In Other Words… Harnessing the Participatory Nature of Adolescents Today: New Literacies and Young Adult Literature (original) (raw)

Harnessing the Participatory Nature of Adolescents Today

New literacies (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007) means a change in dispositions of young adult readers today. While text is generally accessible on mobile tools, it is not the tools that can be used to encourage reading but instead the cultural vibe that can encourage an attitudinal shift toward books. Books can be hip, and if we harness their inherent social capital by capturing and extending the buzz about hot new young adult literature, then that discourse can motivate students to read. While we know that students who read get better at reading, we need to explore ways to harness the participatory nature of today’s students in order to reach alliterate students, those who can read but choose not to.

Call for Action: Supporting the Needs of Struggling Adolescent Readers

2008

This article shares the experiences of a high school reading teacher, Tara, who used reader identity and motivation as tools in meeting the needs of her students. Tara looked beyond the assessments that placed the students in the striving reader class to determine how the students viewed themselves as readers as well as what motivated them to read. She used this data to plan a responsive curriculum for teaching her students to think about in-school texts while preparing the students for high stakes assessment. Tara’s experiences remind teacher educators that teaching reading is about both knowledge of content and knowledge of students and that it is the integration of the two that will lead students to be more successful. Call for Action: Supporting the Needs of Struggling Adolescent Readers America’s middle and high schools are at a turning point in the field of adolescent literacy. Students must be prepared to read for information while participating in a global society at a time ...

Re-engaging Adolescent Readers Through Multimodal Literacies

Many educators and school district curriculums are struggling to find a balance between old texts and new technologies. Much research has been done on how students read multimodal texts, or texts that incorporate images, videos, and other interactive elements with words. Qualitative research methods were used to study how student engagement, level of effort, and reading comprehension were impacted through the use of multimodal texts in tandem with a district-mandated text. In a Midwest school district, six male students and and seven female students were asked to read through a required text and perform a comprehension check and summative blog post summarizing major themes. Then, students were asked to read a longer required text with similar themes while utilizing multimodal literacies in an online environment. A similar comprehension check and blog post were given after utilizing these multimodal literacies to see if they had any impact on engagement, level of effort, and reading comprehension. While initially the multimodal literacy tasks caused student engagement and level of effort to increase, that initial spike fell as students continued working with the texts, indicating that student choice of texts in conjunction with utilization of multimodal literacies could have significant positive implications for students.

The Politics of Reading, Agency, and Participation

When discussing reading instruction and the identities of young people, the agency of the individuals reading is far too frequently disregarded. Reading is an intentional and active process. What we choose to read, how we read it, and for what purpose are key considerations that young people and educators must make regularly. These can lead to joyful reading, but these are considerations tied to activism, politics, and participation in modern society. As such, I want to recognize the fact that reading is an of civic innovation (Mirra & Garcia, 2017). The possibilities of democracy, invention, and ingenuity live in the dreams and imaginations of young people today. They are born from the alchemy that happens when texts connect with and spur action in readers. As literacy educators continue to challenge the meaning of texts in classrooms and in the lives of young people in 2018 and beyond, we must instill liberatory and action-oriented reading practices.

“I Never Thought I Would Read This Much”: Becoming a Reader

The Educational Forum, 2017

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the reading volume and book choices of fourth-grade students and how they identifi ed as readers. Students were encouraged to read 50 books independently. The results showed that students read throughout the year. Grade-level readers described themselves as being a part of the book, while above-and below-grade-level readers identifi ed by their rate of reading. All students increased in reading achievement as measured through assessments.

Can Teenagers be Motivated to Read Literature

Over the last years, in many countries worldwide, there has been a decline in the reading skills of upper secondary school students, and their ability to read and understand advanced literature. Seeing this as an alarming change for the worse, governments, educational bodies and interested groups have taken various measures to address the issue. Five schools in five European countries-Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Finland and Cyprus-have decided to take measures against the students' inability and unwillingness to read literature. Their -2009 Comenius ALCUIN project (Active Literacy: Competence and Understanding, Internally Naturalised-From Decoding to Understanding) aimed to develop reading methods which would motivate students to develop their reading skills, make them competent readers and users of their mother tongue as well as English as a second language. It also aimed to help them address more demanding texts, and also enable them to analyse and critically evaluate literary texts of various genres as well as European perspectives, and degrees of sophistication. This evaluative article aims to establish whether the first four new pedagogical methods used in the first year of the project in the five high schools have managed to motivate students in reading literature.

A “Ladder to Literacy” Engages Reluctant Readers

Middle School Journal, 2011

Without the sunlight of literature children cannot grow as they should. (Morpurgo, 2009, para. 1) Many students struggle with reading as they transition from the elementary to the middle grades and the literature becomes more complex. Many students may also have personal experiences that interfere with them seeing any importance, value, or enjoyment in reading literature, especially books assigned in school. As a result, "struggling readers seldom get to experience how great it feels to finish a book [and] how much fun it can be to escape day-today life by jumping into a good book" (Tovani, 2000, p. 9). Snow and Biancarosa's (2006) admonition is especially urgent at the middle level: Educators must … figure out how to ensure that every student gets beyond the basic literacy skills of the early-elementary grades to the more challenging and more rewarding literacy of the middle and secondary school years. (p. 1) Rosenblatt (1978) contended that how we read depends on the stance we choose-an efferent stance from which we read to gain information, or an aesthetic stance from which we read to connect with and enjoy a text (Purves, 1988). Similarly, Sumara (2002) discussed ways to help teachers motivate and immerse reluctant readers in the language and images of a story, making books gateways "for both aesthetic enjoyment and creative and critical learning" (p. 93). Sumara (2002) proposed that reading is more than acquiring information, communicating ideas, or recording facts. It is an experience.

Engaged Reading as a Collaborative Transformative Practice

Journal of Literacy Research, 2015

The context of this study is a voluntary modification in teaching focus by four eighth-grade teachers who shifted their instructional focus toward student engagement. They abandoned assigned readings in favor of student-selected, self-paced reading within a collection of high interest materials—primarily young adult fiction that students found personally relevant. Over a 4 year period, among other things, this shift consistently resulted, for the students, in increased reading volume, a reduction in students failing the state test, and changes in peer relationships, self-regulation, and conceptions of self. Increasingly predictable shifts across classes in the nature of classroom activity systems along with increasingly predictable student-level outcomes have been accompanied by a parallel evolutionary shift in the activity of teaching (individually and collectively) among the four teachers, reflected in their relationships, their use of resources, and the objects of their activity....