Dyson 2003 Welcome to the Jam.pdf - Oncourse

“Welcome to the Jam”
anne haas dyson
should or would do after school, comments on upcoming trips to Minnesota
for hockey practice and to Dallas for football, and references to “Coach Bombay,”
whom I assumed (incorrectly) was a day-care teacher. In addition to the
talk, there was much intermittent group singing of songs I did not know but
recognized as hip-hop or R&B.
Given all this activity and its evident links to popular media (e.g., sports
shows and youth music), the children presented a unique opportunity to explore
a contemporary childhood and its links to varied cultural material. I had
come upon a semiotic gold mine and, luckily, the children, their teacher, and
their parents all allowed me entry to this mine. And so my informal visit became
the beginning of a formal research project. My role thus evolved from a
curious visitor to a nonthreatening and familiar adult who regularly sought
out the children’s company. Despite my age (more than four decades older
than the children) and my race (White), I became a “fake mama,” or so declared
Denise. However, I never disciplined, never issued directives, and seldom
gave advice, unlike both the fake “Mama” conjured up only with words
and the hardworking Ms. Rita, their highly experienced teacher.
The Official Curriculum
Rita, the children’s first-grade teacher, had professional roots in the British
primary schools of the 1960s. Her classroom routines and composing practices
were organized in a bookend-like structure. There were whole-class times
for introducing and planning tasks, reporting on progress, discussing difficulties,
and sharing final products. These times acted as bookends to more childcontrolled
times, when children worked as members of student-led small
groups, as partners, or as colleagues, doing their own writing but informally
talking with one another. This social organization connected children’s individual
and small-group efforts to the larger community and, in Rita’s words,
created a “little bit” of productive tension about learning. The children, she
said, would think, “‘We’ve got to get it together here, and I’m gonna be asked
to tell my opinion or read my story any minute now.’ It’s not just the passive,
teacher’s-telling-you-to-do-everything.”
During the course of my project, Rita’s curriculum included both openended
writing activities (e.g., writing workshop, where the children wrote and
drew relatively freely, followed by class sharing) and more teacher-directed
ones (e.g., assigned tasks in study units, in which children wrote and drew as
part of social studies and science learning). Throughout all composing activities,
though, Rita was explicit about her expectations, and straightforward and
generous in her guidance. Before writing workshop time began, she might use
whole-group time to brainstorm possible topics, model diverse spelling strategies,
or demonstrate the complex process of monitoring a written message
(stopping to recite a planned sentence, to reread what has been written, and
to see what word to write next — a cumbersome procedure for the inexperienced).
In social studies or science lessons, Rita first enacted new kinds of
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