FOLLOWING THE CHILD, SOCIOANALYSIS, AND THREATS TO COMMUNITY - TEACHER RESPONSE TO CHILDRENS TEXTS

I brought two conceptions of teacher response to my teaching and resea rch in a third-grade writing workshop. The first, drawn from workshop literature, emphasized following and supporting children's choices of topic and purpose for writing. Such a conception, however, ignored the problem of children pursuing questionable intentions and material in their texts, such as when children's texts affirm-even if unintentiona lly-gender, race, and social class stereotypes and boundaries. I devel oped a second conception of response-response as socioanalysis-from wo rk by Habermas and Freire. Children's texts were conceived of as artif acts of an oppressive U.S. society (similar to how, in psychoanalysis, patients' stories are viewed as artifacts of Oedipal conflicts). The core of the paper is a detailed analysis of a particularly difficult o ccasion for teacher response. In this case, a popular child wanted to publish a fictional narrative that I read as an attack on an unpopular classmate. I examine how mv interpretation of Maya's text, ''The Zit Fit: The Lovers in the School,'' depended on my knowledge of informal peer hierarchies and gender arrangements in the workshop and how my wr iting conferences with Maya were caught up in classroom norms and rout ines, as well as larger theoretical debates on the status of texts in the world and authors' responsibility for them. The case dramatizes th e inadequacies of both following the child and socioanalysis as concep tions of response. I propose a revised conception of teacher response, and I argue that response must pay attention to the rhetorical play o f children's texts in the classroom, and be aimed at encouraging and s ustaining an engaged, pluralistic classroom community.