Voice as a Social/Cultural Accomplishment

• In Event: “Voice” in the 21st Century and the Development of Today’s Young Learners

Abstract

Deborah Appleman unpacks the theoretical perspective that voice is essentially the result of a social and cultural mediation with the individual, an argument that has shaped and reformed literacy practice and research in recent times. In children in particular, researchers have seen how voice reflects an increasing linguistic ability to represent their experiences through the reproduction of their social and cultural worlds, including their reproduction of “schooled voices” (Maybin, 2006). These observations focus on how the emerging voice of the self, even, or perhaps especially, in the classroom, is influenced, shaped and sometimes even overshadowed by other voices—that is, the points of view and ways of speaking—that children see to be imbued with social authority in their own lives. And while children and adults alike may develop reading and writing voices through teaching, training, or simply living in the world, the contexts in which they do so are themselves, many theorists argue, socially constructed, so that the individual voice that emerges in writing or in speech is inevitably a product of social and cultural mediation. It is this sociocultural premise that makes the concept of voice an ideal lens for understanding not only the social and cultural nature of texts but the social and cultural nature of teaching and learning within classrooms and the ideologies on which they rest. This presentation explores the ways in which voice-as-lens is a useful and fruitful research concept, utilizing a sample of studies that center on concepts of voice as they help us to understand the challenging sociocultural process of narration, perspective-shaping, revoicing and appropriation, processes that occurs both inside and outside the classroom. The usefulness of voice-as-lens is discussed for out-of-school and nontraditional literacy events, as well as for digital literacy events.

Author

• Deborah A. Appleman, Carleton College