REWRITING FOR, AND BY, THE CHILDREN - THE SOCIAL AND IDEOLOGICAL FATEOF A MEDIA MISS IN AN URBAN CLASSROOM

Stories have often been rewritten for children. Children themselves ar e onlookers to the ''chain of communication'' that unfolds, as stories are rewritten by perceived ideological conservatives and, in turn, by perceived ideological liberators. In this article, I both present and dialogize this vision of children as receptors of adults' ideological messages. I begin by reviewing examples of adults' rewriting for chil dren, drawing primarily on the rewriting of folk stories. Then, using ethnographic data collected in a study of urban school children's use of common story material (from the poplar media), I reconstruct one br anch of a classroom chain of communication. The chain features a girl- next-door figure from a film well-known by the children. In so doing, I illustrate the dialogic process through which children's rewriting b ecomes a mediator of their ideological concerns. The article concludes with a discussion of the classroom conditions that seemed to support the activation of such a dialogic event.