Scribbling Away the Ghosts: A Bakhtinian Interpretation of Preschool Writers and the Disruption of Developmental Discourses

Abstract

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptions of dialogue, monologue, and chronotope, the authors ask readers to consider how different values and actions ultimately create the teaching and learning spaces in which children are recognized as literate. Using qualitative data that focus on the relational writing practices of two preschoolers, this ethnographic work explores how authoritative monologues of development and risk commonly structure our thinking about and interaction with young writers. The article offers an alternative interpretation of children as writers engaged within a relational and dialogic writing space, wherein dominant developmental beliefs are rejected and relationships between children and teachers are reinterpreted. The authors argue for the creation of dialogic classroom spaces that afford children opportunities for multiple possible futures as whole persons.