WRITING CHILDREN - REINVENTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDHOOD LITERACY

Adult ways of writing-of constructing textual visions of-children are linked to their ways of envisioning themselves and, more broadly, to t heir preceptions of fully ''developed'' adults. Thus developmental vis ions have traditionally taken for granted the social and ideological w orlds of privileged adults. This article aims to make problematic such writing by reviewing new visions of language and of development that acknowledge human sociocultural and ideological complexity. Within the se visions, children's differentiation of ways of using language is li nked to their differentiation of their own place-potential or actual-i n the social world. To more fully explore these new visions, this arti cle also offers a concrete illustration of writing children as social and ideologically complex beings. It concludes by considering implicat ions for both professional writing and classroom pedagogy.