This article relies on year-long ethnographic data to examine how the intersection of peer status, gender, and race influenced the role stances children took in one urban fifth grade classroom while participating in three different writing pedagogies: peer tutoring, cooperative peer editing, and collaborative writing. Informed by the sociocultural theories of writing development and literature on peer pedagogies, the study explores the following research questions: (a) How do children enact peer status, gender, and race as they negotiate with one another during peer editing? (b) How do peer editing pedagogies shape opportunities for negotiation? (c) What are the consequences of these peer negotiations? Findings show how peer statuses related to perceptions of achievement, friendships, race, and gender complicate peer writing events. By focusing on how peer status, gender, and race intersected during various peer editing pedagogies, the present study contributes to understandings of how peer social worlds shape the classroom writing experiences of diverse students.

Consistent with a sociocritical frame and the analytic tools of hybridity theory, this article explicates how urban fifth-grade children made language hybrids using rap and poetry to participate in classroom literacy. Ethnographic data from a yearlong study illustrate two key findings. First, standards-based and canon-driven writing models maintained literacy and language borders through antihybrid practices based in antipopular ideologies. Second, the children used hybrid rap poems to negotiate and challenge linguistic and ideological constraints that hemmed in classroom literacy. The author suggests that canon-driven writing pedagogies be more inclusive of youth popular cultures and culturally relevant literacies.

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Through an analysis of European newspapers, human rights organization reportage, and United Nations documents and websites, this article examines how public discourse regarding education, human rights, poverty, child rearing, and child labour manufactures a dangerous, implausible childhood for Romani children. These discourses, perpetrated by human rights organizations and news media, leverage the languages of intervention, cultural difference, nationalism, and social justice to simultaneously victimize and vilify Romani children, rendering them incapable of experiencing humane childhoods. Employing critical discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar analysis, the proposed article seeks to disentangle the discourses of human rights for Roman children from the assimilationist arguments aimed at compulsory schooling and Eurocentric family and labour practices rooted in access to middle class dominant labor markets.

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