Literacy最新文献

This article examines the impact of a poet-led classroom-based poetry programme on secondary school students' writer identities and self-expression, particularly focusing on BPoC teenagers. Drawing on the Writing Realities framework, the research uses focus groups, participant observations, and interviews with the poet-in-residence. Rather than analysing the students' poems, the study explores their engagement with poetry writing and the poet-in-residence, highlighting the contribution to self-reflection and meaning-making. The findings reveal how the residency introduced students to diverse poetry forms, community-based poetry, and collaborative writing, facilitating critical engagement with themes relevant to their lives. However, the school's status as a Predominantly White Institution hindered full expression of BPoC students' identities. The presence of the poet-in-residence, a young mixed-heritage Muslim woman, positively influenced students' relationships with writing, particularly for BPoC students, by providing a protected space for self-expression and identity exploration. The study underscores the importance of creating supportive environments in schools to nurture BPoC students' creativity and writer identity, emphasising the need for anti-racist practices and culturally sustaining pedagogies to empower students from socially marginalised groups.

Despite the widespread popularity of online reading challenges on platforms like Goodreads and The StoryGraph, research on this phenomenon has been mostly absent. This article addresses this gap by examining the motivations of adolescent participants in reading challenges, the outcomes of their participation and the implications for their reading routines. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews with 20 participants aged 15–20 years, the article shows that motivations range from a desire for social engagement within a book-loving peer group to self-challenge. A common thread is that reading challenges serve as a catalyst for increased volitional reading by adolescents, accompanied by changes in their reading habits. Furthermore, analysis of the responses reveals that these evolving reading practices are perceived by participants as both stimulating and self-directed. However, the research also underscores the significant role played by algorithms on platforms like Goodreads in influencing reading routines. The study also shows that some participants in online reading challenges are guided by social motivation, although most of them experience social motives as secondary to their individual and intrinsic desire to read more. At the same time, some individuals partaking in online reading challenges prove susceptible to negative perceptions from others. Hence, this research foregrounds crucial tensions in online reading cultures adolescents engage in, specifically those between autonomy and algorithm and sociocentrism and egocentrism.

This article discusses young women's reading practices and the social uses of literature for enabling gender equality that are present in those practices. Through a digital ethnography study where six young women collaborated as participants, I asked the data: How is literature, precisely its capacity to be used, conceived by young women readers in the search for gender equality? These women's reading engagements are tightly woven with a gender perspective. What are these readers embracing, and what are they rejecting by assuming a gender lens? By tracing these attachments and exclusions, I describe how books affect readers' perspectives and practices on their identities, their choice of authors, the cultural value of books, the social representations of books and reading as education. Participants' close and distant connections between the book and their desire for gender equality allow me to discuss the literature's pedagogical instrumentality and uselessness for achieving gender-inclusive literacy. Finally, I argue that a plural and non-functional approach to literature could offer young people heterogeneous and more creative forms to approach the challenge of gender equality.

Teachers of young writers often feel pressure to focus on narrow, tested conventions, forms and processes of writing. These pressures can contribute to instruction that does not consider students' interests, experiences, language or cultures, but rather can further deficit views of students whose backgrounds do not closely align with those making decisions about what counts as writing in schools. This paper explores purpose-studies—an alternative to genre-studies—Barbara, a fourth-grade teacher, and Alison, a ninth-grade teacher, used to help balance the needs of their students, position students as strong and capable writers and prepare students to write for the test and the world beyond the school walls.

In this article, we explore the dynamic interplay of youth agency, spatial justice, and literacy practices across community spaces through micro-analysis of photographs and interviews of children and youth. Through a lens of spatial reclamation, the study investigates how children and youth disrupt adult-designed spaces to restory and reclaim narratives, ultimately reshaping the socio-spatial landscape. Combining the concepts of restorying and spatial justice, we explore the awareness and agency children exhibit when challenging dominant expectations, particularly examining instances of rulebreaking and safety negotiation. Examining two distinct settings—a school playground and a community protest—the study reveals how youth engage in embodied performances that rupture anticipated discourses in place. The findings underscore the multilayered nature of youth rulebreaking as a form of resistance and as a form of leadership, emphasising the potential for transformative socio-spatial impact as youth reclaim narratives through new co-constructions of space. Across age groups and geographies, Black and Brown youth and children emerge as leaders in reshaping spaces through their acts of resistance, redefining boundaries, and leading peaceful protests. The article calls for a nuanced understanding of how spatial justice intersects with restorying, urging educators and researchers to reconsider acts of reclamation as literacies across adult-dictated spaces.

This paper examines the perspectives of children in two East London primary schools on what influences their independent choice of text, in the context of developing reading for pleasure in schools. All children in three selected year groups (ages approximately 6, 8 and 10) were invited to take part in the research, and from those that volunteered, six children per year group were randomly selected in each school. These focus groups were then observed choosing reading material from a range of pre-determined texts which varied in genre, recommended age-range and representation of diverse groups. The children were then interviewed, with the two researchers seeking to understand the factors that influenced their decisions. A thematic analysis was subsequently conducted to determine the most prevalent of these factors; the researchers identified seven key themes, which will be discussed in this paper. Practical implications that were identified for supporting children to read for pleasure are then suggested, based on these themes.