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Writing, sociality, and identity in kindergarten: An ethnographic study
Abstract
This dissertation reports a study of the social interactions of kindergarten children as they engaged in peer writing activities during free choice periods. The theoretical proposition framing the study is that children may use writing in peer groups to advance their social agendas. These agendas may or may not be those of the teacher or the school. The purposes of the study were: (a) to investigate the nature of students' agendas with respect to both their writing and their social relationships, and (b) to analyze the ways in which writing in this single classroom was connected to children's social and personal identities. Over a full school year, sixty-five hours of videotape were collected with a primary focus on writing activities. Microanalysis of students' discourse processes, using systematic discourse analysis and conversational coding techniques, provided the primary data that supported the findings. A focused study was carried out of the story-construction patterns of one group of girls. These girls created stories in which the characters were fictionalizations of themselves and each other. Through their peer interactions in the process of constructing the stories, the girls negotiated their real-life roles and positions of status, their ownership of both their writing and their personas, and their relationships with each other. Both their writing and their social relationships were transformed in the process. Current practice in teaching elementary writing, based on educators' agendas, supports social interaction as a medium for improved cognition and higher quality written products. The results of this study show that when writing in peer groups is viewed from the students' point of view, some children use school writing to serve their needs for both affiliation and individual agency by negotiating identity issues within the writing process. Such findings contradict the theory that young children are essentially egocentric, suggesting rather that their social competence is as developed when they enter school as their communicative competence. To be complete, a theory of school writing must take into consideration the students' agendas as well as those of educators.
Subject Area
Early childhood education|Elementary education|Educational sociology|Language arts|Educational psychology|Social structure
Recommended Citation
Phinney, Margaret Yatsevitch, "Writing, sociality, and identity in kindergarten: An ethnographic study" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9219479.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9219479