Steedman, Carolyn (1980) The tidy house. Feminist Review, Vol.6 (No.1). pp. 1-24. doi:10.1057/fr.1980.17

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Abstract

This is an account of three working class eight-year-old girls writing a story.
They wrote the story during one week in the summer term of a social priority
school classroom, four years ago. The children's first and second drafts were
kept, as were the typed and edited versions that were bound and displayed, in
three volumes, for classroom use. Drawings and illustrations were also kept.
Altogether, the writing produced by the children amounts to about seventeen
hundred words. For one day during this week a friend, a lecturer from a local
training college who was in the process of collecting material for a course on
child language, had a tape recorder running continuously on the table where the
three girls were working. There are some four hours of recorded conversation on
these tapes, conversation between us and the children, between the children
themselves, to accompany the other material. There is a hum of voices in the
background, a boy bends down to sing into the microphone, a bell rings, someone
comes to the door, there is a class lesson about triangles, a plaster is put on a
bleeding finger by one of the three girls, all is suddenly lost in clatter as the rest
of the class go out to play. Taping under these conditions, some conversation has
been lost. But where we talked to the three girls, and where they, infrequently,
only from necessity, talked to each other about their work, there is a remarkable
clarity. Later, these tapes were transcribed.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > History
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Children's writings, English -- History and criticism, Children's writings, English, Working class writings, English, Language arts (Elementary), Girls -- England
Journal or Publication Title:	Feminist Review
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
ISSN:	0141-7789
Official Date:	1980
Dates:	Date Event 1980 Published
Volume:	Vol.6
Number:	No.1
Page Range:	pp. 1-24
DOI:	10.1057/fr.1980.17
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Restricted or Subscription Access
Version or Related Resource:	Later published as Steedman, C. (1982). The tidy house : little girls writing. London : Virago.
Related URLs:	Related item in WRAP

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