Adolescent Identity and Literacy

Group adolescent identity and literacy is a challenge.  While our topic is most interesting, the sheer broadness of it is also a challenge.  As a future teacher, I feel that it is important for us to research this topic and have some sort of understanding of how adolescents relate to literacy before we try and teach literacy.

My little sub-part of this topic focuses on identity.  I think identity plays a major role in how kids relate to literacy, different genres, and books in general.  Jane Kroger’s Identity Development during Adolescence was a great resource in the basic psychology of development (http://academic.udayton.edu/jackbauer/Readings%20595/Kroger.pdf) but it doesn’t necessarily have a great tie to literacy development.  For that, I turned to Bronwyn Williams and Elizabeth Moje.  Williams focuses more about the influence of social culture in identity and Moje has some great stuff about literacy in itself.

Some of the things I find really interesting is how social media plays into all of these ideas. Williams has a lot to say about different media tools and how they represent the individual, sometimes in a misleading way.  But it is definitely interesting to study since such widespread use of technology is a new thing that is affecting adolescents in a way not seen before.

Another part of our group project stems around our hatred of AR reading.  We have a few articles about why it is bad, not used properly, etc.  My fourteen year old brother thinks it exists just to torture him, and he may not be that far off.  I myself went through AR reading with a strong distaste for a system that allowed me to read Gone With The Wind in fourth grade and still required me to read books aimed for younger audiences for the next four years.  However, not all agree that AR is such a bad thing.  My mother, a special education teacher for K-3, loves AR and thinks it the best thing ever.  She uses it as a motivational tool and judges kids on words read rather than points, which I think is probably the best way to directly apply AR in the classroom.

Overall, our topic is vast and interesting and I have spent quite a few hours lost researching tangents and reading studies and making my brain work overtime.  But as a future teacher, it is important to learn the perspectives of our students in order to actually teach them things instead of talking to a blank wall.