Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

This paper presents an analysis of the prescribed text list for senior school English (including English as an Additional Language or Dialect, EAL/D) in Queensland, Australia. Queer understandings about the normalization of cisgender and heterosexuality provide a framework to analyze prescribed texts for adolescent learners. Hetero-cisgender norms are perpetuated through overrepresentation in endorsed texts. Representations of queer subjectivities or themes in the most highly promoted texts, those appearing on the examination list, are infrequent and minor. Reflexive justice thinking acknowledges the critique of merely identifying “who is missing” in the literature and extends the discussion to consider the complexities of the social, cultural, and political contexts that influence who gets to decide.

This study examines the experiences of 17 teacher candidates who participated in a literacy-focused service-learning initiative in the aftermath of destructive tornadoes in their community. In response to the natural disaster, the Literacy Ambassadors, composed of university literacy faculty and teacher candidates, sought to address the critical need for book access among area students impacted by the tornadoes. Over the course of 8 months, researchers collected initial questionnaires, participant reflections, meeting transcripts, and anecdotal notes as the group met to learn about book matching, text complexity, and to acquire, sort, and curate book bags for individual preK-12 students. Books were shared with community members on three occasions—two occurred 12 months after the tornadoes and served eight schools; another occurred 16 months after the event and served one school. Participants revealed themes of shifting identity, a developing understanding of the complexity of literacy, and the relational power of literacy—offering valuable insights into the impact of community engagement on teacher candidates in response to disaster. These findings support previous research that emphasizes the potential of service-learning as real-life experiences that address community needs while simultaneously enriching the professional growth of future educators.

A review of the 2023 book Teaching with Hip Hop in the 7–12 grade classroom: A guide to students' critical development through popular texts by Lauren Leigh Kelly.

Literacy scholars have called for writing instruction to promote civic engagement, student agency, and multimodal composing. This study addressed this call by describing a research-practice partnership to reimagine writing instruction in a high school English course by incorporating human-centered design challenges. Using case study methods, we describe the process to negotiate curriculum, the divergent ways teachers implemented it, and the positive impact it had on students' attitudes toward writing. Through a transliteracies lens, we found that negotiating a (re)designed curriculum means working through tensions that can lead to new ways of thinking about writing. The (re)designed instruction centered 21st century composing practices that were inherently multimodal and resonated with students' out-of-school composing practices. This led to a positive shift in students' attitudes toward writing. The study suggests that incorporating “wicked problem” design challenges has the potential to reimagine how we teach writing in secondary education.

When a hard-working, justice-oriented group of pre-service English teachers (PSTs) identified themselves as non-readers, two professors and a program alumna at a flagship university in the Midwest were inspired to create a young adult (YA) literature book club. Through monthly meetings, PSTs (and later first-year teachers) gathered in a welcoming third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) to discuss YA books as readers and as teachers, considering both the experience of reading and the purpose for using these texts in their classrooms (Rosenblatt, 1994). Outcomes from Overbooked: An Educators' Book Club suggest that pre-service teachers can find reading joy when offered a supportive space and community to grow as readers and teachers.

Viewing teacher vulnerability as a pedagogical tool, this comparative case study examined two secondary literacy teachers' use of vulnerability in relation to various instructional goals. Through the analysis of eight video-recorded lessons, we found that teachers demonstrated vulnerability through multiple ways within their literacy instruction through modeling ways of connecting personal experiences to texts, and establishing classroom norms that welcome difficult emotions and experiences. However, we also found that teacher vulnerability can sometimes lead to uncertainty, and even constrain student participation. We argue that teacher vulnerability helps establish a humanizing pedagogy, and offer possible strategies for teachers who are vulnerable within literacy instruction. We conclude with a discussion of different levels of appropriating vulnerability as a pedagogical tool.

In this Narrative Inquiry, we share the stories of three Chinese rural students who grew up in a southeastern county in China before moving to the county seat for high school. By inviting our participants to read their own life, we aimed to understand how Chinese rural students make sense of their experience in an exam-centered school system that seemed to offer them opportunities of upward social mobility but at the same time perpetuated the mindset of rural deficiency. Data analysis shows that the visceral feelings of shame and love played an important role in our participants' critical consciousness about school, allowing them to work within and against school norms to transform a strictly stratified school space. We argue that marginalized youth's storytelling can become a practice of critical literacy, enabling them to construct critical meaning makings in embodied ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown measures in many countries have increased young people's engagement with digital media. The digital divide goes beyond just having devices and includes differences in how well young people can use digital technology. In this paper, we shift our attention beyond screen time to the nature of the adolescents' digital media use. Our study looks at two adolescents from different backgrounds to understand how their digital media experiences differ in viewing, play, and reading. We add to the literature on the influence SES has on the ways in which adolescents are using digital media during the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. Our study was conducted during the pandemic and participants were selected using convenience stratified sampling and the snowballing method. Our findings show that the adolescents' digital viewing was motivated by the need to be a part of an affinity group and that while the viewing was passive, it served a social function to develop a sense of connectedness with peers. We also found that adolescents from high socioeconomic backgrounds tended to engage in more digital reading compared to their peers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, while the adolescents' digital play was shaped by their socioeconomic realities, they were able to make the most from their circumstances and demonstrated both creativity and savviness. By demonstrating the disparities in digital media experiences between two adolescents from contrastive socioeconomic backgrounds, we shed light on the implications of the digital divide, where both equitable access to digital resources and the development of digital literacies necessary to navigate the digital landscape is currently lacking. We argue for the importance for researchers and policymakers to move beyond acknowledging long-standing concerns and take actionable steps to address these issues.

In this article, we revisit the co-creation of a 45-min film, Gender is Like an Ocean, produced with middle school students in response to Kirstin Cronn-Mills's young adult novel Beautiful Music for Ugly Children. The making of this film brought together collaborative inquiry and arts creation. Drawing on the work of critical literacy educators as well as scholars in queer and trans studies, we trace students' participation in the process of co-creating this film through three critical moments, which map their inquiries into gender identity and representation and our own attempts to learn alongside them.