Dyson 2003 Welcome to the Jam.pdf - Oncourse

“Welcome to the Jam”
anne haas dyson
There is nothing unusual about Noah and Tommy’s play with appealing
voices. Research on family conversation and language development (e.g.,
Dore, 1989; Nelson, 1996), storytelling (Miller & Mehler, 1994), literary response
(e.g., Miller, Hoogstra, Mintz, Fung, & Williams, 1993), and dramatic
play (e.g., Garvey, 1990) all illustrate children’s attentiveness to plot lines and
character voices that are aesthetically marked, affectively charged, and allow
them to assume appealing and/or powerful positions.
Indeed, this attentiveness to voices supports children’s entry into language
itself. Children learn words as they participate with others in their everyday
practices (e.g., dressing, eating, “peek-a-boo” games) (Bruner, 1990; Nelson,
1996). To use the concepts of the language philosopher Bakhtin (1981), children
re-voice those offered words, “re-accenting” them with their own intentions.
In this way, children form a sense of their own agency, their own possibilities
for action, as they slip into the voices that organize their social worlds,
including their routine practices.
The typicality of those voices, their ways of enacting a typical social situation,
indicates their generic quality. Indeed, genres can be viewed as kinds of
practices (Hanks, 1996), that is, as ways of participating in the recurrent social
activities of a society. These typified voices, or genres, result from the many
people who have participated in similar situations, adopting certain evaluative
stances toward others and the world, speaking and singing certain thematic
content in structurally compatible ways (Bakhtin, 1986). Ways of telling stories
(through varied media), of reporting local and national news, and of celebrating,
communicating, or praying through song are all typical voices or generic
texts, and yet all are made manifest through particular and unique encounters,
or dialogues, between speakers and listeners, readers and writers
(Bakhtin, 1981).
Textual Toys in Childhood Spaces
Although the particularities of childhoods vary across historical time and cultural
space, children all over the globe are alert to the voice-filled landscape of
their everyday lives. Within that landscape, they may find textual toys — symbolic
material useful for conversation, collaborative play, and group singing —
in the words of human and electronic voices. Among the latter are radio deejays
and singing stars, TV sports commentators and movie characters.
Through an eclectic mix of appealing symbolic stuff (including both longstanding
childhood rhymes and more ephemeral media materials), children
engage in cultural and expressive practices and thereby produce friendships
and imaginative worlds (see also Dyson, 1993, 1997; Fisherkeller, 2002;
Garvey, 1990; Jenkins, 1988; Newkirk, 2002; Opie & Opie, 1959). Indeed, the
cultural geographer Massey (1998) argues that youth cultures across the globe
(if not particularly childhood cultures) are marked by an openness in which
commercial media, however global their reach, are always localized in how
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