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Dyson mined her research history for moments in three children's lives that illustrate interconnections between participation in popular culture and in school composing.
Superman said, "Don't worry. I gotcha." The lady said, "Iknow you got me, but who's got you?"
-Five-year-old Ashley drawing and telling a Superman story (Dyson, 1981)
Almost 40 years ago now, I met Ashley (all names are pseudonyms) at a kindergarten writing center I had set up for my dissertation (Dyson, 1981). He was great fun to sit by (for me and for his peers), as he accompanied his detailed drawings with imaginative storytelling, blending material from the television, the movies, and everyday life. Moreover, Ashley, foreshadowing children in my future, would wield a magic brown crayon and his beloved superheroes would change identity and become Black like him.
Among his drawn superheroes was, of course, Superman, who "always have an S on his shirt." One day, Ashley wrote his own name across Superman's shirt, using letters and letter-like forms. He drew a box around his all-important and quite clear S so that it served double duty, marking both Superman and him.
I look back now, all these years later, and see potential social and semiotic processes mediated by the "toy box" of commercial media (Dyson, 2003)-characters, plots, appealing language, dynamic images, and on and on, all available for the taking. Ashley was thus a participant in popular culture (Storey, 2015), that is, in the social and semiotic use of primarily commercial media. With a blank page and a marker in hand, he declared himself an S-endowed superhero, venturing forward in what was, for him, the new world of school.
I wrote none of this at the time, of course. In the then blossoming research on child writing, popular culture was not singled out for study. Moreover, findings on child writing were generalized (e.g., "the first-grade writer," "the second-grade writer"); in that homogenization, the particularities of children living and learning at the intersection of societal forces like race, class, and gender were often erased.
In this article, I take readers along with me over time and space as we follow children writing into the complexities of popular culture. Key moments in the lives of three children-Jameel, Tina, and Ta'Von-will help...