Excavating childhoods’ layers: an ethnographic dig into inequities of race, class, and literacies

ABSTRACT

I write as an ethnographer of childhoods and literacies toshare a critical methodological lesson I have learned: simply observing children in educational settings will not yield rich understandings of the inequities arising from the interplay of societal constructs of race, class, and gender. Such understandings require ethnographic digs, analogous to those of geologists and archeologists. Surface level educational happenings must be situated in institutional, geographic, and ideological landscapes, both historical and sociopolitical. These foundational layers echo in both formal and informal school practices, including those of peers . To illustrate, I draw on data from a 4-year case study of Ta’Von, a Black child in a white-majority elementary school; I focus on his experiences in ‘the achievement gap.’ Those experiences, reverberating with local racialized history, suggest that inclusive schools require, not fixing children to eliminate a gap, but fixing the taken-for-granted assumptions and practices of schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnographic
• literacy
• race
• childhoods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Internal Review Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign approved the project, for which Ta’Von’s mother signed a consent letters sent home by his classroom teacher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Haas Dyson

Anne Haas Dyson is a former teacher of young children, a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and, currently, a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. Dyson’s ethnographic research has focused on the intersection of childhood cultures and literacy practices, primarily focused on  writing.  Among her previous ethnographic  publications are Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School (1993; honored with the David Russell award for Distinguished Research from NCTE), Writing Superheroes (1997), The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write (2003),  ReWRITING the Basics: Literacy Learning in Children’s Cultures (2013, also a Russell award winner), and Writing the School House Blues (2021).