Recent studies undertaken with sociocultural perspectives on literacy offer a framework through which to explore poetry in youth's lives. This article draws upon works within New Literacy Studies to provide a glimpse of urban high school youth's experiences in a unique program called Poetry for the People (P4P). It identifies some ways in which these experiences have been valuable in acquisition of writing skills, confidence in learning, self‐awareness, and development of social conscience. The view of poetry presented affirms the importance of students' voices in the writing and learning process. It highlights how acknowledging students' interests in and abilities to produce sophisticated poems can create different possibilities for enhancing students' literacy development. The import of poetry for young people's identities, in particular emergent identities as empowered citizens and writers, examined within the context of P4P advances current perspectives on how poetry can be used for effective writing instruction in and out of schools.
Racializing affect draws on Black feminist theories to extend affect theory and related poststructuralist approaches within literacy studies. The authors examined literacies via a study of affect and youth of color in career and technical education (CTE) and the reconfiguration of CTE to enable radical change in the racializing experiences of/with technologies. An information technology classroom and its spatial arrangements, plus the larger CTE school, offered a lens into how material spatial movement (mobility and dislocation) affects bodily movements (rhythm, relationality, intensity, and energy) in a rhizomatic becoming process of reconstituted racializing affect with technology. Interested in the emergent rhythms and living intensities within affect theory, the authors also drew on the movie Black Panther to further theorize affect in relation to the discussion on becoming‐technologist through the character of Shuri. This creative rendering provided a different methodological approach to reflect the authors’ own intensities as researchers and consumers of popular culture in the analysis. Together, the authors hope to shed light on CTE as an understudied educational context and to reimagine race, gender, and difference in relation to technology and literacy learning.
In this article, the author illustrates the blurring lines of youth cultural production and participatory politics from the perspective of new media literacies. Drawing on design-based action research, the author discusses pedagogical considerations in the conceptualization of new media literacies in a semester-long course that culminated in inquiry-based social action projects created by university students in the urban Midwest. Noteworthy in the course was an emerging ethos developed through collaboration, participation, and distributed expertise leading to the production of video documentaries and interactive websites. New media literacies served as core cultural competencies and social skills in a new media landscape, but more importantly emerged as key practices toward youth cultural production and participatory politics. The latter offers insights into the centrality of pedagogy in the politics of knowledge production.
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