Shared Territory: Understanding Children's Writing As Works Hardcover

Margaret Himley

Shared Territory brings together Patricia Carini's concept of the developing child as a `maker of works' and Bakhtin's theory of language as dialogism in order to re-examine our assumptions about how to define written language development and how to understand it. Centring on Carini's claim that projects and artefacts of all kinds, from crayon drawings by children to letters and diaries by adults, are the objectified workings of the human mind enabled by and through cultural practices of signification, Himley argues that children's texts are a `shared territory', in which writer, reader, and language itself all dwell and participate in the making of meaning.

9780195061895

English

Oxford University Press Inc

14-11-1991

240

This book is a very complex and subtle argument, in part because it crosses the disciplinary boundaries of emergent writing, child development, composition studies, and literary theory. . . . rich reading . . . holds value for those interested in both emergent literacy as well as those interested in the implications of reader response theories to the writings of very young children. . . . offers a well-crafted discussion of the tensions inherent in qualitative research relating to issues of human development. * Contemporary Psychology *