Herein, I explore the meanings of the oft-used phrase “children’s voices.” The phrase is seldom defined in the literature on children’s language, oral and written. And yet, studying those voices has been fronted as a key methodological tool allowing insights into concerns about equity and the erasure of “nonmainstream” children’s communicative resources. Thus, this essay examines the professional use of “children’s voices” by taking readers on a voice-filled journey through time and space as I consider literally how this unstable but valuable phrase (e.g., “children’s voices”) is used to index some quality of children’s language use, especially their multimodal composing. First, I report on a literature analysis, focused on a relatively recent decade of articles from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)’s journal focused on children, Language Arts (the decade beginning in 2010). Although it proved to be a relative rarity to identify an author defining “children’s voices,” this project phase was invaluable for developing a taxonomy of non-rigidified but still differentiated categories for the meaning of “children’s voices.” Next, to clarify this unstable but useful taxonomy, I examined my ethnographic reports written over 46 years of studying children’s talk and writing, selecting excerpts from four chronologically organized reports, which were undergirded by different stances toward “children’s voices.” Together they illustrate how going deeper into children’s voices meant expanding the nature of the sociopolitical and cultural worlds enacted, sustained, or interrupted by children’s contextualized voices. As Hymes said many years ago, to understand voice and how it figures into equity issues in education, one needs ethnographic context. I aim to suggest why clarity about voice matters theoretically, politically, and pedagogically if we are to understand children’s composing of both texts and themselves as participants in a shared world.

中文翻译：

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跟随孩子们的“声音”：研究人员的作品集


在这里，我探讨了经常使用的短语“孩子们的声音”的含义。在有关儿童语言、口头和书面的文献中很少对该短语进行定义。然而，研究这些声音已被视为一种关键的方法论工具，可以洞察对公平和“非主流”儿童交流资源的消除的担忧。因此，本文通过带领读者踏上一段穿越时空的声音之旅，探讨了“儿童之声”的专业用法，同时我从字面上考虑了这个不稳定但有价值的短语（例如“儿童之声”）如何用于索引某些质量儿童的语言使用，特别是多模态写作。首先，我报告了一项文献分析，重点关注国家英语教师委员会 (NCTE) 期刊《儿童语言艺术》最近十年的文章（从 2010 年开始的十年）。尽管事实证明，确定定义“儿童的声音”的作者相对较少，但该项目阶段对于开发“儿童的声音”含义的非僵化但仍然有区别的类别的分类法非常宝贵。接下来，为了澄清这个不稳定但有用的分类法，我检查了我在 46 年的儿童谈话和写作研究中所写的民族志报告，从四份按时间顺序排列的报告中选择了摘录，这些报告都以对“儿童声音”的不同立场为基础。它们共同说明了深入了解儿童的声音如何意味着扩大由儿童语境化的声音所制定、维持或中断的社会政治和文化世界的性质。正如海姆斯多年前所说，要理解声音以及它如何影响教育公平问题，我们需要民族志背景。 我的目的是提出，如果我们要理解儿童对文本的创作以及他们自己作为共享世界的参与者，那么声音的清晰度在理论上、政治上和教学上都很重要。