Joshua, a second grader reading at the preprimer level, resists answering the author's questions about his conceptions of reading until she agrees to spend equal time drawing and looking through Waldo books with him. Surprisingly, it is while "doing Waldos," rather than during classroom observations or in answering her carefully planned interview questions, that Joshua shows the author his developing sense of narrative, his earliest attempts at phonetic decoding, and the importance of minimal-text books like Waldo books as a nonthreatening gateway into literate experience for him and other struggling readers. The author comes to see such shared agenda setting as not just the most ethical way to interview people but also the most effective, because it allows for the serendipity of discovering answers to questions the author had not even thought to ask.
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