Steedman, Carolyn. (1980) The tidy house. Feminist Review, Vol.6 (No.1). pp. 1-24. ISSN 0141-7789

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.

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