Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents' Lives

Bridging the Everyday/Academic Divide, Third Edition

Edited by Donna E. Alvermann, Kathleen A. Hinchman

Published December 12th 2011 by Routledge – 280 pages

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Description

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.

Contents

Foreword

Reconceptualizing Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement

Randy Bomer

Introduction

Kathleen A. Hinchman and Donna E. Alvermann

Part I: Understanding Youth’s Everyday Literacies

1 Touchstone Chapter: Playing for Real: Texts and the Performance of Identity

Lorri Nielsen

2 Becoming Life-Long Readers: Insights from a Comic Book Reader

Stergios G. Botzakis

3 Low-Income Youth’s (Public) Internet Practices in South America: Potential Lessons for Educators in the U.S. and Other Post-Industrial Nations

Eliane Rubinstein-Avila

4 Teacher Response: Lessons Learned from Young People’s Everyday Literacies

Anne Bulcher and Margaret Moran

Part II: Integrating Everyday and Academic Literacies

5 Touchstone Chapter: “Struggling” Adolescents’ Engagement in Mulitmediating: Countering the Institutional Construction of Incompetence

David O’Brien

6 Thinking with Forensic Science: A Content Analysis of Forensic Comic Books and Graphic Novels

Barbara Guzzetti & Marcia Mardis

7 Reclaiming and Rebuilding the Writer Identities of Black Adolescent Males

Marcelle M. Haddix

8 Teacher Response: Bridging Everyday Literacies with Academic Literacy

McKenzie Weaver

Part III: Addressing Sociocultural and Identity Issues in Adolescents’ Literacy Lives

9 Touchstone Chapter: Exploring Race, Language, and Culture in Critical Literacy Classrooms

Bob Fecho

Bette Davis

Renee Moore

10 Re-Writing the Stock Stories of Urban Adolescents: Autobiography as a Social and Performative Practice at the InterSections of Identities

Kelly Wissman

Lalitha Vasudevan

11 “In This Little Town Nothing Much Ever Happens, But Someday Something Will”: Reading Young Adult Literature from the Blue Ridge Foothills

Gay Ivey

12 Teacher Response: Addressing Sociocultural and Identity Issues in Adolescents’ Literacy Lives

Justin Claypool

George White

Part IV: Changing Teachers, Teaching Changes

13 Touchstone Chapter: Adolescents’ Multiple Identities and Teacher Professional Development

Alfred W. Tatum

14 Reconceptualizing Together: Exploring Participatory and Productive Critical Media Literacies in a Collaborative Teacher Research Group

Eli Tucker-Raymond

Daisy Torres-Petrovich

Keith Dumbleton

Ellen Damlich

15 Baby Steps toward Web 1.5: Middle School Teachers’ Personal Learning and Explorations of Pop Culture and Digital Literacy Tools for Classroom Literacy Instruction

Margaret C. Hagood

16 Teacher Response: Professional Development to Reconceptualize Literacy Instruction

Maryanne Desmond Barrett

Elizabeth G. Mascia

Afterword

Donna E. Alvermann

Kathleen A. Hinchman

Contributors

Index

Author Bio

Donna E. Alvermann is Distinguished Research Professor, University of Georgia.

Kathleen A. Hinchman is Professor, Reading & Language Arts Center and Director, Reading and English education doctoral programs, Syracuse University.

Welcome!

Welcome to the companion website for our text! Adolescents and the contexts in which they learn, media, and literacies continue to evolve, sometimes at a breakneck pace. Those of us who work with adolescents need to engage in ongoing reconceptualizations of this work. To help with this process, the chapters in this book offer rich, varied accounts of youth situating, mingling, and enhancing their everyday and academic literacies, as well as of teachers and teacher educators learning to facilitate their use of texts of all kinds.

This website offers questions and resources to explore and use as you ponder the authors’ research about adolescents’ identities, everyday literacies, integration of everyday and academic literacies, sociocultural and identity aspects of literacies, and teachers’ efforts to stay abreast of these evolving issues. We offer a special thanks to Elizabeth Stevens, from Syracuse University, for helping us to locate many of the websites that we’ve included here.