In this ethnographic study of a group of African American first graders, Anne Haas Dyson illustrates the textual processes — the deliberate manipulation of popular cultural material — involved in the children's shared practices as playful children and good friends. These same processes shaped the ways the children made sense of and began to participate in school literacy. The observed children did not approach official literacy activities in their classroom as though they had nothing to do with their own childhoods. They made use of familiar media-influenced practices and symbolic material to take intellectual and social action in the official school world. Dyson offers a fresh perspective on children's experiences with popular media, emphasizing that they are an integral aspect of contemporary childhoods, not an external threat. Moreover, she presents an alternative view of the pathways and mechanisms through which children enter into school literacy practices, one that illuminates how children build from the very social and symbolic stuff of their own childhoods.

Research on childhood literacy has tended to idealize selected practices of a romanticized childhood; it portrays that childhood as providing the most relevant literacy resources and as launching ‘the child’ most directly into school literacy success. Herein, I argue that the prominence of this assumed direct route is theoretically problematic; moreover, it overshadows the very crosscultural childhood qualities–and the particular, localized childhood symbols and practices–through which children construct written language as a useful medium. In order to make this argument, I draw on data collected in a yearlong ethnographic project in an urban primary school in the USA. In the project, I examined children’s appropriations of diverse cultural material for school composing. In the analysis, I used the productionof a text as the unit of analysis. Through studying these minimal units, I untangled the intertextual threads that linked the children’s present literacy activity to their experiences; for instance, as (pretend) radio singing stars and, beyond that, as radio consumers (or video watchers, superhero enactors, church goers, and so on). I focus on key events from two children’s case histories to illustrate how recontextualization processes (i.e. processes of transporting cultural material across social boundaries) undergirded developmental pathways into school literacy. Children’s illustrated potential to adapt cultural resources in response to changing conditions–to be playful–seems key, not only to furthering literacy development, but also to furthering sociocultural lives on a fragile, ever-changing planet.

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Anne Haas Dyson analyzes primary students' spontaneous, unsanctioned talk in the classroom and argues that these interactions — often regarded as "time off task" — can become occasions for engaging in intellectually demanding tasks. Drawing upon research conducted over a two-year period in an urban elementary school, the author presents an overview of the accomplishments of children who, without explicit directions from their teacher, collaborated with one another to create extended stories and critique the logic of those stories. Dyson maintains that these examples of spontaneous talk supported the intellectual development of these beginning writers, thereby extending conventional definitions of students' "on" and "off" task behavior.