Robert Petrone

Linking Contemporary Research on Youth, Literacy, and Popular Culture With Literacy Teacher Education:

The aim of this article is to expand the dialogue about how contemporary scholarship on the intersections between youth, literacy, and popular culture might inform literacy teacher education. Specifically, this article is designed to (a) orient literacy teacher educators who may be somewhat unfamiliar with this particular line of scholarship to a few of its major concepts and K-12 classroom implications and (b) propose several ways this line of scholarship might open up possibilities for literacy teacher educators to help pre-service literacy teachers develop culturally responsive teaching practices. To address these goals, this article first provides an introduction to several common ways popular culture has been theorized. From this introduction, the article explains the following three concepts within contemporary scholarship that investigates youth engagement with popular culture: (a) popular culture as a site of identity formation for youth; (b) popular culture as a context for literacy development; and (c) popular culture as a vehicle for sociopolitical critique and action. In addition, this article illustrates pedagogical implications these concepts have for K-12 literacy education, including how literacy instructors adopt ethnographic stances toward youth engagement with popular culture to reposition youth and ascertain their popular culture funds of knowledge, bridge standard literacy curricula to students’ popular culture funds of knowledge, and develop literacy curricula to facilitate students’ sociopolitical critique and action. Finally, this article explores how this line of scholarship may open up spaces within literacy teacher education for K-12 pre-service literacy teachers to grapple with the politics of literacy pedagogy.

The Youth Lens: Analyzing Adolescence/ts in Literary Texts

Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship that re-conceptualizes adolescence as a cultural construct, this article introduces a Youth Lens. A Youth Lens comprises an approach to textual analysis that examines howideas about adolescence and youth get formed, circulated, critiqued, andrevised. Focused specifically on its application to young adult literature, agenre of writing that explicitly names it audience, this article explores howa Youth Lens provides a much needed critical approach to interpreting andteaching young adult literature within literacy education, especially given the problematic representations of youth in many of these literarytexts. Specifically, this article a) discusses the central assumptions thatgovern a Youth Lens; b) provides an explanation of the lens, includingpublished and new examples and guiding questions; c) presents an in-depthcase of how a Youth Lens illuminates new possibilities forunderstanding The Hunger Games; and, d) offers specific implications aYouth Lens has for the analysis of young adult and other literary texts,approaches to teaching young adult literature courses for pre-service literacy teachers, and secondary literacy pedagogy involving young adult literature and media texts.

Re-Positioning Youth in English Teacher Education

Abstract Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers’ thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can facilitate pre-service English teachers’ interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts so they might be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. The first focuses on teaching a Youth Lens in the context of a Young Adult Literature course, an approach that helps future teachers learn about adolescence as a construct and the linkages between this idea and English pedagogy. The second focuses on integrating youth into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices whereby they are “re-positioned” as experts and contributors to English teacher education. Together, these points of intervention provide ways to re-position youth systemically throughout English teacher education programs.