RM Winter 2016 FLIP

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Reading Matters
Teaching Matters
| 46| Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |
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
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