Tensions in Teaching Adolescence/ts: Analyzing Resistances In A Young Adult Literature Course

Abstract

Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths’ consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension—and pedagogical potential—of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial discourses of adolescence. Reflecting on six years of teaching the course at two different institutions with a strong focus on critical perspectives of youth, the article examines why students in the class would understandably strain against this curriculum, as well as what it might mean for secondary literacy curricula and secondary students if teacher educators and secondary teachers take up these pedagogical risks and sources of resistance in efforts to interrupt dominant and stereotypical discourses about youth.

Reconsidering the Hypothetical Adolescent in Evaluating and Teaching Young Adult Literature

“…Although critical youth scholarship has underscored the value of a more complex and nuanced view of young people, several studies have found that a dominant, biological‐psychological view of adolescence enters into preservice ELA teachers' pedagogical thinking. For instance, preservice ELA teachers tend to perform a particular teacher identity, distancing themselves from the adolescent identity presumed of their future students (Lewis & Finders, ); understand their role as future teachers, as well as the purpose of ELA generally, as providing supports for students in coping with the struggles of adolescence (Petrone & Lewis, ); and conceptualize “inappropriate” or “immoral” behavior in YAL as contagious, especially if such depictions are grounded in prototypical teenage issues such as drug and alcohol use, suicide, and pregnancy (Sarigianides, ).…”

Meeting Pedagogical Encounters Halfway

“…The professional literature is full of calls from teacher educators for their students to more thoroughly examine how the theories we have, for example, about adolescence (Finders, ; Sarigianides, ), popular culture (Petrone, ), sexuality (Ryan & Hermann‐Wilmarth, ), nonstandard English (Vetter, ), and readers/reading (Lesley, ) come to matter in enacting less unjust literacy pedagogies. But how do we get students to meet us halfway in critically examining what these texts have to offer?…”

Literature Circles: Utilizing Chris Cutcher to Empower Youth

“…Explicit discussion of YA literature can scrutinize whether YA literature "redefine[s] adolescence (no longer as opposite to adults) and…advocate [s] for adolescents in different ways" (Petrone & Lewis, 2012, p. 283), whether YA literature "as a whole help[s] to constitute the known and knowable adolescent" (p. 283), or whether it perpetuates the controlling definitions of youth. Sarigianides (2012), in course work she has developed for pre-service teachers, has sought ways to insure that the study of YA literature does not "become a mirror for reproducing anticipated teen angst" (p. 224), posing the question teachers who incorporate YA literature into their classrooms should be asking: "As a body of literature marketed and marked for a specific audience, young adults, how do such texts represent young people?" (p. 225).…”