Just Girls

Just Girls was essentially a year long ethnographic study on two groups of girls at a Jr. High School.  One way in which this helps us to understand literacy studies is by showing how many different forms of literacy there are.  The author included things like passing notes, writing on the bathroom walls, and magazines in the category of literacy.  It also showed how literacy functions as a social category because there were different forms of literacy being used in both separate groups.  My group talked a lot about the social differences between the two groups.  The Tough Cookies used literacy as a way of isolating themselves (i.e. reading silently to themselves) while the Social Queens used it to communicate and relate to each other (i.e. passing notes and sharing books).