Serious Reconsiderations

Abstract

Serious Reconsiderations Hugh Crago (bio) Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath . The Braid of Literature: Children's Worlds of Reading. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. The Braid of Literature is not an easy book to describe or evaluate. Even an apparently simple factual description is problematic. Like our own Prelude to Literacy(Crago and Crago, 1993), it originated in a mother's case study of her children's interactions with books. Lindsay, Shelby Wolf's elder daughter, is, in the words of the dedication, "the heroine and heart of the story." The bulk of the diary records transcribed and analyzed in the book concern her. But her younger sister, Ashley, is also mentioned frequently, and a number of records concern her alone. So is this work a study of Lindsay or a joint study of Lindsay and Ashley? The reasons for the ambiguity become obvious when we examine the time frame within which the book's data were collected. One reviewer tells us dramatically that "every day, from 1982 to 1991, Shelby Wolf field-noted and audio- and video-taped" her two daughters (Davis 63). This claim is not fully supported even by the book's blurb, which in turn inflates what is stated on pages one and two of the text itself. We are told approximately when intensive record-keeping began for Lindsay ("soon after her third birthday"), but not when it ceased nor how often audio- and video-taping occurred (there are almost no references to the latter). The Prologue refers to "artifacts of Lindsay's birth and development" preserved by Wolf, but the book itself makes very little use of this early material. Only five references are made to data gathered prior to Lindsay's attaining the age of 3:3 (three years, three months) (Lowe correspondence). It seems that Lindsay was intensively observed and recorded between 3:3 and 4:2 (for Wolf's Masters' thesis), and that another period of intensive recording followed, when Ashley was between about 3:10 and 4:3 (perhaps for another thesis, or for this book), which, because most reading sessions were shared, meant that Lindsay was also recorded again in her late sixth and early seventh years. Of course, frequency of quotation does not automatically equate with frequency of recording, but it is a rough guide, and Virginia Lowe's full tabulation strikingly suggests long periods when either no recording was done, or no data were thought worthy of mention. A total of fourteen months of systematic data-gathering (with perhaps scattered observations in between) hardly corresponds to "nine years" of "daily" recording of two children. The dedication attributes to the younger Ashley a "clear, sweet voice of her own." When second children come along, they do inevitably alter the climate of family interaction and demand to be included-in reading sessions as in dedications. They are also different from their elder siblings. Wolf and Heath's study comments several times on the differences between Lindsay's and Ashley's patterns of response to literature, and if these had been correlated with comparable data (e.g., Graetz; M. Crago, "Analysis"; Lowe, "Stop"), they could have produced fruitful speculations about the interaction of birth order, genetic inheritance, and parental modeling in explaining why two children in the same family would respond both so similarly and so differently to the same texts. Apart from a brief reference in the Epilogue, however, Wolf and Heath do not seek to explore this issue. The actual study of the two children was conducted by Wolf, most of it, apparently, while she was a young teacher and graduate student. We are told that Marjorie Siegel "originated the work," but we are not told in what way (presumably Siegel suggested it as a thesis topic?). At a later stage, Shirley Brice Heath became Wolf's collaborator on this volume. We are not told when, or why, this happened, except that "what brought us together. . . was our mutual interest in the language of literature and the enduring patterns in which it enters the thoughts and expressions of young children" (2). The authors tell us that "there is no single voice in this book," but go on...