Drawing on ethnographic research inside and outside the classroom, Janet
Maybin investigates how 10-12 year-old children use talk and literacy to
construct knowledge about their social worlds and about themselves, as they
negotiate the transition from childhood into adolescence. Through the
analysis of examples of talk, she shows how children use collaborative
verbal strategies, stories of personal experience and the reworked voices
of others to investigate the moral order and forge their own identities.