RM Winter 2016 FLIP

work, developing an understanding of the “social languages” (Gee, 2000) that characterize adolescent discourse. Part of our dilemma is that what adolescents find worth reading has often not, to this point, been valued in the school curriculum. Additionally, the increasing demands of high-stakes testing force some otherwise willing teachers away from allowing students to choose reading texts and toward test preparation. Yale Professor emeritus Seymour Sarason (1998) maintained that schools are uninteresting places in which the interests and concerns of students have no relevance to what they are required to learn in the classroom. There is now, suggested Sarason, almost an unbridgeable gap that students perceive between the world of school and the world outside it. School is an institution that depends on some fairly complex and unnatural forms of compliance. We tend to elevate in importance those behaviors that make institutional arrangements run more smoothly. Although student achievement has always been—at least, rhetorically—the central issue of education, if anything, education per se appears less relevant to students today than ever before. For more than a decade, literacy researchers have been making the case for expanding education definitions of literacy to incorporate the vast range of multimodalities, multimedia, and multiliteracies, with their concomitant 21st Century digital technologies, into the literacy teaching of k-12 schooling (Jewitt, 2008; Kress & Jewitt, 2003; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). Teenagers are the biggest consumers of online video and are highly social and creative in how they use and engage with the Web. They watch half as much television but spend, on average, seven times the amount of time viewing online video than do adults (Goodacre, 2015). As we consider the impact our teaching will have on what the New London Group (1996) referred to as students’ social futures, finding ways of connecting academic experiences with relevant outside of school literacies becomes of utmost importance. In the end of year course reflection, Joshua and his classmates were asked what their favorite and least favorite work was in class. Joshua did not say that his favorite activity was Titanic . He said, “Of all the books I read this year, The Battle of Jericho was my favorite. It was mysterious and interesting, when the chapter ended with a remark or some kind of clue, I just wanted to flip the page and read on.” He added, “A lot of the books that I read this year were written by Gary Paulsen. I like his books because he mostly writes about adventure and surviving.” His least favorite reading? “Out of all the information text that we did, the one that I hated the most was working with (state test prep book) passages. It was my least favorite, because they were all long and boring just like the test.” The growing numbers of our students who struggle with literacy tasks and the engagement of adolescents with language—traditional as well as popular, along with the nonlinear texts of the Internet and other media--suggests our need to rethink our work as teachers in some fundamental

ways. Making room in schools for student voices is the first step in making schools successful learning places for all students (Ma’ayan, 2010). As adolescents transition to adulthood, developing literacy skills that move beyond the basics, the ways texts in their world impact their belief systems, and the ways in which ideology and persuasion in traditional and popular culture, as well as corporate and citizen life, work to manipulate, define, shape, and sell at every juncture become significant to students’ futures. Creating a school climate that embraces disengaged learners, their literacies, their experiences, and their interests is of fundamental importance to our social and cultural outcomes as a people. References Apple, M. W. (2005). Education, markets, and an audit culture. Critical Quarterly , 47 (1-2), 11-29.

Reading Matters Teaching Matters

Ballard, R. (1998). Exploring the Titanic . New York: Scholastic.

Beers, K. (2003). When kids can’t read . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Draper, S. (2005). The battle of Jericho . New York: Simon Pulse.

Gee, J.P. (2000). Teenagers in new times: A new literacy studies perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43 , 412-420.

Goodacre, M. (March 25, 2015) Social consumers, smartphone users, short- form viewers: Teenagers and online video (Web log summary of research by OfCom Children’s Digital Day 2014). Retrieved from http://stakeholders.ofcom. org.uk/binaries/research/crossmedia/2014/children-digital-day.pdf

Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education, 32 , 241-267.

Kress, G. & Jewitt, C. (2003). Introduction. In C. Jewitt & G. Kress. (Eds.) Multimodal literacy (pp. 1-18). New York: Peter Lang.

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning . Buckingham: Open University Press.

Lord, W. (1955). A night to remember. New York: Bantam.

Ma’ayan, H.D. (2010) Erika’s stories: Literacy solutions for a failing middle school student. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53 , 646-654.

Nafisi, A. (2008). Reading Lolita in Tehran: A memoir in books. Harper Perennial.

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66 (1), 60-92.

Pajares, F., & Schunk, D.F. (2001). Self-beliefs and school success: Self-efficacy, self-concept, and school achievement. In Riding, R., & Raynor, R. (Eds.). Perception . London: Ablex, 239-266.

Sarason, S.B. (1998). The predictable failure of education reform. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

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