“There the kid was, stranded in a car”: Reading the Fictions of Children as if They Mattered

Abstract

There the kid was stranded in a car with a dead guy on the driver’s seat… . first he went backward then he went forward and there was blood all over the windshield… .

These lines were written by “Brendan,” a student in the author’s fourth grade writing workshop. “Bloody content” poses difficulties for teachers. Recurrent images of violence and abandonment cause concern: Is the child himself a witness to violence, or subject to it? Has the child experienced abandonment or neglect firsthand? While such concerns are sometimes warranted, they represent an essentially autobiographical reading of children’s writings. I argue this is often not the most pedagogically appropriate response. I propose a mode of reading that takes the child’s writing seriously as fiction: as imaginative, thoughtful meditations on some aspect of the public world. Drawing on my own teaching experience and on theoretical perspectives provided by literature, literary and “writing process” theory, and work of progressive educators such as John Dewey, I examine Brendan’s fiction. I offer a “close reading” of the piece quoted above, contextualized by other instances of Brendan’s writing and the responses of his classmates. I find that his work amply repays such reading, and I offer a conceptualization of the “child as a thinker and the teacher as a thinking reader.” This image locates the teacher as a participant—a responsible interpreter and citizen—of the world envisioned and implicitly criticized by the child-author.