Composing childhood cultures: Ethnography upside down

This chapter discusses childhood cultures, and how and why one positions oneself within dynamic, multilayered classroom contexts – and what it means to try to view the world “from children’s perspectives.” The author has a longstanding interest in writing studies, but that interest is infused with an interest in the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, more recently focusing on language ideology and, also, on race. The chapter addresses classrooms as places, to quote Massey, that have a “thrown togetherness” quality, where children – and teachers – whose trajectories have not crossed, who are coming from different places, find themselves negotiating classroom space. The author draws on ethnography, particularly the ethnography of communication, but other scholarship too, in addition to that noted above, sociology (which has dominated the study of integration vs. desegregation), language ideologies, and sociocultural theories of child development that highlight child cultures and transitions from one sociocultural setting to another as is the institutional norm.