Coach Bombay's kids learn to write: Children's appropriation of media material for school literacy

In my year-long ethnographic study in an urban first grade classroom, I exa mined the what's and how's of children's appropriation of media material fo r participation in unofficial peer worlds and also official academic ones, especially those involving child composing. Focusing on a tight-knit-group of friends, I documented the range of cultural texts that figured into this local version of a contemporary childhood, particularly those of the popul ar media (e.g., radio songs, movies, cartoons, and sports media shows). The children and their classmates differentially appropriated these same cultu ral texts in their forays into school literacy Thus, I also examined the na ture of this recontextualization of texts, including (a) the material appro priated (both textual and conceptual); (b) the textual or compositional mea ns through which those multimedia appropriations were transformed into writ ten prose; and (c) the ways in which the resulting written texts mediated c hildren's participation in and negotiation with school worlds. To allow the oretical depth and narrative coherence, in this article I highlight child a ppropriations from sports and sports-related media. I describe the kinds of textual and conceptual knowledge embedded in textual practices that, unlik e engagements with storybooks and environmental print, have seldom received serious attention in early literacy research. Moreover, I stress the poten tial hybrid nature of even the earliest of children's written texts; inhere nt in this hybridization are developmental and pedagogical challenges-compl ex tensions related to the symbolic, social, and ideological diversity of c hildren's present resources and pleasures.