Anne Haas-Dyson’s (2003) The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write, Popular Literacies in Childhood and School Cultures is the product of a yearlong ethnographic study in an urban first grade classroom, wherein she examined children’s appropriation of cultural material for participation in unofficial (e.g., social spaces) and official (e.g., academic spaces) ‘worlds’. Focusing on a small circle of friends (“the Brothers and Sisters”), she documented the range of media texts that were created, existed, and exchanged within their peer culture. Identifying the different ways in which these children and their peers recontextualized such media, she examined the nature of their incorporation of such “textual toys” in the children’s forays into school
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Epistemological shifts in the study of childhood have contributed to a push for children to be seen and treated as active participants in the research process (Powell and Smith 2009). Greater involvement of children in decisions that affect them speaks directly to Cassell’s (1980) application of the Kantian principle to judgments of ethical adequacy in fieldwork. She suggests Kantian ethics--“that persons be treated at all times as ends in themselves, never merely as means”--provides a more appropriate ethical framework for evaluating fieldwork in settings with children (Cassell 1980:55). To apply the principle of respect for human autonomy in childhood studies, researchers frame their work as research with children, rather than on them. In Brothers and Sisters, Dyson (2003) foregrounds the children’s cultural worlds, the breadth of their textual experiences, and “the depth of their social and symbolic adaptability . . . [to provide a] . . . look from inside a particular child culture out toward school demands . . .” (p. 5). She situates her ethical orientation within a broader discourse of childhood rights. Framing children as social actors capable of assuming a participatory role in research, she views children as embedded in a complex web of intimate and larger social relations beyond the immediate research context and supports] ‘sympathetic co-experiencing’ between adults and children in a particular research activity (McGuire 2006).
Epistemological shifts in the study of childhood have contributed to a push for children to be seen and treated as active participants in the research process (Powell and Smith 2009). Greater involvement of children in decisions that affect them speaks directly to Cassell’s (1980) application of the Kantian principle to judgments of ethical adequacy in fieldwork. She suggests Kantian ethics--“that persons be treated at all times as ends in themselves, never merely as means”--provides a more appropriate ethical framework for evaluating fieldwork in settings with children (Cassell 1980:55). To apply the principle of respect for human autonomy in childhood studies, researchers frame their work as research with children, rather than on them. In Brothers and Sisters, Dyson (2003) foregrounds the children’s cultural worlds, the breadth of their textual experiences, and “the depth of their social and symbolic adaptability . . . [to provide a] . . . look from inside a particular child culture out toward school demands . . .” (p. 5). She situates her ethical orientation within a broader discourse of childhood rights. Framing children as social actors capable of assuming a participatory role in research, she views children as embedded in a complex web of intimate and larger social relations beyond the immediate research context and supports] ‘sympathetic co-experiencing’ between adults and children in a particular research activity (McGuire 2006).