Scholarly Work - English
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/8827
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Item “Although Adolescence Need Not Be Violent…”: Preservice Teachers' Connections Between “Adolescence” and Literacy Curriculum(2010-02) Lewis, Mark A.; Petrone, RobertThis article reports the findings of a study that examined how and why a group of pre-service secondary literacy teachers conceptualized and created various curricular activities involving young adult literary texts as part of their work for a teacher education course on teaching literature. Specifically, this article examines the systems of reasoning about the concept of adolescence that undergirded and rationalized these pre-service literacy teachers' curricular activities. Excerpts of the pre-service teachers' rationales and sample activities are presented here to illustrate how these pre-service teachers perceived adolescence as primarily a time of identity formation, especially one fraught with danger, and literacy curriculum, particularly the study of young adult literary texts, as a vehicle to help their future students traverse this tumultuous time. In presenting these findings, this article argues for secondary literacy teachers and literacy teacher educators to rethink and complicate their normalized assumptions of adolescence and secondary students.Item The Youth Lens: Analyzing Adolescence/ts in Literary Texts(2015-02) Petrone, Robert; Sarigianides, Sophia Tatiana; Lewis, Mark A.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 how ideas about adolescence and youth get formed, circulated, critiqued, and revised. Focused specifically on its application to young adult literature, a genre of writing that explicitly names it audience, this article explores how a Youth Lens provides a much needed critical approach to interpreting and teaching young adult literature within literacy education, especially given the problematic representations of youth in many of these literary texts. Specifically, this article a) discusses the central assumptions that govern a Youth Lens; b) provides an explanation of the lens, including published and new examples and guiding questions; c) presents an in-depth case of how a Youth Lens illuminates new possibilities for understanding The Hunger Games; and, d) offers specific implications a Youth 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.