Book Review: Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World

Journal of Literacy Research, Winter 2004/2005 by Brozo, William G

Book Review: Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World

Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World. Donna Alvermann, Editor, 2002. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, Inc. (275 Seventh Avenue, 28th Floor, New York, NY 10001), Softcover. 235 pages.

Teaching Youth Media: A Critical Guide to Literacy, Video Production, and Social Change. Steven Goodman, 2003. New York: Teachers College Press (1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027), Softcover. 144 pages.

It is a distinctly postmodern impulse to trouble accepted notions about what it means to be a reader and writer. And in so doing, the authors and contributors of the two volumes under review demonstrate just how complex the business of literacy teaching and learning really is. As the theories and contexts for our work have expanded well beyond understandings of reading and writing processes, we have found it intellectually exciting and socially and politically honest to foreground what has heretofore been left in the shadows, namely that any act of literacy is rife with issues of history, culture, class, politics, and identity. If reading is fundamentally a process of reading the world then a multitude of semiotic, audio, visual, and electronic data streams need to be accounted for in our studies of literacy. A preservice teacher presented in the Alvermann volume puts it this way: "If you are deriving a message from it, you are reading it" (p. 73).

In Alvermann, we are asked to rethink the authority of the printed word as an insidious tool of marginalization (King & O'Brien). At the same time, we are urged to expand our view of literacy to include such practices as Knobel and Lankshear's scenariating (asking "what if" questions in the process of imagining new possible futures) and culture jamming (using digital technologies to alter and spoof mainstream dominant culture) as well as Jim Gee's portfolio people and shape-shifting (millennial youth creating the "right" profiles for elite positions in schools and society).

More than ever before, we live in, as one contributor (O'Brien, 2001) coins it, a "mediasphere," a world saturated by inescapable, ever-evolving, and competing media that both flow through us and are altered and created by us. According to the authors of these books and chapters, adolescents as engaged participants in the mediasphere create forms of discourse that are neither appreciated nor acknowledged in most traditional school settings. Instead, schools cling to the primacy of print literacy, which may not be meeting the critical needs of youth in the mediasphere today or serving them well in the attention economy of the future (Lankshear & Knobel).

In The Skin That We Speak (Delpit & Dowdy, 2002), Joanne Kilgour Dowdy's admonishment that the schism between "master discourse and the language of personal expression" (2002, p. 4) be eradicated, though in reference to colonized societies and colonized individuals, strikes me as highly analogous to a prominent theme in Alvermann. Taken together, the Alvermann chapters foster a sense that the semiotic discourse worlds most teens inhabit offer a "language of intimacy" (Dowdy, 2002, p. 4) invalidated in the public sphere of schools and classrooms. Formal education is the setting where youths' language-digital, graphic, aural-is too often judged wrong. And from the sensible advice that the language repertoires of children be expanded while "at the same time maintaining their connection to their mother tongue" (Delpit & Dowdy, 2002, p. xxii), it follows that adolescents steeped and competent in digital literacies be encouraged to demonstrate their facility with these media in school for understanding and critical reworking of class topics.

The authors and contributors of both books are univocal in their call for exploiting the multiple literacy competencies adolescents bring to school. These literacies include the ability to (a) communicate through digital means, such as e-mail and instant messaging; (b) create hypertext documents; (c) interpret and think critically about music CDs, video/computer games, web sites, and videos; (d) construct web pages and e-zines; and (e) engage in identity construction using digital technologies. Allan Luke (in Alvermann) asserts that in most school settings with traditional reading and language arts schemes little room is made for demonstrations of students' semiotic competencies because traditional print literacy is assumed to be a necessary prerequisite. In Alvermann, the case is made for valuing students' out-of-school literacies in order for teachers to learn from their students and help them fulfill their goals in the global reach of our digital world (Hinchman & Lalik; Young, Dillon, & Moje). Goodman, in his book, offers an alternative reason: "Unlike so many of their other experiences at home and at school, which [end] in disappointment and failure," their video production experiences "yielded tangible evidence that they can succeed" (p. 99).

The omnipresence of media in the lives of youth is enough to warrant the need for developing in them what the contributors of these two volumes characterize as critical media literacy. Imbuing teens with a language of critique for interrogating their worlds can be accomplished best when they are allowed to express through new media and multiliteracies their understandings of how political, socioeconomic, and market forces impinge on their lives. The projects that emerge from Goodman's Educational Video Center well represent how critical literacy might be achieved in the process of video documentary production. For example, he describes how a group of high school students created a documentary they called Young Gunz, about a pervasive problem of gun violence in their community. Using oral histories, self portraits, neighborhood informants, and local interpreters, the students researched the topic, then conducted shoots and edited tape of victims, perpetrators, grassroots organizations working for social change, community leaders, and themselves. Goodman says of this process: