Corsaro, W. A. (2003). We're Friends, Right? Inside Kids' Culture. Karen E. Petersen, Portland State University

Corsaro, W. A. (2003). We're Friends, Right? Inside Kids' Culture. Washington D.C.: Joseph Henry Press. Pp. xiv + 248 $22.95     ISBN 0-309-08729-5 Karen E. Petersen Portland State University February 4, 2005 William Corsaro has spent thirty years researching the peer culture of children. In this book he focuses his research on preschool children between the ages of three and six attending four very different preschools. He observed children in Berkeley, California, Indianapolis, Indiana, Bologna, Italy, and Modena Italy. He chooses to tackle his research through ethnographic observation. He begins the book with a brief look at the historical differences between children of the 1970s and the children of today’s generation. In the 1970s, 30% of mothers with children under the age of six worked out side the home. By 1999 the number of mothers with children under six was up to 62%. In 1970 roughly 38% of children between the ages of three and five attended a preschool program or kindergarten, by 1999 almost 65% of three to five year olds attended some form type of preschool program. Corsaro uses these statistics to frame the questions he sets out to answer in this book; children are spending more time outside of the home and they are spending that time with peers, is that a bad thing and does it different from the past? Do kids’ peer cultures differ based on the generation in which they were raised? By using the ethnographic method to observe the culture of children, Corsaro has a few hurdles to overcome. How does an adult gain acceptance into the world of children. Children are aware that adults are bigger and stronger, and they have a position of power in their lives. Corsaro knew he had to become an atypical adult if he were going to be able to go native to study kids’ peer culture. To gain entry and acceptance in to the lives of the children he studied, Corsaro understood it was critical to represent the world of children with out distorting it by forcing it through the lens of an adult perspective. Corsaro quickly realized the complexity of children’s social structures and found acceptance in their society which allowed him to study the communal, collective and processes of kids’ peer culture. Corsaro began his research in 1974 in Berkeley, California. He spent his first few weeks observing the children from a concealed area which allowed the children to adjust to the new school year and gave Corsaro a chance to make sense of what he was observing. He was able to categorize a routine of activities and whether they were initiated by teachers or by the children themselves. After three weeks Corsaro was ready to engage with the children on their level and he set out to become one of the kids. In his observations prior to engaging with the children Corsaro noted a pattern of interactions initiated by the adults and that the adults also limited their interactions with the children to certain areas of the preschool. Armed with this information Corsaro adopted a reactive strategy and waited for the children to approach him. It took four days before one of the children approached Bill. She asked who he was and what he was doing, he replied he was watching because he liked to. She then asked his name and he responded by saying, “I’m Bill and you’re Sue (p. 11)”. Curious she asked how Bill knew her name, his explanation that he overheard other children calling her by name puzzled her and she ran off to join her friends. Bill felt his first encounter was an utter failure. Much to his surprise Sue returned a short time later with a boy named Jonathon and the previous exchange was repeated. Jonathon, a bit more cynical than Sue questioned Bill about the name of every child on the playground, when Bill passed this inquisition with flying colors, Jonathon asked Bill the name of his little sister, again Bill provided the correct answer. Baffled Jonathon ran off to tell two of his friends and Sue invited Bill to shovel sand with her in the sandbox, in no time several children joined them until the teachers announced it was time to clean up and come indoors. Bill had been accepted by the children as a “big kid.” While he was accepted as a “big kid”, it is important to note that Bill was never full accepted as a kid, he was just too big. His nickname as “big kid” stuck and he was accepted as an atypical adult. This acceptance allowed him to carry out his research as the children did not consider him an adult in the tradition sense. Bill next observed children in a preschool in Bologna, Italy from 1983 to 1986. The Italian children accepted Bill more easily than their American counterparts due to Bill’s lack of proficiency in Italian. The children saw him as an “incompetent adult (p. 15).” The children found Bill funny, fascinating, and somewhat of a big dumb kid. While he has relatively little trouble being accepted by the Italian children, three problems emerged with the Italian teachers. The teachers and Bill were all self conscious about the language gap, their discussions were limited and it was difficult to discuss abstract concepts like the different educational policies between the two countries, and the teachers would try to modulate their language to make it easier for Bill to understand; this often resulted in frustration from both parties and the teachers would start from the beginning of the conversation losing valuable time trying to communicate. The next group Corsaro observed was a group of children in a Headstart program located in Indianapolis, Indiana. What made Bill and atypical adult at this location was his ethnicity. He was a white man surrounded by predominately Black women and black children. The last preschool Corsaro observed for this book was in Modena, Italy from 1996 to 2001. In Modena, Corsaro was able to observe the transition from preschool to elementary school. He spent the last five months in the preschool setting and the first four months observing the students as first graders. In Modena, the five year olds had structured periods of reading and writing as part of their everyday activities, something that did not occur in the Bologna group. The children in Modena were also studying English, however, Bill was still seen as an incompetent adult which allowed him to be a participant observer as he had in the other three settings. Now that Bill had been accepted as an atypical adult in each of the preschools, he set about studying kids’ peer culture. Corsaro defines kids’ peer culture as, “a stable set of activities or routines, artifacts, values, and concerns that kids produce and share in interaction with each other (p. 50).” Two basic themes emerge in kids’ peer cultures, to gain control of their lives and to share a sense of control with each other. One way to gain that control is by controlling access to play activities. Children are protective of their interactive space and those wishing to join in must find a successful method to gain entry into the play arena. If a child is not fortunate enough to be playing near a classmate they must employ a strategy to gain access to play with others. One method children use to gain access is to simply join in with what the other children are doing, this method is often successful. Other methods Corsaro observed children use to gain access included non-verbal entry, this is where a child would place themselves in the play area and observe until a chance for them to join in presented itself. Another method Corsaro observed was verbal reference of affiliation. Often this verbal tactic is phrased as the question, “we’re friends, right? (p.36).” This method was also usually successful and the outsider was granted access and allowed to play with the others. Preschool children see playing together an attribute of friendship, if you are playing together, you are friends. Those you don’t play with are not your friends; to children it is that simple. Corsaro writes this book as if he were an ethnographer studying an indigenous tribe unknown to the industrialized world. He defines his observations and then follows them with examples from his field notes. Now, settled in and accepted by those he is observing, he details the routines and themes that emerged at each of his study sites. “Almost all definitions of play include some reference to fantasy and the absence of rules or strict guidelines that structure the activity (p. 91).” Corsaro documented two types of play at the sites he observed, spontaneous fantasy play and socio-dramatic play. Corsaro first focuses on spontaneous fantasy play and distinguishes it from socio-dramatic play by the different features of the two types of play. Spontaneous fantasy play develops without a specific plan of action and emerges through verbal negotiation, and shared knowledge of the adult world. However, this type of play is highly creative and involves a great deal of improvisation. Corsaro also noted that three themes emerged in spontaneous fantasy play, danger and rescue themes, lost and found themes, and death and rebirth themes. In each of these themes he found distinct patterns. He observed that kids are able to create infinite situations that include danger. In danger and rescue themes, there are three phases. First their must be recognition of danger and this danger is something that happens to the children, it does not occur due to the children being reckless. Second is the evasion phase, there must be a way to aver the danger. The final phase is resolution of danger and recognition that the danger has dissipated. The lost and found theme occurred in two varieties, in the first variety there is the loss of an object, search and recovery of the object and shared excitement and joy of finding the lost object. The second variation of this theme involves the loss of an animated character the children invented gets lost. In this version the emotion and anxiety builds more dramatically when one of the characters turns up missing. The same sense of shared relief and joy is experienced when the lost character is found. This type of play allows children to develop social skills and develop a sense of trust among their peers. This type of play also serves as a way for children to share and feel, to a certain degree, that they have a sense of control over danger, fear, and threats to their safety. The final type of themed spontaneous play Corsaro witnessed was the death and rebirth theme. There are four phases in the structure of this themed play and are as follows; an announcement of death or dying, a reaction to the announcement, ways to overcome death, and lastly, a rebirth and celebration. In this spontaneous play, there was not the same build up of anxiety and tension seen in the other types of spontaneous fantasy play, the focus on this type of play is in the excitement and celebration of the rebirth. Corsaro repeatedly makes the point that in each of these scenarios, a tension is created and it is created to be resolved. Corsaro includes examples of the interchanges between the children for each of the constructs he defines. It is easy to see, when reading these exchanges how kids’ peer culture is so quickly dismissed. He reminds the reader that this type of play when examined closely demonstrates a complex play structure that is often quickly dismissed by adults as, well, child’s play. Corsaro next examines socio-dramatic play and it’s implications for children’s social and emotional development. Corsaro defines socio-dramatic play as collaborative play where kids produce activities that relate to their real lives. Often they directly imitate and embellish adult models of behavior in this type of play structure. This type of play introduces status and power and it allows kids to see how different people in society interact with others. Also observed in socio-dramatic play are gender roles and stereotypes. Gender roles are partly socially constructed by children themselves based on their interactions with adults and other children. What children learn from socio-dramatic play include specific social knowledge and the relationship between context and behavior. Socio-dramatic role playing includes scenarios that center around family activities or occupational settings. Between the ages of four and five, there is a shift in socio-dramatic play where fantasy becomes a central theme with animal packs, knight, and pirates are often the main characters the children become. Five and six year olds observed in animal pack play displayed aggressive behavior that was often kept in check by one or two “mothers’ who would discipline the more aggressive animals in their charge. Corsaro next addressed the question of the complexity of child’s play across social class groups. There was an assumption that children from lower socio-economic status (SES) lagged behind their middle class peers in terms of language and cognitive skills. Corsaro found that in the Headstart program, there were more structured activities focused on language skills to ensure they would be in step with their middle class peers upon entering elementary school. Corsaro found that children from lower SES backgrounds had different language and role play skills but that they were not necessarily deficit compared to their middle class peers. In fact what Corsaro termed “interpretive reproduction (p. 126),” that is the linking and articulating local features of ongoing play to develop conceptions of the adult world, children in the Headstart program demonstrated more realistic reproductions of the adult worlds they interpreted in their role play. This stricter adherence to adult modeling demonstrates a difference in the type of role play, not a language deficit compared to the middle-class white children observed in Berkeley. Corsaro next takes aim at what children do when they learn basic social rules. It should come as no surprise that they look for ways around the rules. Children will attempt to use legitimate objects and resources to get around rules to meet personal or group needs and wants. This behavior was first described by Erving Goffman as “secondary adjustments” (p. 140). It is believed these secondary adjustments serve as a way for individuals to stand apart from the role that social institutions may expect of them. Membership and participation in the adult world are important to kids. Still, children’s developing sense of who they are is bolstered by their active resistance to certain adult rules restricting their behavior. In this sense, kids’ joint recognition of adult rules, and their common resistance to certain of these rules, can be seen as stable elements of peer culture (p.141).” For children who are trying to develop a sense of who they are, doing something taboo is considered valuable in their peer culture, even simple “secondary adjustments” such as leaving their seat at inappropriate times, making a face at the teacher when their back is turned or talking during quiet time are ways children can resist the rules imposed on them by the social institution. They often break the rules for the sheer sake of breaking rules and as a way to challenge the authority of the teacher. In Italy, Corsaro observed rule breaking in the form of disputes over power and resources. These disputes broke out most often in the afternoon during free drawing time. This type of dispute is a consistent feature of kids’ peer culture and has a specific structure that starts with a child challenging the adult’s control, this would give the children a chance to feel a shared sense of control by doing what they wanted and they would employ elaborate strategies to get what they wanted. Corsaro also observed the children use other types of “secondary adjustments”; one of the most universal strategies he witnessed was clean-up evasion. The children would use multiple methods to avoid cleaning up. They would use a relocation strategy; they would simply move to a different play area and then claim they had already cleaned up elsewhere. Another popular evasion strategy was the inability to clean up due to personal reasons, either illness, injury, or the convenient need to use the restroom. Both of these tactics involve delaying the task and are always successful to some degree because of organizational time constraints. These simple “secondary adjustments” do serve a learning purpose; children learn the need for rules. To get around rules, children need to understand why rule exist. To help children understand this, the teacher may use a past event that led to the creation of the rule as a way to enforce the rule during a current situation. A final way children may get around a rule is when the teachers relax the rules during periods of creativity, or they may temporarily suspend the rule by changing it. If a child brings a forbidden object to school, the teachers may declare the day sharing day, taking away the power a child can gain by breaking a rule. It is important to understand that the use of “secondary adjustments by children and the reaction by the adults to the reactions change the social cultures of both the children and the adults. Corsaro tackles one more topic of kids’ peer cultures before he offers his opinions on what we can do to improve the early education system here in America. Conflict is the natural progression that stems from breaking rules and engaging in simple disputes. Corsaro identifies two types of conflict, conflict over objects and conflicts over friendships. Conflicts involving objects are relatively short-lived and usually only involve two or three children. Conflicts involving friendships are more elaborate and laden with emotion. When the conflict is over an object, children will sometimes resolve the disputes themselves using humor. Common themes in conflict involve persistence and humor to help dissipate the tension that is inherent in conflicts. It is also essential to show you can play if you want to gain entry to a play area, sometimes which involves resolving the dispute. It is a first step in learning to choose your battles carefully. For boys, being tough and standing ones ground during conflict, although counterintuitive can lead to affiliation. Corsaro noticed different patterns of dispute resolution in the different populations he studied. White middle class American children dealt with disputes by manipulating language, used logic to make and defend their position and worked to keep the disputes from escalating and becoming emotional. The African-American children Corsaro studied were more likely to resort to pushing and shoving in disputes over objects or disputes involving status, such as their place in line. Teachers allowed the children a certain amount of latitude but if they had to intervene the children respected the authority of the teachers and quickly ended the disputes. African-American children also engaged in extended group debates that would arise from conflicts when one or more of the children would oppose the stated beliefs or opinions of another child. Oppositional talk was also observed as part of the everyday culture of African-American children, it is believed this type of engagement provided the children with an outlet for defining, and challenging social identities and status within the group. Similar to the oppositional talk witnessed in the African-American kids’ peer culture is the Cantilena that Corsaro witnessed among the Italian children. What makes the Cantilena unique is that it is a sing-song taunt composed of four syllables and is directly related to the context of the current conflict. In conflicts between the Italian children, often a third party would intervene and act as a mediator in an attempt to resolve the dispute, something not seen in their American counterparts. Researchers have argued that children rarely settle their own disputes because adults are too quick to intervene. In the preschool cultures Corsaro studied, the results are mixed, in the Italian preschools and the Headstart programs, the teachers were less likely to intervene than teachers in the Berkeley and Bloomington preschools. Corsaro found that in white class Middle America, conflict is often seen as negative and threatening and may be the reason teachers intervened more quickly in the Berkeley and Bloomington preschools. Conflict is a natural part of kids’ peer cultures and impossible to eliminate. Instead of considering conflict a negative circumstance, we might be better served as a community at large by learning how to work through conflicts and disagreements. “We can develop a better appreciation of the complexity of kids’ cultures by remembering that they arise out of highly diverse and complex adult cultures and societies in which they are embedded (p.194).” It is from the above quote that Corsaro offers his opinion on ways we can improve our understanding of children’s’ peer cultures and how we can provide a firmer foundation in their preschool years. Corsaro believe that any adult who takes children seriously can be more open to learning from them. We must be wary of the prevalent attitude in the United States that contradicts itself when it comes to our children. On one hand we make bold statements about how children are our future while on the other hand we tolerate the inequitable distribution of resources that leave many children living below the poverty line. Most countries have poverty rates that are 50% less than the rates here in the United States and all western European countries are far ahead of the United States when it comes to providing child care, maternity leave and healthcare. Corsaro found more parental investment in the early childhood programs in Italy, a respect for teachers unequal to that found here in the United States, and low teacher turn over. Western Europe is also more progressive in their investment in early childhood education. In fact, France and Italy are considered to be the best models of early education programs in the world. The success of these programs may be attributed to a curriculum that stresses social and language skills and bridging the child’s transition from family to community and formal schooling. Playing and debating are considered equally important activities as activities that focus on individual cognitive or intellectual development. In the Modena Italy preschool, the children stay with the same teacher throughout their entire preschool career which provides not only education but also provides a social and community organization for families with preschool children. The Modena program also has a component of civic engagement that involves long term projects that often focus on the children. To implement such a successful model the United States has obstacles to overcome. Distrust in big government has perhaps been the biggest obstacle in adopting a model similar to the ones observed in Italy. Seeing that obstacle as one too large to overcome at this point in time, Corsaro looks beyond the government to what individuals and communities can do to improve early education here in the U.S. Perhaps the most important piece of advice that Corsaro imparts is that we should be aware of the importance of letting children be children without underestimating their cognitive, social, and emotional abilities. What was a reoccurring theme throughout the book became more pronounced in the Corsaro’s conclusion. Because we do not consider children to be fully developed humans, we are quick to dismiss their voices and in some cases deny them their rights by not considering them as full fledged citizens. It is not difficult to see the parallels between our youngest members of society and the disenfranchised groups that have come before them. Civil rights have helped pave the way for African-Americans, Women, and people with disabilities. I believe Corsaro wanted to leave us with the message that we should not have to create legislation so that children can participate in early education programs that will provide them with a strong foundation to become active citizens in not just their own culture but the adult culture in which they are already embedded. About the Reviewer Karen E. Petersen is a graduate student at Portland State University. She is currently completing work on her Master’s degree in Special Education. Her interests include psychology, human development, education, motivation and learning, and the interaction between nature and nurture.