Looking for Angels: Knowing Adolescents by Engaging With Their Multimodal Literacy Practices

Abstract

The vast landscape of youths' literacies can leave teachers of adolescents feeling caught between the possibility of creativity and the confining practices of labeling, measurement, and evaluation. Recent research demonstrates that attending to the rich, multimodal literacy practices of young people opens up ways of getting to know them and creating new points of learning and engagement (Mahiri, 2004).In this article, I explore the literacy journey that a student and I embarked on over the course of eight months. The "low literate" label attached to him belied his creativity, expressive practices, and intellect, yet it continued to follow him beyond our time together. As it was in this case, school-sanctioned literacy, defined by an arbitrary standard, is often at the center of school labeling practices. But that standard's function is out of sync with the worlds that youths currently navigate and the work and higher education worlds that they will have to navigate in the future. Here, I explore what happened when teacher and student moved beyond labels to learn, compose, and "know" together. Meeting AngelAngel (all names are pseudonyms) was one of several young men I met while teaching in an education program in a northeastern U.S. city. Participants came from across the city and were mandated by the courts and their probation officers (POs) to attend the program for varying lengths of time. Although the program was mixed race and gender, the majority of the student population comprised African American and Latino males. I focused on literacy in the classes I taught with another teacher. We spent most mornings working with students individually and used the afternoons for whole-group activities.Angel walked into our classroom in the early fall of my second year in the program. He wore an oversized white T-shirt and faded jeans that almost entirely covered the tops of his boots. Joe, one of the other teachers, followed behind him and handed me a blue folder with a corner of the Test of Adult Basic English (TABE) visible.The program had an open-entry/open-exit policy, so there were between 12 and 25 youths between the ages of 16 and 20 who attended the © 2006 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (pp. 252-256)

Shrek Meets Vygotsky: Rethinking Adolescents' Multimodal Literacy Practices in Schools

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“…Increasingly, researchers are exploring adolescents’ digital literacy practices, particularly out‐of‐school, suggesting implications and challenges for teachers (e.g., Hull & Katz, ; Paris, ; Rowsell & Burke, ; Vasudevan, ; West, ). One of the central claims of this work is how adolescents’ identities, agency, and literacy practices are intimately related, something that Jared's online exchanges with Wei affirm.…”

An Ecological Approach to Classroom Literacy Instruction: Lessons Learned From No Impact Man

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