Book club!

This week, our group worked on Anne Dyson’s Writing Superheroes. In this book the author describes observations of an elementary school class’s small plays, which are written and acted out by students. Dyson also tells us the social context of children and how they construct their works for the student author’s theater. She is able to see the same themes, roles, and plot structures arise in many plays. From this book we can see how contemporary childhood and classroom literacy are both linked to popular culture.

Popular culture and childhood are obviously linked, Dyson gave great examples of this.  The focus of Writing Superheroes is the author’s theater. In this child-run theater, superhero stories are always joyously anticipated. These classroom superhero plays echo the same subjects, themes, and characters as those in famous comic books and popular movies. Authoring these stories is a chance for some children to broaden their social circle. For students like Sammy, a boy who used the plays to have social inclusion, these plays allowed his literacy to work for him. While these plays typically serve young boys well, the girls are often excluded.

Girls could have been excluded for a number of reasons. Dyson noted that the roles women play in popular superhero movies (which lay the foundation for the children’s plays) are typically passive roles or insignificant. This dynamic between men and women is mimicked by children.  To get around weak female roles, young girls had to write their own plays that would empower females in the script. For instance, a young girl named Tina and a friend began to write a superhero play and intentionally exclude boys. The plays clearly give a look at how popular culture influences the literacy of children since childhood literacy is developed through popular culture. Many children have literary events that require a familiarity with pop culture (superhero plays, card games, manga reading groups etc.)

There are so many ideas to unpack from this book. The author explains the numerous roles text can play. For the boy Sammy, text was a “ticket to play”. For Tina , text (in their plays) indicated who was tough and their social influence. Students used their characters to play out this toughness and gain social influence. This book says a lot about childhood and literacy practices of children in relation to popular culture. This book showed me how classroom literacy builds on the literacy practices of childhood; these literacy practices are rooted in popular culture sometimes.