Dyson 2003 Welcome to the Jam.pdf - Oncourse

“Welcome to the Jam”
anne haas dyson
writing, though, was a separate genre. It was not a story but a personal experience
text that allowed Noah to fulfill the perceived expectations of school.
Initially, the children participated in most official composing events primarily
by drawing and talking, just as Noah did in the Space Jam event. During
official events, they organized symbol-making primarily around communicative
practices not explicitly taught in school, that is, by childhood practices,
like dramatic and visual play. The children’s actions, then, indexed their unofficial
world.
After drawing (a symbolic activity sanctioned by Rita), the children wrote familiar
names (e.g., of family or friends) and brief textual frames, which they
appropriated from the class-generated “things to write about” list (e.g., “I like
...,”“Isaw...,”“Iwent...“).Typically, any media appropriations consisted
of names and events that could be “liked” or to which they “went,” so to speak.
The writing, then, was a sociolinguistic nod to the official world, “the social
matrix within which the [print] discourse” mattered (Hanks, 2000, p. 166).
Still, despite the brevity of the written texts, recontextualizing unofficial
material yielded multimodal composing productions that were hybrids, however
simple they appeared. That is, they drew from and indexed different
worlds (Bakhtin, 1981). For this reason, it is possible in hindsight to see the
rough edges where different kinds of cultural material met and from which
tensions would arise. Symbolic tensions, important in all the children’s case histories,
seem inherent in Noah’s juxtaposition of a drawn story and a written
personal experience. Indeed, it would seem difficult for even a highly experienced
story writer to verbally translate the visceral experience of an arm
stretching unexpectedly through space, a ball tracing an arc in the sky, or even
a face expressing joy; exaggerated movements and facial expressions are the
prime province of animation, not of words.
The children’s brief efforts also suggested social tensions between official
and unofficial worlds. For example, the “truth” in the brothers and sisters’
world was a playful truth that accomplished the serious work of social connection;
it was not, however, the truth assumed in the official world when a personal
experience was reported. Denise and Vanessa, for instance, each wrote
that they “went” to the other’s house, something they never did at all (as confirmed
by their parents); their official personal experiences were bits of fiction.
Finally, ideological tensions were evident too. Noah twice wrote that he
“saw a good boy.” The boy was good, he told me, because he had a “water gun”
(which, in his picture, was shooting bullets, a banned kind of classroom play).
These kinds of rough edges in children’s work sometimes became more expansive
communicative and problem-solving spaces. For this to happen, children
had to orchestrate any talking, drawing, and writing within the frame of a
particular practice (see Dyson, 1989). When that happened, rough edges between
media and between worlds were not so easily smoothed over, as I illustrate
below.
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