participation mode shaping its social meaning,
even the sense of what is or is not appropriate copying all may vary across
literacy events and practices. At its heart, copying mediates relationships,
not only between author and copier, but also between participants in shared
activities or practices (c.f. Valentine, 2006). Among these relationships are
those between dutiful student and in-charge teacher, culturally hip partic-
ipants on a media landscape, responsive peers engaged in imaginative play,
and even binaries of us and not us the one(s) with no right to copy.
Copying goes on, be it assigned, discouraged, or even outlawed. Indeed,
in the world of intellectual property rights, laws are being challenged and
rethought as the right to rewrite the stuff of consumer culture becomes a
way of getting in on popular storytelling (Jenkins, 2006), much as it was
for Denise and the Brothers and the Sisters. Moreover, school childrens
apparent copying of each other, officially seen as a means of avoiding
thinking for oneself, is a judgment undergirded by an individualist
ideology of composing. Although children may indeed copy because they
are confused, their apparent copying may also be unofficially undergirded
by a relational ideology of composing. Thus, highlighted in Mrs Bees and
Mrs Kays rooms were responsive peers, coordinating their social and
symbolic moves and, perhaps, protecting their textual playground from the
intrusion of others, the not us (c.f. Corsaro, 2003). Through childrens
joint efforts, a story of a battle could be found in a configuration of texts,
as could a sweeter tale of longed-for parties with prizes, piatas, and maybe
even a bit of money.
My intention here is not to discount the responsibility of policy makers
and teachers to plan for and guide students learning. But it is to suggest
that childrens engagement in the complex communicative act of writing
is energized and organized by their agency and their desire to participate
in a world shared with others. This is why, explained Vygotsky (1978),
writing can be so hard to teach. One cannot order children to have inten-
tions, anymore than Latrez could order Ernest to write his name on his
paper. And while child-enticing practices can and should be organized by
teachers, there will always be an unofficial world, a network of relation-
ships and practices among children that supports, interferes with, or simply
co-exists with the official one (Dyson, 1993). If children are indeed appro-
priating writing as a communicative medium, then it should figure into
the worlds they control.
Thus, informed by ongoing professional conversations, I have aimed to
gain deeper insight into the intersection of childrens construction of their
own childhoods and their construction of written language. This has led to
26
the focus herein on modes of enacted child relations and on the official and
unofficial practices through which relations could be solidified and
sustained; those practices could become dialogically linked with each other
and with those beyond their borders.
This way of looking leads to an emphasis on the complex participatory
dynamics by which written language becomes relevant to small children
(Vygotsky, 1978: 118). Jenkins (2006) and others associate participatory
cultures with new media and with youth. But new media are just that, new
technologies that allow new ways of connecting, playing, and learning,
with others. The roots of participatory cultures can be found in humble,
under-resourced classrooms, filled with small children who are gifted,
nonetheless, with the human capacity for coordinating their actions with
others who share their intentions (Kenneally, 2007).
There are many accounts now of skillful teachers who claim the profes-
sional and curricular space both to organize activities that guide children
into official literacy use, and to allow children ample room to appropriate
and use literacy in worlds they control (e.g. Comber and Kamler, 2005;
Genishi and Dyson, 2009; Manyak, 2001). Teachers may even explicitly
discuss with children the nature of collegial relations and possible ways of
organizing composing (e.g. complementary and collaborative efforts).
Moreover, teachers with public forums for sharing and discussing
childrens work allow an avenue for the mutually expansive interplay of
official and unofficial worlds. In such a forum; children are responsible for
sharing and explaining their efforts; and teachers are responsible for
building on those efforts and connecting them to the official school agenda.
Such a forum would also allow a public space to problematize text-
mediated relationships, among them those of inclusion and exclusion, and
their link to societal issues, including those of gender most audible in this
article.
Of course, academics have their own participatory communities, their
own textual spaces for building representations about childhoods and
literacies. We copy each other (carefully citing, best we can) and talk
collaboratively (or not so collaboratively), working toward nuanced,
situated understandings of a plethora of questions and issues about society,
children, and literacies. This journal was founded to serve as just such a
participatory community, energized by the inclusive vision of Jackie Marsh,
Guy Merchant, Nigel Hall, and their colleagues. The issues raised in this
article about childhoods, ideologies, and notions of copying need to be
recontextualized in the particularities of local situations far removed from
the American Midwest; in that way, generalizable understandings about the
dynamics of child cultures and literacies can be formed and implications
27
for educators played out in varied societal settings. Because of this need for
professional communication, JECL continues to be a place where my own
lifelong adventure intersects with others. So, in the words of Alicia, Excuse
me. Hello. Talk!.
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Correspondence to:
anne haas dyson, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of
Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1310 South Sixth St., 320
Education Building, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. [email: ahdyson@uiuc.edu]
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007-031 ECL356990 Dyson_Article 156 x 234mm 19/02/2010 11:44 Page 7

Writing childhoods under

copying in early childhood Childhood Literacy

Abstract This article problematizes a hegemonic vision of children

Keywords childhood cultures; copying; individualism; writing development

Excuse me. Hello. Talk!

communicative and often playful practices that constituted their lives as

Perspectives on copying, visions of childhoods

behavior, from childrens experience of that curriculum. This was the

The active child in a literate world: The myth of copying

echoing Vygotsky (1978), so clearly explains, what is meaningful to young

Contemporary children in a multi-voiced world: Copying as remix

Consider the textual poachers Jenkins (1992) discusses, using a term

cultural landscape. Paths to literacy participation could be forged with a

Childhood cultures: Copying and the ideology of ownership

Researcher Copying Children

In Mrs Bees and Mrs Kays classrooms, I constructed my own relationship

Composing relationships, constructing childhoods: The ins

Despite Mrs Bees caution, air balloons sprouted up on the childrens

Complementary relations: Composing reciprocity

Ernest: Hey Charles, how you spell your name? . . .

choreographing of texts displayed in the relations of even Mrs Bees very

Collaborative relations: Improvisational play

Manny: Youre just copying offa us.

Writing relationships and childhood worlds: Contextualizing

phenomenon of copying. The nature of what is copied, the intention ener-

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