Dyson 2003 Welcome to the Jam.pdf - Oncourse

“Welcome to the Jam”
anne haas dyson
ceived as “cheap” consumer goods (like television shows) and more “high
ticket items such as computers, CD-ROMs, educational materials, and books”
(p. 88). Teachers at day-care centers serving lower income children also value
such goods but may be more tolerant of, and more forthcoming about, their
own popular pleasures, in part because the media seem a much less ominous
factor in children’s lives than, for example, poverty or parental absence.
In Rita’s classroom, media use in official school contexts was much more
pervasive among children from the brothers and sisters’ neighborhood than it
was among those from the more affluent neighborhood. Moreover, certain
media sources (like the movie Space Jam) were uniformly and almost exclusively
referenced by African American children. In this extensive use of the
media and in the relationship between media use and identity, Rita’s young
students were similar to participants in my previous research in local schools
(Dyson, 1997) and reflective of a national survey of children’s media use
(Rideout, Foehr, Roberts, & Brodie, 1999). That survey documented the pervasiveness
of media use among American children from age two to eighteen
and, even more so, among low-income and African American and Latino children.
However, a permeability to children’s textual resources has not been a dominant
quality of school literacy curricula. Indeed, dominant curricula tend to
have an antagonistic or, at the very least, a compensatory relationship to childhoods
deemed not “mainstream” (i.e., viewed as not print centered). This relationship
was evident in the beginnings of intensive political and academic attention
to very young children’s literacy in the turbulent 1960s (e.g., Bereiter
& Englemann, 1966) and it has continued up to the present (e.g., Neuman,
2001).
One effect of the continual return to narrow conceptions of young children’s
literacy is the continual neglect of popular literacies (Luke & Luke,
2001) and of the textual manipulation processes through which media material
is adapted to local desires and needs. As I have argued, these very processes
are key to written language development and, moreover, to children’s
play with identity, with who they are as people of particular heritages and loyalties.
Opening up classrooms to children’s textual resources and literate processes
means opening them up as well to the pleasures and challenges of children’s
everyday lives and to the multimedia of the emerging and everchanging
textual scene (Hull & Schultz, 2001). In other words, it means educators,
and schools as institutions, situating themselves in this time of energetic
and spirited engagement with texts of a range of symbolic and social
types and, in this way, joining the children in the jam — the literacy jam.
Notes
1. “Welcome to the Jam” (Quad City DJs, 1996) is part of the hip-hop and R&B score for
the film Space Jam (Falk, Ross, & Pytka, 1996). The film stars Michael Jordan, a well-
357