Young children as ‘becoming’ writers within the context of a school classroom: creating alternative approaches to hear children through their writing activity

This article seeks to counter the predominant understanding of young children's writing activity within a classroom, which has been formed as a response to the structural framework of school literacy. Taking a different approach, I have explored the established relationship between language and writing as a socio-cultural construction transforming human thought (Vygotsky 1986; Wertsch 1998), and plugged aspects of these ideas together with features of Deleuzian thinking. The writing child is conceptualised as a becoming writer (Deleuze & Guattari 2004), and their writing activity considered as a process of 'relational encounters'. This alternative reading of children's early writing activity is presented through the analysis of a short vignette; a writing encounter between three children where connections between bodies, mediational objects, sensations and emotion are traced to further our understanding of writing as a process of movement and production.