Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write

1. Verbal and Performance

1.1. Speakers and writers are always performing

1.2. "through a performance, the speaker aims to 'elicit the participative attention and energy of his audience"(15).

1.3. Observed children are writing to establish commonalities or social cohesion, criticize other or defend themselves from others' criticisms, and take the stage for an artistic performance (58).

1.3.1. "the I cannot see its own social place, for 'I' can only look at you; rather, we know ourselves only through the responses of others" (Bahktin, 1990).

2. Writing Process Pedagogy

2.1. Writer's as real authors "who make decisions about what and how they're going to write" (50).

2.2. More concrete

3. Fiction Writing

3.1. How does writing fiction bridge these two worlds? How could fiction writing tasks do what other writing "skills" need of an author? Fiction is and can be argument. Fiction, however, this is not widely accepted as "of merit" or "rigorous" enough. Why?

3.1.1. I guess students won't be writing fiction in their lives... but wouldn't the practice of creating in this way prepare them for all of the same tasks?

3.1.1.1. There is almost a safe guard in writing fiction, similar to that of humor, there are things you can say when it is understood that it is imagined. Seems like it would take stress and pressure off the author's correctness and more on their craft choices.

4. Writing as Social Work

4.1. "Young children bring to school their experiences in establishing spheres of relatedness" (12).

4.2. "Learning to write involves figuring out how to manipulate the words on the page in order to accomplish particular kinds of social work" (17)

4.3. "The nature of peer group dynamics in any one classroom is influenced by the divisions and inequities of the larger society; those divisions are particularized in the surface characteristics, social attitudes, and cultural behaviors of children themselves" (Ramsey, 1991).

4.3.1. Pressure of written forms to maintain, advance, or create self to others.

5. Bridging the unofficial with the official worlds.

5.1. Jameel writing story about Coco Pops-- deciding to leave out personal experiences. Making "sociocultural decisions to the public nature of official texts" (121).

6. How are we hindering learning or idea development by using this medium ALL THE TIME? In older years, students do not want to use time to write any more than they have to. Their "freewriting" tends to be their structured planning based on the formula we (teachers) have conditioned them to use in every writing task.