W A Corsaro
Biographic Data
| ID | 22517 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W A Corsaro |
| GIVEN NAMES | W A |
| FAMILY NAME | Corsaro |
| SIGNATURE | CORSARO W A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University Bloomington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6789-8204 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 373 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Big Ideas from Little People
Beginning in the 1970s, research in childhood studies led to the reevaluation of children’s agency and their contributions to society. In my work on children’s interactions with peers and adults in schools and families, I challenged traditional views of socialization offering the alternative view of interpretive reproduction and associated concepts of peer culture and priming events. I review the development of these concepts and the importance o…
Grimshaw, Allen (1929–2011)
Allen Grimshaw was born in New York City in 1929. He took his AB degree in anthropology and sociology at the University of Missouri in 1950 and his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. He joined the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington that same year as Instructor and retired as professor of sociology in 1994. Grimshaw's most significant contribution to sociology was theory construction and empirical research in two areas: conflic…
The Sociology of Childhood
New edition of this bestselling undergraduate textbook, adopted in sociology and education departments throughout the world
Collective Identity, Intergenerational Relations, and Civic Society
This paper examines transition rituals and activities of Norwegian Russ (youth graduating from high school). Drawing on observations, archival and in-depth interview data collected over six years, we make two important findings. First, through their creative participation in traditional rituals Russ develop and share their own collective identity while also contributing to civic society more generally. Second, intergenerational relations play a c…
Cultures enfantines
Le voyageur, parfois dépaysé par l’immersion dans une autre culture, est au contraire aussitôt en terrain familier en observant un groupe d’enfants qui jouent. Pour autant, se souvient-il nécessairement des jeux de tape-mains qu’il pratiquait étant petit ? Sait-il si les enfants chantent encore « Am Stram Gram, pic et pic et colégram » quand ils « plouffent » ? Si certaines pratiques enfantines, de la cour de récréation à la rue, sont connues dep…
Ships Without a Shore
Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives on the Study of Children
Entrada no campo, aceitação e natureza da participação nos estudos etnográficos com crianças pequenas
Fazer pesquisa etnográfica com crianças pequenas envolve um certo número de desafios uma vez que os adultos são percebidos como poderosos e controladores de suas vidas. Este artigo relata minhas pesquisas etnográficas comparativas com crianças de pré-escolas nos Estados Unidos e na Itália. Enfoco mais particularmente a entrada no campo, o estabelecimento do status de participante e a coleta de notas de campo e de dados audiovisuais. Faço uma brev…
No Exit
Keeping and Making Friends
William A. Corsaro, Luisa Molinari, Kathryn Gold Hadley, Heather Sugioka, Keeping and Making Friends: Italian Children's Transition from Preschool to Elementary School, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 272-292
Differences in Children's Construction of Gender Across Culture
The authors examine gender segregation and cross-sex play in a comparative perspective. Although some level of gender segregation seems to be a universal feature in children's play, taking an interpretive view, it was found that children in some peer cultures emphasize gender differences and ritualize cross-sex interactions and in other cultures, children seldom enforce gender boundaries. Gender identity varies in salience and practice among Ital…
Children's Collective Activities and Peer Culture in Early Literacy in American and Italian Preschools
Recent work on early literacy has stressed the child's active nature in the learning process and has studied the effects of including children's peer interests in literacy curricula. In this article, the authors extend this work by examining American and Italian children's early literacy awareness and early literacy activities in preschools and the Italian children's transition from early to advanced literacy activities as they move from the pres…
A reprodução interpretativa no brincar ao "faz-de-conta" das crianças
Tradução de Manuela Ferreira e Isabel Breu.
Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 8
Without the parent you lose the child" : teachers' expectations and parents' (non)-involvement / Katherine Brown Rosier -- Interracial relationships and racial identity processes in an urban mother-and-child rehabilitation program / Colin H. Sacks -- The colors of the rainbow : children's racial self-classification / Sheryl R. Tynes -- The social world of male and female athletes in high school / Robert Crosnoe -- On the nature and developmental …
Priming Events and Italian Children's Transition from Preschool to Elementary School
We report on the Italian component of an ethnographic study of children's transition from preschool to elementary school in Italy and the United States. In line with our interpretive approach to socialization, we introduce the notion of priming events. Priming events involve activities in which children, by their very participation, attend prospectively to ongoing or anticipated changes in their lives. We identify different types of priming event…
The Sociology of Childhood
The Sociology of Childhood
Ethnographic Studies of Children and Youth
Play and Games in the Peer Cultures of Preschool and Preadolescent Children
This article is an ethnographic study of children's production and participation in play and games in an Italian preschool and an afterschool program in a Swedish elementary school. Most traditional theoretical and empirical work on children's play and games has focused on the contributions of these activities for children's development of social, cognitive and communicative skills. Other research has extended this developmental focus by examinin…
Early Education, children's Lives, and the Transition from Home to School in Italy and the United States
Toward a potential integration of interpretive and quantitative research in psychology
Social support processes in early childhood friendship
Examined congruences between children's friendships and classroom social ecologies in three distinct settings, and poses that such congruences or social adaptations are aptly characterized as a process of enacted social support; i.e., an interpersonal transaction involving the reduction or evasion of stress. Data were derived from Corsaro's recent ethnographics of children's friendship and peer culture in a University Preschool (Corsaro, 1985) an…
Introduction of Glen H. Elder Jr. for the Cooley-Mead Award
I have the pleasure of introducing Glen H. Elder Jr., the 1993 recipient of the CooleyMead Award. The Cooley-Mead Award is given annually by the Section on Social Psychology to recognize lifetime contributions to the intellectual and scientific advancement of sociological social psychology. Glen Elder epitomizes this criterion. Glen's exposure to the Great Depression as a young child in Cleveland, his experiences in the mass mobilization of World…
Gender Play
Speaking in Many Voices
Interpretive Reproduction in Children's Peer Cultures
William A. Corsaro, Interpretive Reproduction in Children's Peer Cultures, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2, Special Issue: Theoretical Advances in Social Psychology (Jun., 1992), pp. 160-177
We're friends, right
In this paper, children's use of access rituals in peer interaction in a nursery school is examined and a discussion of the implications of the findings regarding the development of communicative competence is presented. The findings show that entry into play is a production of some importance involving considerable time and strategy to accomplish, while leave-taking usually involves unmarked physical movement from play areas. The importance of p…
Discussione and Friendship
This paper addresses the lack of theoretical work on young children in sociology by presenting an interpretive approach to childhood socialization. This approach extends traditional views of human development by demonstrating that socialization is a collective process that occurs in a social, rather than in a private, realm. To illustrate the interpretive approach, we present a multilayered analysis of two phases of a lengthy verbal routine discu…
Play and Games in the Peer Cultures of Preschool and Preadolescent Children
This article is an ethnographic study of children's production and participation in play and games in an Italian preschool and an afterschool program in a Swedish elementary school. Most traditional theoretical and empirical work on children's play and games has focused on the contributions of these activities for children's development of social, cognitive and communicative skills. Other research has extended this developmental focus by examinin…
Young Children's Conception of Status and Role
Sewell, W. H., A. 0. Haller, and A. Portes 1969 The educational and early occupational status attainment process. American Sociological Review 34:82-92. Sewell, W. H., and V. Shah 1967 Socioeconomic status, intelligence, and the attainment of higher education. Sociology of Education 40:1-23. Spenner, K. I. 1974 Predicting levels of aspiration: A comparison of perceived and actual informational inputs from significant others. Paper presented at th…
Routines in the Peer Culture of American and Italian Nursery School Children
Although the importance of the influence of peers and the peer culture has long been seen as a central feature of the socialization process, there have been few direct studies of interactive processes in the peer culture. This article reports on a comparative study of nursery school children in the United States and Italy and identifies and discusses the importance of basic routines in the peer culture of young children for their development of c…
Competent Parents, Complex Lives
This study builds on earlier ethnography of friendship processes among children attending a Head Start program in a large city in the Midwest. Here, through intensive interviews and ethnographic observations of a small sample of the Head Start children's families, the researchers examine the values and concerns of lower-class Black mothers regarding their children's education. Earlier studies have shown that Black parents of all income levels pla…
Peer culture in the preschool
1988). Peer culture in the preschool. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 27, Becoming a Student, pp. 19-24
The clarification request as a feature of adult interactive styles with young children
The analysis of videotaped naturally occurring adult-child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The analysis of the form and function of adult clarification requests demonstrated the importance of the interactive demands adults encounter when interacting with young children. The nature of these interactive demands and how adults deal with them are discussed in regard to…
Entrada no campo, aceitação e natureza da participação nos estudos etnográficos com crianças pequenas
Fazer pesquisa etnográfica com crianças pequenas envolve um certo número de desafios uma vez que os adultos são percebidos como poderosos e controladores de suas vidas. Este artigo relata minhas pesquisas etnográficas comparativas com crianças de pré-escolas nos Estados Unidos e na Itália. Enfoco mais particularmente a entrada no campo, o estabelecimento do status de participante e a coleta de notas de campo e de dados audiovisuais. Faço uma brev…
Interpretive reproduction in children's role play
Recent theoretical developments in sociology, anthropology, and psychology have led to the development of an interpretive approach to childhood socialization. From the interpretive perspective, socialization is viewed as a reproductive rather than a linear process. The process is reproductive in the sense that children do not merely indi vidually internalize the external adult culture. Rather children become a part of adult culture, that is, cont…
Social-Ecological Constraints on Children's Communicative Strategies
This paper focuses on how the socio-ecological environment provides specific socially-defined opportunities for interaction and talk. The socially defined character of the different areas of a nursery school are seen as the generated product of both the conventionalised expectations, and the accustomed, practiced expectations which are the product of pathways of usage and performance specifics which arise from the habitual usages of certain areas…
Ethnographic Studies of Children and Youth
Discussion, Debate, and Friendship Processes
Event Structure Models from Ethnographic Data
We present a new method of modeling ethnographic descriptions. The method draws on recent anthropological and sociological developments in ethnography and receives its technical foundation from production system models in cognitive science. We display models as graphs to show logical relations among events, and we use models as grammars to generate acceptable sequences of concrete and abstract events. We illustrate the approach in a detailed anal…
Something Old and Something New
In recent years there has been a significant increase in studies of social interaction and language use which involve the collection and analysis of audiovisual (AV) data. This article reviews a number of methodological issues in research involving AV recording and proposes strategies for improving the reliability and validity of AV data. The article maintains that AV recording should be part of conventional ethnography and that specific features…
Differences in Children's Construction of Gender Across Culture
The authors examine gender segregation and cross-sex play in a comparative perspective. Although some level of gender segregation seems to be a universal feature in children's play, taking an interpretive view, it was found that children in some peer cultures emphasize gender differences and ritualize cross-sex interactions and in other cultures, children seldom enforce gender boundaries. Gender identity varies in salience and practice among Ital…
Priming Events and Italian Children's Transition from Preschool to Elementary School
We report on the Italian component of an ethnographic study of children's transition from preschool to elementary school in Italy and the United States. In line with our interpretive approach to socialization, we introduce the notion of priming events. Priming events involve activities in which children, by their very participation, attend prospectively to ongoing or anticipated changes in their lives. We identify different types of priming event…
Language and Social Situations
1. Language and Social Situations: An Introductory Review.- The Background to the Study of Language and Situations.- The Psychological Tradition.- Cognitive Approaches.- The Sociological Tradition.- The Evidence for Links Between Language and Social Situations.- Summary and an Outline of the Volume.- I. Situational Factors in Language Development.- 2. The Role of Interaction Formats in Language Acquisition.- Two Conflicting Views of Language Acqu…
Collective Identity, Intergenerational Relations, and Civic Society
This paper examines transition rituals and activities of Norwegian Russ (youth graduating from high school). Drawing on observations, archival and in-depth interview data collected over six years, we make two important findings. First, through their creative participation in traditional rituals Russ develop and share their own collective identity while also contributing to civic society more generally. Second, intergenerational relations play a c…
Children's Collective Activities and Peer Culture in Early Literacy in American and Italian Preschools
Recent work on early literacy has stressed the child's active nature in the learning process and has studied the effects of including children's peer interests in literacy curricula. In this article, the authors extend this work by examining American and Italian children's early literacy awareness and early literacy activities in preschools and the Italian children's transition from early to advanced literacy activities as they move from the pres…
Social support processes in early childhood friendship
Examined congruences between children's friendships and classroom social ecologies in three distinct settings, and poses that such congruences or social adaptations are aptly characterized as a process of enacted social support; i.e., an interpersonal transaction involving the reduction or evasion of stress. Data were derived from Corsaro's recent ethnographics of children's friendship and peer culture in a University Preschool (Corsaro, 1985) an…
Big Ideas from Little People
Beginning in the 1970s, research in childhood studies led to the reevaluation of children’s agency and their contributions to society. In my work on children’s interactions with peers and adults in schools and families, I challenged traditional views of socialization offering the alternative view of interpretive reproduction and associated concepts of peer culture and priming events. I review the development of these concepts and the importance o…
Keeping and Making Friends
William A. Corsaro, Luisa Molinari, Kathryn Gold Hadley, Heather Sugioka, Keeping and Making Friends: Italian Children's Transition from Preschool to Elementary School, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 272-292
No Exit
Language Use and School Performance
Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use. Mary Sanches , Ben G. Blount
The clarification request as a feature of adult interactive styles with young children
The analysis of videotaped naturally occurring adult-child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The analysis of the form and function of adult clarification requests demonstrated the importance of the interactive demands adults encounter when interacting with young children. The nature of these interactive demands and how adults deal with them are discussed in regard to…
Teachers and Meaning
Social-Ecological Constraints on Children's Communicative Strategies
This paper focuses on how the socio-ecological environment provides specific socially-defined opportunities for interaction and talk. The socially defined character of the different areas of a nursery school are seen as the generated product of both the conventionalised expectations, and the accustomed, practiced expectations which are the product of pathways of usage and performance specifics which arise from the habitual usages of certain areas…
Child Discourse
Towards a Social Grammar of Language
We're friends, right
In this paper, children's use of access rituals in peer interaction in a nursery school is examined and a discussion of the implications of the findings regarding the development of communicative competence is presented. The findings show that entry into play is a production of some importance involving considerable time and strategy to accomplish, while leave-taking usually involves unmarked physical movement from play areas. The importance of p…
Young Children's Conception of Status and Role
Sewell, W. H., A. 0. Haller, and A. Portes 1969 The educational and early occupational status attainment process. American Sociological Review 34:82-92. Sewell, W. H., and V. Shah 1967 Socioeconomic status, intelligence, and the attainment of higher education. Sociology of Education 40:1-23. Spenner, K. I. 1974 Predicting levels of aspiration: A comparison of perceived and actual informational inputs from significant others. Paper presented at th…
Language and Control
A Critical Survey of Sociologuistics
Something Old and Something New
In recent years there has been a significant increase in studies of social interaction and language use which involve the collection and analysis of audiovisual (AV) data. This article reviews a number of methodological issues in research involving AV recording and proposes strategies for improving the reliability and validity of AV data. The article maintains that AV recording should be part of conventional ethnography and that specific features…
Script recognition, articulation and expansion in children's role play∗
Recent work on children's discourse has developed the importance of children's knowledge of social scripts for the production of sustained dialogue in peer interaction. Applying Cicourel's interactive model of discourse, this paper examines preschool children's recognition, articulation, and expansion of social scripts in role play. The analyses suggest that children's use of scripts depends on the nature of role play and that children's attempts…
Forms Of Talk.Erving Goffman
Life in the Classroom and Playground
This study, first published in 1982, approaches children from an ethogenic viewpoint. It records their own accounts of their social world and sees them as members of a distinct culture with its own perspective, code of behaviour and strategies for making sense of their lives. The author suggests that teachers who can take the pupil’s perspective into account will work together more successfully with these pupils in the process of communicating th…
A Handbook of Social Science Methods, Volume 2
Children and Television
Sandbox Society
Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years
Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years
Based on a year-long micro-ethnography of a nursery school, this book presents a unique approach to childhood socialization by focusing directly upon the social, interactive, and communicative processes that make up the world of young children. It contains micro-sociolinguistic analyses of videotaped peer interactive episodes which are the basis of explanations of children's development and use of social concepts such as status, role, norms, and …
Toward a better understanding of Vygotsky's process of internalization
Language and Social Situations
1. Language and Social Situations: An Introductory Review.- The Background to the Study of Language and Situations.- The Psychological Tradition.- Cognitive Approaches.- The Sociological Tradition.- The Evidence for Links Between Language and Social Situations.- Summary and an Outline of the Volume.- I. Situational Factors in Language Development.- 2. The Role of Interaction Formats in Language Acquisition.- Two Conflicting Views of Language Acqu…
Language Socialization across Cultures
Discussione and Friendship
This paper addresses the lack of theoretical work on young children in sociology by presenting an interpretive approach to childhood socialization. This approach extends traditional views of human development by demonstrating that socialization is a collective process that occurs in a social, rather than in a private, realm. To illustrate the interpretive approach, we present a multilayered analysis of two phases of a lengthy verbal routine discu…
Peer culture in the preschool
1988). Peer culture in the preschool. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 27, Becoming a Student, pp. 19-24
Sociology (49 works) · Psychology (41 works) · Developmental psychology (24 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (15 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Social science (14 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (13 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works)