Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents' Lives

Bridging the Everyday/Academic Divide, Third Edition

Donna E. Alvermann, Kathleen A. Hinchman, Donna E. Alvermann, Kathleen A. Hinchman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136728075
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Like previous editions, the third edition of Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents' Lives invites middle- and high-school educators to move toward a broad, generative view of adolescent literacies. Recognizing that digital media, social networking phenomena are now central in adolescents' lives, what is different is the focus in this edition on bridging students' everyday literacies and subject matter learning. Four chapters from earlier editions serve as touchstone texts, honoring youth's diverse experiences and illustrating how young people's literacies are enacted, situated, and mediated in various locales; nine new chapters consider how these themes are lived in today's schools and in the rapidly changing world outside of school

This edition features heightened attention multimodal meaning construction, more discussion of practical implications of the ideas presented, and co-authored teacher commentaries at the end of each section. A Companion Website, new for this edition, facilitates practical application of the text's key ideas, with discussion questions, and links to instructional activities, blogs, additional readings and viewings, and interactive web pages, and videos.

Part I

Understanding Youth’s Everyday Literacies

1

Touchstone Chapter Playing For Real

Texts and the Performance of Identity

Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Old paint on canvas as it ages sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea….This is called pentimento…the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

Lillian Hellman (1973), Pentimento

This chapter is in two sections: Adolescence, and Early Adulthood. The first section, Adolescence, is an abbreviation of an earlier chapter written for the first edition of this handbook (Neilsen, 1998b). The earlier chapter, written eight years ago, focuses on identity creation, and on what I call “touchstone” texts informing the lives of two adolescents in high school. These touchstone texts shape the lives of David and El in ways that suggest that reading in adolescence is an activity of interpolation—whether the texts are film, cultural practices, or literary works, they inhabit the reader and the reader, in turn, writes the texts into his or her life. This earlier chapter, “Adolescence,” suggests that, as educators, we must learn which texts resonate for adolescents and why. Both the substance of “Adolescence” and the theoretical inferences have remained as they were 8 years ago in order to preserve the original data, analyses and theoretical perspectives of both the participants and the researcher in context at that time. The reader is encouraged to read this section as though he or she might be reading it 8 years ago.

The second section of this chapter is an update; here, in “Adulthood,” we meet again the two friends, David and El, 8 years after high school and after their first conversation with the researcher. What are their textual preoccupations now? What role do they believe their readings have played in shaping their lives? And what insights, given their experience, might they offer to educators today? This section, like the earlier chapter, invites an aesthetic as much as an efferent reading. Because much of our reading in school and the academy is efferent (and much writing is thus propositional, theoretical, and closed), this chapter offers the possibility of understanding research and scholartistry (Neilsen, 2002), which is, like texts, students, and data themselves, open to multiple interpretations.

Adolescence

Prologue

“Who am I?” is a question of central importance in adolescence. No longer children unselfconsciously acting out story in the school yard or playing dress-up in the basement, adolescents try on roles in their lives at school, at home, and in the community. Unlike the play of young children, however, adolescent play often is marked by the awareness of its purpose: to explore identities in order to find a place in the world. Although play at all ages is serious, adolescent performanceas-identity has a particular urgency and intensity. Eva Hoffman (1989) describes this intensity about life as being marked by “fire, flair, a holy spark of inspiration” (p. 154). Who will I be today, tomorrow, next year?

This study explored the role of text in the lives of two adolescents in a Nova Scotia rural community. Here the term text refers to sets of signifying practices and discourses available to us in local and larger discourse communities: a novel in English class, the conversation about that novel, teen zines, mall cultures, music videos, advertising, and television sitcoms, for example. The premise of this study is that our engagements with everyday texts help all readers and writers to shape and reshape our identities, but that adolescents, in particular, engage in more fluid, intentional and often more passionate identity-play in their encounters with such symbolic resources. These resources not only help the adolescent make sense of her or his experience, but also offer opportunities for trying on or taking up often multiple and conflicting roles or identities. In this way, a text is both role and reality. Adolescents, who typically demonstrate as much zeal in taking up roles as they do in resisting them, become at once the performer, the audience, and the theatre. By performing the texts of their lives, they are reading and writing themselves.

As researcher, mother, and community member, I have observed the participants, Eleanor and David, in a number of social, personal, and school settings since their first grade in school. The in-depth interviews about the role of key texts in their lives, however, were taken over two months late in their Grade 11 (junior) year in high school. Emerging from transcripts of six hours of individual and paired interviews is a recurring theme: the fluidity of text in performance and role-playing as Eleanor and David make and shape meaning in their lives through literacy. Their understanding and “scripting” of principal—or what I refer to as “touchstone”— texts in their lives is woven into their school and social behavior in a process of ongoing revision. Here the texts are the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and the film, Pulp Fiction. Their motifs and influences shift, recede, and emerge, seeming at times like the phenomena of pentimento in painting (Hellman, 1978) or the layered scripts of a palimpsest. The text or texts, as the adolescents themselves, resist stasis and defy definition.

The Players

Eleanor

Eleanor and her older sister moved with their mother (a single parent) to this rural Nova Scotia community before Eleanor started school. She lives with her mother, the owner of a craft store, and her stepfather, a fifth-generation Nova Scotian, in a recently converted boathouse on St. Margaret’s Bay.

Interviews with El took place just before she turned 17. El is independent, has traveled alone to Ireland to visit relatives, travels every other weekend to see her birth father, and works part-time at a local restaurant/coffee house and occasionally as a sign painter. She goes into Halifax regularly to see films, hang out in coffee houses, or to visit her current boyfriend, an art student.

El’s dress is distinctive, what some might call “nonconformist.” She wears several earrings, including a nose ring; her dark hair has sported many hairstyles. She is short, quiet, but not shy, and often questions her parents’ and her teachers’ decisions. Art, drama, English, and history are her favorite school subjects. She has attended school in the same school system since grade primary.

David

David, 17, moved to the community from western Canada 13 years ago with his parents, both of whom are educators. He has a 9-year-old brother. David and Eleanor have been close friends since Grade 1, but never romantically paired. David, like El, has been independent from childhood, and has traveled frequently out of Nova Scotia. He attended school in the same classes as Eleanor. Highly verbal, he performs in school settings (as class clown), has studied drama with the local theatre school, and served as a youth judge at the local film festival. David is on two baseball teams, has been an avid skater and snowboarder, and when not with his girlfriend, Cheryl, hangs out with El and other friends from school. Ross, David, Simon, and El have made several home videos based on material they have written or improvised.

David dresses in a style he calls unique (“I am not preppie, not jock, and not punk”), but is in the contemporary style of skateboarders (large shirts, long skirtlike shorts). Like El, David’s heritage is European, largely Caucasian; his greatgrandmother was Cree. His brown hair, once worn in a ponytail, is now short and dyed dark blond. David is tall and solidly built. El’s and David’s strong sense of justice is demonstrated in their ongoing challenge of what they see as sexist or racist practices of their teachers or the community. Both frequently “diss” the rural community for what they see as its provincial attitudes.

Researcher/Narrator

As a 13-year resident of the rural community, I have researched and written about the literate behavior of adults in the area (Neilsen, 1989). As David’s mother and a volunteer in their schools, I have seen both David and El in a variety of literacy and schooling contexts over the 11-year period in which they have known one another. Having moved intellectually from an atomistic, functional notion of literacy and literacy research in the 1970s, I am now engaged in ongoing research into gender and literacy that might be characterized as phenomenological.

The Texts

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger’s 1951 story of a prep-school runaway is perhaps one of North America’s most controversial and enduring novels. Typically described as the only novel to successfully “convey contemporary youth’s dissatisfaction with adult society” (Benet’s, 1987), it deals with the two days following Holden Caulfield’s departure from school. Holden Caulfield is considered by many adolescent and adult readers to represent the voice of disaffected youth. Indeed, although readers in the 1950s were avid readers of the novel (the language was frank and racy enough for the times to ensure a wide readership), the work continues to attract succeeding generations of young readers.

Pulp Fiction

The controversial movie (Tarantino, 1994) about low-rent hit men won the 1994 Cannes Film Festival’s highest prize, the Palme d’Or, and a 1994 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the writer/director, Quentin Tarantino. Celebrated as the work of one of cinema’s “enfants terrible,” the movie also marked actor John Travolta’s long-awaited return to the screen.

Like Salinger, Tarantino has been praised for his authentic, engaging dialogue and his originality. In Tarantino’s case, the film is flagrantly derivative of other films and of pop culture narratives and, ironically, it is this derivative “bricolage” quality, in part, that wowed the critics. The term pulp fiction refers to the 5-cent novels popular a generation ago, and the movie is replete with pop culture images and references and allusions to well-known movies. The film disrupts the conventional narrative and linear plot line; viewers must piece together “what happened” through a series of flashbacks (and jumps forward). Martin and Porter (1996) describe it as a “trash masterpiece” in which the writer/director “spares the viewer little in this tale of the underbelly of Los Angeles where philosophizing hit men and techno-crazed druggies live on the thrill-packed edge” (p. 103). Vincent Vega (Travolta) and Jules (Samuel Jackson) are the hapless gangsters whom we follow on the trail of a suitcase, the contents of which remains a mystery.

The movie, like its director/writer, is not without its critics. Some have called the film “blaxploitation,” claiming that actor Samuel Jackson’s Afro and exaggerated sideburns (part of the movie’s 1970s motif) make him just another Black stereotype, and that Travolta’s “White negro” attitude, as well as the script’s frequent use of the word “nigger,” makes the movie both dangerous and racist. Feminists, in particular, have attacked the film for its graphic violence: heroin addiction, execution-style murder, male rape, and bondage.

Theoretical Backdrop

This study assumes that becoming literate is a lifelong process, and that literacy learning and literate behaviors are semiotic activities (Neilsen, 1989) in which we learn to read and write within value-laden code systems. Becoming literate is a process not only of acquiring functional skills of decoding and encoding printed material, but also of developing critical awareness and agency in one’s own life.

Adolescents in particular draw from popular culture to “actively create and define their own social identities…‘reading’ and ‘writing’ popular culture are thus inherently social processes” (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1994, p. 108). As young people learn to see themselves in social and political terms, they have the opportunity to actively choose or to resist the discourses and roles available to them. Although it is true that choice itself is framed and shaped by myriad personal and social influences, it is also true that the more diverse and discrepant the choices provided for young adults, the greater the chance their choices will move them beyond the insular and the local. Buckingham and Sefton-Green (1994) offer this observation:

Becoming critical could be seen simply as a matter…in Bourdieu’s terms, of acquiring a kind of cultural capital…on the other hand, (it) could be seen from a Vygotskyan perspective…(emphasizing) the way in which critical understanding offers the individual a degree of power and control over his or her thought processes.

(p. 182)

Adolescents supported in multiple opportunities to work with a range of texts, both school-sanctioned and popular, would seem, then, to be well positioned for growth in their critical literacy development.

Cherland (1993) and others have shown how young girls take up gender identities through reading as a social practice. Rogers’ (1993) study of preadolescent girls makes apparent that entry into adolescence creates for young girls a “crisis of courage” (p. 290) in which they struggle to maintain their outspokenness and strength in the face of pressures to assume societal roles and expectations for feminine behavior. Finders’ (1996a, 1996b) work on the “underlife” of junior high school girls’ literacy practices illustrates how social roles are shaped and maintained through girls’ reading and writing outside of school-sanctioned literacy practices. Humans, regardless of age, tend to resist an official view of who they must be and what they must do (Finders, 1996a).

Boys, as much as girls, can be constrained by limited constructions of their gender identities in school and society. Most work in gender over the last decade has affirmed that cultural values about males and females are inscribed in literacy practices and can reinforce strongly the stereotypical male/female polarities of activity/passivity, dominance/submission, and public/private. Finders (1996a) calls for opportunities that examine:

the social, historical and cultural motivations of particular roles available— in texts, classrooms, and the larger culture—(that) will lead students to more critical awareness and thus, it is hoped, to the ability to revise those roles…Students, both male and female…need opportunities to practice dealing with intellectual uncertainties and political tension.

(p. 126)

The texts of students’ lives, regardless of the context, often undergo a process that Jenkins (1992) calls “becoming real,” whether the text is in the private or the public domain. First the text—particularly if it is interesting to the reader/ viewer—is incorporated into lived experience; then it is reread and rewritten so that it is more productive and more able to sustain its original appeal; and finally, it is shared within social practices as assumed and tacit knowledge, particularly among friends.

As this study shows, the touchstone texts that inform Eleanor’s and David’s lives—The Catcher in the Rye and Pulp Fiction, respectively—undergo such a process of becoming real, culminating, finally, in the insertion of these texts into their social world. In this way, whether it is a Saturday Night Live sketch seen alone at home and then reenacted in the school hallway as a piece of shared text (and then subsequently used as a “shorthand” reference for a social phenomenon), or whether it is a touchstone novel or film that plays an important role in their lives, these young people live the private in concert with the public. Each script, or text, has the potential for reenactment in public in some form, whether the enactment is explicit (in speech or writing) or tacit (changed behavior, for example).

To learn about the texts in their lives, I asked two questions of El and David: “Tell me about your reading and writing in school” (I asked this question of them individually, and together); and “Tell me about your favorite ‘text’ (book, movie)” (I explained my perspective on “text,” and that my meaning included other media). Each talked with only my occasional prompting for further explanation. Because we know each other so well, the conversations were, at first, aw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Reconceptualizing Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding Youth’s Everyday Literacies
• Part II: Integrating Everyday and Academic Literacies
• Part III: Addressing Sociocultural and Identity Issues in Adolescents’ Literacy Lives
• Part IV: Changing Teachers, Teaching Changes
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index