Blog 6 Adolescent Identity and Literacy

My group is discussing and researching Adolescent Identity and Literacy. Our conversations in class have been a bit all over the place as we have been planning how to execute our website by splitting up subtopics within the broad topic of Adolescent Identity and Literacy. Our main focus during the in class discussion is the ways in which schooling can hold back students in their literacy studies. For example, the AR framework that so many schools use. We are focusing on the ways in which we (as teachers) can possibly get rid of these programs and set up our students with reading assignment that allow our students to explore their own interests and various reading levels.

Youth, Identity, and Digital Media written by David Beckingham discusses the ways in which digital media has affected our youth. Beckingham discusses the ways in which people view our younger generation as a “digital generation” but doesn’t completely agree with this viewpoint. Many believe that the digital generation is using the internet in innovative and creative ways. He states that recent studies have  showed that students aren’t using the internet in such ways but are mostly using the internet as a way to communicate among peers by reinforcing local networks (16). I found this to be very fascinating when relating this idea to the ways in which an adolescent uses the Internet to form an identity. The lines get blurred because while on the Internet, an adolescent can be someone they may not be in real life. This thought is frightening to me and I cannot really place why that freaks me out so much. I guess I believe that adolescents should find out who they are through real life interactions, but use the Internet as purely a source of communication and information perhaps starting in Junior High or High School.

However, I believe that digital media can affect children and youth in positive ways, as Beckingham points out that digital media allows youth to have more of a voice than they would otherwise. Beckingham encourages a balance between the new innovations of digital media while incorporating old educational frameworks.

“This does not mean that we are uncritical of youth practices or that we believe that digital media necessarily hold the key to empowerment. Rather, we argue against technological determinism, stressing the need for balanced scholarship that recognize the importances of our current moment within the contest of existing structure and unfolding history. This means placing contemporary changes within a historical contest as well as working to highlight the diversity in the landscape of media and media uptake (ix).”

Here Beckingham stresses how essential it is for us to push for a perfect balance between digital media and other learning practices to enrich our youth. In the process we can learn what is going to work best for our adolescence during the rise and expansion of media. As future educators we must figure out a way to incorporate all these things…. eeeeek.