Project
Report
Hilary Haworth
Table of contents
2. Rationale and conceptual framework
Interviews and members’ categories
6. Findings
related to issues in E844
Appendix I Project Proposal i
Appendix II Data collection table xiii
Appendix III Interview
notes xiv
The aims of the investigation shifted over time. At the outset, the approach could be said to have been - broadly - an enquiry into cognitive processes rather than socio-cultural ones. The questions were around the ways in which children could be seen to be identifying stories as stories, and how they adapted the features they recognized and enjoyed and put them to work in their own narratives. At the proposal stage, I described the aims as follows:
As data collection progressed, the focus of attention ‘panned back’ in order to take greater account of context. Where I had been attempting to look inward, on the child, I began to look around the child. The researcher ‘gaze’ moved outward, to how children’s stories were being cultivated, ‘scaffolded’ prompted, enjoyed and evaluated in socially and culturally specific contexts, and the effects this could be said to be having on narrative making practice.
The project ideas developed as an area of interest from observation of my own children. From the age of about two, my son Christopher would announce a story, seating himself in a particular position and organizing his audience; he showed a strong awareness of acceptable verbal formulae for the beginning and end of a narrative (at first to the exclusion of all other components); and at three he was disgusted to discover a story book that ended with a question (West, 1998).
Once Christopher went to pre-school, he became increasingly aware that other types of story ‘performances’ were required of him. Children were encouraged to bring a news item and speak about it, ideally in relation to the project topic theme at the time (such as The Weather, or Planet Earth); these story-based ’performances’ from the children were used to prompt whole class questioning designed to extend factual knowledge and vocabulary about the topic. Story books had two main uses: children chose one to look at quietly at the start of circle time; or teachers read one aloud and ask mainly ‘recall’ questions about it, either in a group according to strict turn-taking rules, or one to one.
Christopher’s own narrating utterances, already demonstrably “filled with others’ words” (Bahktin,1986), now had to flex and be put to new uses. This intriguing – clearly social – practice provided the germ of this project.
The focus of the study is not on how children learn to tell ‘good’ stories. As such, it may not have immediate implications for teaching practice. Even the original cognition-based concerns were more “how children express a range of social identities through talk in the classroom and playground” (Mercer, 2001), than how policy or pedagogy could be re-designed to develop narrative-making skills.
Certainly, one insight the project reinforces is the relatively early stage at which children start to “do” stories, well before they would be expected to possess the vocabulary, sequencing, structuring and sentence-making skills for writing them down. I refer to these childrens’ practices as story-making. This description is preferred as narratives so often occur in the form of pretend play, poem or song (or, for Heath, a ‘sociodrama’, 1983).
More significant here is the clarification of the immensely varied kinds of story-making children are engaged in, and the ingeniously flexible ways in which they put linguistic and other resources to work in order to produce meanings that will win attention, recognition or acceptance in different interactional spaces. Viewing narrative-making as engagement in social practice, rather than as the acquisition of a code-breaking skill set or tool kit, justifies looking at the practices of such early learners, and answers criticisms that they could be considered to be “pre-literate”.
Even students whose mother tongue is the language used in school have much to learn about how that language is used as an educational medium
Study Guide, p.14
Hicks’ exploration of the nature of discourse is an important basis for the discussion of classroom practices here. Discourse has a dual meaning - both oral and written textual products, and the social practice in home and classroom. Circle and news time have ‘shared histories’ associated with them that are “social constructions…constituted by discourse and joint action” (Hicks 2003).
The discourses of story making are specific to purpose, and to context. Here, with Mercer (2000), I see context from a socio-cultural perspective, as a socially constructed frame of reference that includes not just the physical context but also the tools used, the texts and conversations individuals have a history of sharing, and other signing systems such as gesture and illustration. Or as Russell has it:
Context is not a container for a learner, but rather a weaving together of the learner with other people and tools into a web or network of sociocultural interactions and meanings that are integral to the learning
Russell, 2002
This ‘weaving together’ is not necessarily always a peaceable or peaceful process, however. In Hicks’ view (2003) discourses embody ideologies as well as ideas, and provide a badge of membership or a brand of exclusion from communities. Therefore in looking at the narrative making of children, I do so through the lens of practice theory. In particular, I take the view that these children are apprentice story-makers, producing shared artifacts via their legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger,1991; Bucholtz,1999).
A community of practice (CoP) has three constitutive features, as defined by one of the concept’s original authors, Wenger (1998):
1. mutual engagement
2. a joint enterprise
3. a shared repertoire (of tools and techniques)
The CoP required quite precise identification. It would be nonsense to view the children in the study as apprentice craftspeople of the mature, modern narrative. The CoP here is the class of children mutually engaged in constructing oral and visual learning artifacts in a shared system of rules, roles and resources.
Discussion of a CoP (Lave and Wenger, 1991) allows for the introduction of the concept of power struggle as well as apprenticeship, development and change. New meanings can be collaboratively produced, ways of producing artifacts can be varied, and the CoP develops “shared evaluations of the meaning created by that variation” (Davies, 2005). Yet CoPs are not naturally egalitarian, just as discourses are never neutral.
Community of practice theory also allows us to view linguistic practice as part of a range of signifying practices children can adopt and adapt to their meaning-making in stories. Bucholtz works with the framework of the CoP in order to “re-incorporate language into the physical self”, and I investigate how children use props, pictures, gesture, sound effects, mime and song to bring their bodies and their subjectivities into the story-making process.
Part of learning to produce stories within a community of practice is the imitating of other voices. In their story making children quote and copy, often drawing on texts that are themselves ‘hybrid’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). Teachers may coach this practice through “guided participation” (Rogoff, 1990; Rojas Drummond, 2000; Mercer, 2000). Communities may develop shared meanings even without overt tuition, where experts ‘scaffold’ the zone of proximal development or ZPD (Vygotsky, 1978), or where groups collaborate in an intermental development zone or IDZ (Mercer, 2000).
When Mercer concludes that “recycling the language they hear may be an important way of assimilating the collective ways of thinking of the community in which they are growing up”, he looks in particular at the role jokes and humour can play in learning to manage and exploit ‘shared responses’ to language and language forms. There are clear connections here to Bakhtin’s idea of “language with a sideways look” (1981b), which also notes the importance of laughter in story-making.
Bahktinian ideas of ‘dialogic’ language, of ‘polyglossia’, the concept of a ludic and comic intertextuality, and the variety of ways in which any voice reproduces others may seem a little over-engineered for the analysis of children’s narrative performances (Bahktin, 1981, 1981b, 1984). Objection may be raised that Bakhtin is describing the work of specific novelists at the height of their powers, not the activities of children in the pre-school classroom. However, Bakhtinian ideas have been successfully and insightfully adopted for such varied analyses as work on high school writing (Dyson, 1997); early science writing (Hicks, 2003); the views on literacy of women in rural Pakistan (Zubair, 1999); ‘voices’ in ESL students’ letter writing (Scollon et al, 1998); ‘identity practice’ among teenage girls (Bucholtz, 1999); and the informal talk of children as they are inducted into high school (Maybin, 2003).
Of these, two in particular provide tools and perspectives for the current project. Maybin shows how even in ‘just talk’, as opposed to writing, “a web of complex links to other conversations and other contexts is constructed between participants”, and looks at the variety of ways in which children take on others’ voices.
Hicks (2003) sees the classroom as the place where discourse and context meet. Her Bakhtinian analysis demonstrates how meaning is derived “against the background of other texts and the discourses of other occasions” (Lemke, 1992). In Hicks’ research into classroom writing, the fact that a child’s science diary shows her adopting fledgling scientific discursive practices, can be used as evidence that the child has ‘learned science’ (Hicks, 2003, p.9). In this report I examine a scientific ‘story’ produced by children in similar terms.
The study focused on two physical contexts:
This represents a narrowing of focus from the proposal stage. This was for two main reasons. First, contexts for narration are more than geographical and physical. In the school setting in particular it proved problematic to identify and understand the texts known to or being appropriated by the children. Thus it was difficult to talk about the intertextual context with any degree of certainty since it was so broad, encompassing the oral story telling and book and audio visual collections in the home, in the extended family, at the library, in other playgroups, at Sunday schools and so on.
Secondly my concerns were with story-making as community practice. As a result, looking at geographically distinct loci caused problems. I could not assume that I was looking at one, fairly stable, speech community, whose practices could be ‘transported’ from one context ( the home) to another (school, library, Sunday school) and remain substantially unchanged by that transposition. On the contrary I believed, with Bucholtz (1999) and Moss (2003), that contextual elements other than the linguistic influenced the meaning made in that particular configuration. A community of practice is in part constituted by its locus of operation. I did indeed find that practice was specific to each context – children were both story-makers and story-takers in school, but the ground rules for these practices were unlike those at home. The pre-school classroom became the location for the CoP at issue.
In order to ensure confidentiality the school is not identified in output documents. First name pseudonyms or abbreviations are used for children, and no photography has been included in the report.
A communication to parents and school staff was circulated giving a basic description of the project, its parameters and any confidentiality issues, and requesting permission to involve their children. It was made clear that the project was not an ‘inspection’, and did not review pedagogy or methodology, nor was it to draw conclusions about children’s ability or aptitude levels, or comment on teacher performance. A ‘proof’ copy of the report was made available to director and her staff and their comments have been included in the final version.
One result of taking the school as the primary location for the community of practice has been that, implicitly, I was designating the school story making practices as central (‘core’ in Lave and Wenger’s terms) and home practices as peripheral. This validation of ‘schooled’ practice over local contexts is not meant to imply that home practices are less important, less varied or less intriguing. It may be more useful to think of the children, in their story making in and out of school, as traveling centripetally, centrifugally or orbitally (Wenger, 2000), or acting as ‘brokers’ on the borders of the community of practice.
It followed from the shift in focus towards the cultural and geographical specificity of the story telling, that the level of analytical detail would shift also. There was less of a role for Conversation Analysis (CA) than was anticipated at the project proposal stage. With fewer close-grained observations of how children appropriated the narrative forms available to them, based on small sections of transcribed talk, more emphasis could be given to semi-structured interviews with parents, and classroom observation. This also allowed more weight to be given to the variety of non-linguistic practices - including gesture, posture and the use of documents and other material objects - at work in constructing narrative context for the children.
For Roadville, Trackton’s stories would be lies: for Trackton, Roadville’s stories would not even count as stories
Heath, 1983
It became clear early in the data collection process that I needed to be explicit about the cultural specificity of the form of story telling I was exploring. I became particularly interested in the way particular structures of narrative were replicated, recognized and valued in school. In particular, the work of Heath (1983) on different language practices in different cultures, and the match or mismatch between them and practices privileged in school, was illuminative. While neither space nor time constraints allowed for an ethnographic study of any such detail here, the lens through which Heath looked at the discursive practices of children lent itself to the design of data-gathering for this project. One central idea of her ethnography in particular - that events should be looked at from the point of view of participants, and analysed using ‘members categories’ - is core to this study.
The unit of study I defined as a “narrative event”, after Moss’ (2003) definition of a “literacy event”. Each narrative event is a distinct configuration of resources with “meaning potential (Halliday 1978) – speakers, readers and listeners, texts and contexts; rule systems and roles; artifacts being produced. By logging and categorizing the narrative events in which my son was engaged over a 48 hour period, I unearthed a huge variety of events that could all be categorized as story-making.
The format for the interviews that followed was semi-structured. Interviews were conducted over a period of three weeks with three parents and with two teachers in the school. Interviews were taped, with the permission of interviewees. Questions were the same in each interview but phrased to be as open as possible: I did not wish to impose readings on the stories or elicit the description of only one type of story. As for Moss (2003), my starting position was “the use of a particular range of techniques designed to elicit and preserve ways of knowing and acting which belong to the researched”.
Parents were asked to remember three specific incidents. One was to be an occasion when their child told them a story, but the interviewer did not provide further explanation as to what constituted a story. The second was to be an occasion when an adult or older sibling shared a story with the child; the medium was not specified. The third concerned a story telling occasion that their parents were unhappy about – again left open to uncover attitudes to fiction, truth and lies in the family. For the purposes of this report I concentrate on findings from the first part of the interviews, on children’s own narratives. This section concentrated on the circumstances of the story-telling event, story beginnings, the child’s managing of the audience, use of media, story endings and evaluations. See Appendix III for a copy of the interview notes.
Zubair(1999) shows how participants’ use of specific antonyms around issues of freedom and restriction, individuality and collectivism ‘voices’ their perceptions of their social context. Here I examine parents’ ‘definitions-in-action’ of what constitutes story making – and what is excluded - to compare the practices of school and home. Results were tabulated together in order to identify common features, and this drawing out of categories is again based on the approach of Moss (2003) and Bernstein (1996): “developing reading rules…to grasp how members construct their various texts to manage their contexts”.
In classroom observations I base my approach on that of Moss (2003) who argues that while speakers, texts and “material and discursive space” generate new meanings in interaction, “these [elements] are traditionally handled separately, using different kinds of analytic tools”. Bucholtz (1999) also argues that “non-linguistic social practices and language should be approached in analogous ways”.
In generating data from school I mapped elements such as group size, students’ and teachers’ postures and positions, when and how far pupils are permitted to move around, the materiality of the texts used, furnishings and physical space, as well as recording circle time and taking notes. This mapping has shown how children and teachers use their physical position, and organise their audience’s, in order to establish their role as story-maker.
These results were also tabulated. While two hours of lessons were observed only about ten minutes of classroom talk has been transcribed in detail.
Literacy… is messy and diverse and not in need of pluralizing
Kress 1997
The children studied were boys between 3½ and four years of age. Fathers are in full-time employment; only one of the mothers works part-time outside the home.
The home log of “narrative
events” uncovered a huge variety of narrative events through the day. Some were prompted and steered by questions
from an adult, others spontaneous; some were listened to, some were
“self-talk”; some were plays; others poetry; some were more or less
playful. Just as Moss (2003) found, the formation
of explanation categories provided real insights into the approaches of
parents, the resources available to children and the effects of material
contexts. For Moss, studying the reading
of boys in school, it helped to show how “a similar curriculum slot performing
the same function but in a different setting and mobilising different
resources, can still turn out differently”. In the current study, it also raised questions
about the assumptions of parents regarding the values attached to and attention
given to different ways of making meaning with narrative.
The log categorization process also helped generate a “language of explanation” (Bernstein, 1996) for the project, which informed the interviews that followed. When parents were asked to describe their child as ‘telling a story’, they all referred to incidents in the home or the car, which were unprompted and one-to-one. A narrative following a prompt (such as ‘tell Daddy what we did today’) was not considered to be a story. These types of narratives had bigger audiences and noisier settings – typically around the tea table with siblings also vying for attention – and were more likely to be interrupted or finish prematurely. A description or retelling of a book or a television programme were not described as story-making by any parents, although the teacher interviewed used this as her first example.
A ‘good’ story for parents was, therefore, spontaneous, but also ‘funny’ or inventive. Parents enjoyed their children’s manipulation of language - particularly a reworking of ‘The Elephant and the Bad Baby’ (Vipont and Briggs, 1971) involving a tissue and a toy plane – and rewarded children with laughter. As parody and polyglossia are the heart and soul of novelistic fiction for Bahktin (1981b), it could be said that the discourse parents are valuing here is that of the fictional creative text.
In interview, the teachers drew exclusively on occasions where the child re-told a story for their examples of a child’s storytelling practice, whereas parents did not. Observation of this type of story-making is regular and efforts are made to standardize the evaluations produced by different members of staff by using a common structure. The re-telling of a story from a book - the school does not use audio-visual or ICT equipment - is used as a vehicle to assess recall and sequencing skills (remembering the main events and characters of the text and introducing them in the same order).
These skills are rated more highly than quoting specific phrases. This reflects the fact that fanciful use of language, creating fictions for the entertainment of others, is not a central practice to the pre-school. The recall of illustration is not rated at all. The low importance attached to illustration in school observations is at odds with the fact that the texts chosen by the children (Brown, 1996; West, 1998) used the illustrative mode to subvert the textual mode like Bakhtin’s “comic doubles” (1981b). ‘Parody’ is hugely important to Bahktin, one of the most ‘double-voiced’ utterances in his (1984) typology of different ways of reproducing voices (Maybin, 2003). While they produce little parody of their own, children are highly responsive to it in these texts.
Children’s story-making of the type and structure more like that reported at home take place almost exclusively in circle time. Unlike at home, however, stories are prompted by an adult (the teacher names a child to tell a story, although that child has notified the group of her intention to contribute by bringing a “news item” which is put into a special box in the centre of the circle at the start of the session. This is effectively a queuing system!). Unlike at home, the audience is large, and turn-taking rules are generally enforced, although the activity is self-limiting (the children were allowed to get to the end of their account and not timed out). Roles of listener and speaker are more defined than at home.
Thus, in looking at the story making of even very young children it is possible to see them adapting their discourse to the context of use. In fact the classroom observations show that they have multiple story-making literacies, in Street’s terms, “that vary with time and place and are embedded in specific cultural practices” (Street, 2003).
The teacher (T.) announced “Story time”. The children (C, J, S, D and K.) were arranged in small chairs in a semi-circle. By means of an action game, which all the children were clearly familiar with, the children’s bodies were calmed. However the first activity was a sequence of IRF (initiation-response-feedback) exchanges on previous project work on plants and growth.
Sequence 1: What do plants need?
T: What do plants need… to live?
S. Sun
J: Water and …[
C [water
S: Sun and water
T: Yes, they need sun ….and water …, and they need….. [sniffs and exhales exaggeratedly]
D: Air
T: Yes they need air, good. Can we see air?.... What can we do with air?
J: A balloon, blow a balloon.
C: And stick sellotape on a balloon……..
[The children discuss an earlier experiment, pricking an inflated balloon through a piece of tape to allow the air to escape slowly]
T: How did you know the air was coming out?
C: My cheek went cold
T: Your cheek was all cold yes, that’s right. Now , good…
C: It’s all [freeeezing!
T. [Now, I’m going to tell you a story about the sun……Who can tell me, which is bigger, the earth or the sun? Is the sun bigger?
S: The sun.
T: Is the sun bigger, what do you think Kitty?
K: The sun.
T: So why does it look small? Why does the sun look small?
C: Far.
J: Far far away.
T: That’s right, it’s far away, it’s a long way away. So now, yes, we have to listen now….Good, this is going to be the sun, this big yellow circle. And we are going to put it on the floor like…this.
T: I’m going to give you all something to hold
She distributes postcard sized cards each one showing a picture of a
native or non-native plant, which the children are coached in identifying and
classifying (fruit or vegetable?). The
children collaborate to spread these
cards around the sun “because they need the sun to be able to grow”.
The announcement of story-telling frames a variety of discourses here:
– the testing of recall and understanding usually managed in British class rooms by the IRE/IRF[1] exchange;
– the joint account of a scientific experiment;
– the gathering of personal interpretations of empirical data; and
– starting to create an artifact, the representation of the sun in bright coloured paper.
In addition, the positions of teacher and pupil are clearly established in ways typical of classroom dialogue, bearing comparison with Mercer’s (2000) sequence on teachers’ techniques for facilitating a class “remembering together”, these being:
As the class actively constructs ‘common knowledge’ in building the floor diagram artifact, a highly- developed exploration of the classification of plants and animals is produced, represented and given materiality in the concentric circles of cards. However the classification system is of the teachers choosing (Herbivore, carnivore or omnivore, rather than furred or feathered, vertebrate or invertebrate for example):
T: Does a rabbit eat meat or plants?......A cow, does it eat other animals or does it eat grass?.....Monkeys eat…fruit or meat?.......A panda, plants or meat?
In Sequence 2, intertextuality is also managed by the teacher. The disruptive, ludic potential of the intertext is contained and controlled: the answer that fits the ‘scientific’ discourse is admitted.
Sequence 2: The hungry caterpillar
T: What does the hungry caterpillar eat in the story?[2]
C: Cake!
J: Water…water melon!
C: Slice of …. Slicey sausage!
J: Leaves!
T: Yes, leaves. (The other answers are also correct)
Thus the discourse constructs the identities of students and teacher just as it constructs subject knowledge. This is consistent with other commentaries on CoPs including Davies (2005):
Those within the community of practice are extremely aware of those at the top, and the power that those few wield over the other members
Sequence 3: All fall down
T: …….all these herbivores, what do they need to be able to live?
S: Seaweed
J: I saw one of those outside (points at card)
T: (to Ben) A tomato?
J: Yes, because, yes it was on a picture… outside
T: (to class) What do they eat…?
C: Plants!
T: Yes, they all need plants. What if there was no sun?
C: All fall down.
T: Fall down? Why would they fall down?
J: They would be breaking.
S: They will die.
T: Yes the plants will die. And what will happen to this animal if it dies?
S: Will… die.
T: Yes, that’s right.
J: Everyone dies
C: All die
T: If there’s no plants what will happen to the herbivores?
C: All die
‘All fall down’ and ‘breaking’ here, like the list of fictionalized foodstuffs for the caterpillar in Sequence 2, are “dispreferred responses” (Mercer, 2000), pointing up where the ground rules for the literacy event have broken down. ‘All fall down’, an acceptable nursery rhyme gloss for dying, needs to be ‘repaired’ for inclusion in the scientific narrative being created (Bucholtz, 1999).
Invited to listen to “a story about the sun”, the children ended up collaborating in its telling; instead of consuming a fictional narrative these children were in fact more recognizably engaged in a science lesson in the form of a quiz, and the artifact they collaborated to produce was most like a scientific diagram. These discourse types are not widely used in the homes of the children whose parents I interviewed, and would certainly not be described as stories there.
Nevertheless, a workable cohesion is achieved. Anaphoric references are shared; cataphoric references are understood, repetitions and substitutions build up ‘cumulative talk’ (Mercer, 2000) within the limitations of the roles and identities also being actively constructed in this classroom.
From the theoretical perspective of practice theory, we can see this as a “collaborative performance” (Bucholtz, 1999), where the ground rules for narrative making are constantly ‘under construction’. Further, despite the small scale of the study, it is plausible to extrapolate that all the repairs and adjustments made at the detailed level of classroom interactions may reflect repairs and adjustments at the level of the community.
And with Bakhtinian perspectives in mind, it is also possible to argue that these sequences demonstrate the ways in which class members’ “talk runs along contextual foundations of their own creation” (Mercer, 2000), an example of how all utterances are part of a larger conversation over time.
There are two main limitations of the success of the project. The first stems from its selective nature. Observed interactions point to very different discourses being used to make and describe narratives in school and at home. Parents are valuing and rewarding spontaneous, lively story-telling from their children (at least, they think they are). Teachers are guiding children’s participation more towards the construction of ‘creative non-fiction writing’ – book summaries, pictorial science texts, topical accounts of a visual aid linked to project work. Teachers in schools were observed telling a child who had started to report on the transgressions of another, “We don’t tell tales”, whereas parents are not making that discursive connection between fiction and lying. Observations suggest conflicting epistemological, ideological and moral attitudes towards story-making in these different contexts.
However, observations were of necessity limited to a few hours’ of data in the school. How valid, how generalisable, are the findings? Their validity rests on an acceptance that discourse is constitutive of social life (Hicks, 2003). In other words, that the negotiations for discursive space, for a position within a community of practice, the construction of voice and identity, are done continuously in social interactions. From that point it is logical to accept that “adjustments at interactional boundaries may reflect adjustments at community boundaries” (Bucholtz 1999).
The second issue is the distance traveled from the original aims and objectives of the project. The outcome of this project is the product of a not inconsiderable evolution and re-framing of its original aims and questions, and reflects my own developing understanding of socio-cultural approaches over the duration of the course E844: Language and Literacy in a Changing World. Moving away from a concern with cognition and towards social practice changed the unit of study, the locus of study, methodologies and theoretical perspectives. A fine-grained analysis of story-making using the techniques of conversation analysis would provide interesting insights into the developing linguistic practice of early learners, and I can anticipate that a combination of both levels of analysis - in a much larger project - would show in high detail the adjustments and repairs community members are engaged in. I believe this would be a valuable extension of the work started here.
In conclusion, this study has been illuminative to both parents and teachers at the school. It draws attention to the not inconsiderable feats of interpretation and decoding we are expecting of children as they prepare for full time schooling, and the huge variety and flexibility of the stories children tell themselves about their complex, novelistic social world of multi-layered voices.
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