Following the sounds of children’s “voices”: A researcher’s portfolio

Abstract

Herein, I explore the meanings of the oft-used phrase “children’s voices.” The phrase is seldom defined in the literature on children’s language, oral and written. And yet, studying those voices has been fronted as a key methodological tool allowing insights into concerns about equity and the erasure of “nonmainstream” children’s communicative resources. Thus, this essay examines the professional use of “children’s voices” by taking readers on a voice-filled journey through time and space as I consider literally how this unstable but valuable phrase (e.g., “children’s voices”) is used to index some quality of children’s language use, especially their multimodal composing. First, I report on a literature analysis, focused on a relatively recent decade of articles from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)’s journal focused on children, Language Arts (the decade beginning in 2010). Although it proved to be a relative rarity to identify an author defining “children’s voices,” this project phase was invaluable for developing a taxonomy of non-rigidified but still differentiated categories for the meaning of “children’s voices.” Next, to clarify this unstable but useful taxonomy, I examined my ethnographic reports written over 46 years of studying children’s talk and writing, selecting excerpts from four chronologically organized reports, which were undergirded by different stances toward “children’s voices.” Together they illustrate how going deeper into children’s voices meant expanding the nature of the sociopolitical and cultural worlds enacted, sustained, or interrupted by children’s contextualized voices. As Hymes said many years ago, to understand voice and how it figures into equity issues in education, one needs ethnographic context. I aim to suggest why clarity about voice matters theoretically, politically, and pedagogically if we are to understand children’s composing of both texts and themselves as participants in a shared world.