Defining Adolescent Literacies

Culminating Statement: Adolescent Literacies as "A Matter of Design"

In my attempt to define adolescent literacies, I find myself leaning back into the ways

in which literacy remains keenly concerned with communication, sense-making, and

language, how we use it, and how we position ourselves within it -- albeit, engagements with

language that are not merely limited to reading and writing practices. My understandings of

adolescent literacies are aligned with the social semiotic theory of

multimodality, which guides the work of Kress and his colleagues (Kress, 1997; Kress & Van

Leeuwen, 1996; Lemke, 1989), and is "concerned primarily with communication in its widest

sense – visual, oral, gestural, linguistic, musical, kinesthetic, and digital. It is a theory that

attempts to explain how people play a central role in making meaning – how they use various

resources (signs) that are available to them in representing through different modes what they

wish to communicate to others" (p. 20). As I reflect on literacy, language, and adolescence, I

think about the ways in which these literacies shape and influence adolescents, how

adolescents engage with literacies, and how these multi-literacies manifest across adolescents'

diverse lifeworlds. Adolescents engage with multi-literacies across communication channels,

including but not limited to creative, visual, and virtual spaces-- and often, adolescents

themselves are agents in the art of producing, writing, creating, and remixing their own

literacies across various modalities and media. 

In "A Pedagogy of Multi-literacies: Designing Social Futures" (1996), the New

London Group examines meaning-making processes across various modalities. The authors

urge moving away from "traditional literacy pedagogy" by highlighting textual multiplicity:

when literacy is concerned with "language only", and "usually on a singular national form of
language... conceived as a stable system based on rules such as mastering sound-letter

correspondence...[this] translates into an authoritarian kind of pedagogy" (p. 64). I am in

accordance with the New London Group's framing of adolescents as designers of meaning,

since while language is a crucial part of literacy, the broad scope of literacy includes many

languages (including multiple Englishes), and various communication channels through

which adolescents make meaning. The six "design elements" of adolescent literacy include

"linguistic meaning, visual meaning, audio meaning, gestural meaning, spatial meaning, and

the multimodal patterns of meaning" (New London Group, 1996, p. 65). The question then

becomes not so much what literacy is, but how literacies are engaged with across these varied

spaces and places. 

I believe adolescent literacies are characterized by openness to meaning, avenues for

possibility, creativity, and potential. Defining the terms multi-modal and multi-

literacies will help anchor my claims that adolescent literacies hold liberatory potential.  As

the New London Group indicates, a pedagogy of multi-literacy "focuses on modes of

representation much broader than language alone" (New London Group, 1996, p. 64).

Semiotic activities, "including using language to produce or consume texts" are then treated

as "A Matter of Design," thus emphasizing "the fact that meaning-making is an active and

dynamic process, and not something governed by static rules" (p. 74). Taking these

definitions into account, multi-modality refers to "the interplay between different

representational modes, for instance, between images and written/spoken word. Multimodal

representations mediate the sociocultural ways in which these modes are combined in the

communication process" (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001, p. 20). Weaving these definitions

together, adolescent literacies emerge as dynamic, transformative, malleable, and interactive.

Additionally, these literacies also place adolescents at the center. 

 Therefore, it is important to define adolescence alongside literacy. Generally

speaking, adolescence tends to be understood as a time in a person's life, situated between the

ages of 12 and 18, when one attends secondary and high school. Adolescence is considered to

be an "in-between" and liminal life stage, where developmentally, one experiences many

changes (physical, emotional, social, intellectual), and where one is concerned with their self-

concept and identity, and how they fit in to their broader social groups and communities.

Adolescents may then "read" their worlds from these intersectional perspectives, as they view

their surroundings and make meaning across time, space, and place. 

Yagelski's "Writing as praxis" (2012) places youth writing and participation at the

center of adolescent literacies, and calls for educators to "teach writing in ways that give

students access to its transformative power; we [must] allow [students] to experience writing

as a way of making sense of themselves and the world around them" (p. 189). I believe that

for adolescents (and all of us, regardless of our age) literacy should allow us to engage with

our lives more deeply and more intentionally. Last but not least, my views on adolescent

literacies are that youth engage in transformative practice when they write-- on both

individual and collective fronts--  and their experiences of writing can lead to transformed

praxis, and to transformed worlds. 

References: 

Alvermann, D. E. (2009). Sociocultural constructions of adolescence and young people's

literacies. In L. Christenbury, R. Bomer, & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Handbook of

adolescent literacy research (pp. 14–28). New York: Guilford.

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social

futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.

Yagelski, R. P. (2012). Writing as praxis. English Education, 44(2), 190. (Yagelski also

references Freire). 

Critical Incidents

1. The Relationships Between Language and Voice

~Voice is what makes language living ~ Voice breathes life into language~

During our class discussions about power, language, and discourse, what emerged for me was

the differences between language and voice, and the relationships that surface between both.

According to Amy Tan in "Mother Tongue" (1999), "I cannot give you much more than

personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others. I am a

writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated

by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of

language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple

truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with"
(Tan, 1999). As evident in this passage, Tan's creative non-fiction piece engages with the

ways in which power dynamics shape and influence relationships to language, and she

implicitly poses the question: who holds the power to define? Voice emerges through

language, and there is not merely one voice within language-- there are many. The presence

of many Englishes reveals the divergences, multiplicities, and constellations that reconfigure

language(s) within families and across communities, harkening back to D. E. Kirkland’s

claim in "English(es) in urban contexts" (2010) that the ‘borders’ between and around the

“linguistic mainstream” are nexus points in which language is ‘made over.’ By pushing

against the linguistic ‘mainstream’, we can lean into communal practices in which language

gets 'made over' instead of 'enforced or controlled' (p. 301). Through voice, language and

experience gets 'made over' and contributes to the dynamism associated with multi-literacies.

Engaging with these critical texts and discussions lead me to think about what it means

to love language, and to give voice to language - what it means to let our words be alive and

living, with the potential to grow and be 'made over' across different contexts.  

2. How do we "Story" Ourselves? 

In my inquiries throughout the semester, I considered what it means to "story" the

self.  According to Murray in "All Writing is Autobiography" (1997), "when we talk about

our own language, we allow students their own language" (p. 67). Murray describes an

instance where he asks one of his colleagues: "What is autobiographical in this poem?" And

his colleague responses, "Your thinking style, your voice" (p. 67). I think humans have an

intense "need" for stories - we fashion our lives around stories, seek out overarching

narratives, purpose, and meaning in what we do, and why we feel. Stories help us feel like we

matter - to ourselves and to each other. Stories, although often communicated through
language, do not require language, or even closure. Jamaica Kincaid's verse-poem "Girl" is a

prime example of a moment captured in time and place. In the verse-poem, the mother's

advice to her daughter heavily emphasizes traditional gender roles; as I think about how we

"story" ourselves, I also consider what it means to stand on the outskirts, or attempt to inhabit

someone else's story for a brief moment within the space of a poem - and what kinds of

avenues for meaning emerge as we consider what it means to fashion "story" from a

particular place in time. 

In Week 10, we created multi-modal representations of Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"

poem in groups. Each group created their own 3-D model of the poem (my group built a table

out of construction paper, traditionally set with buttons as dinner plates) to embody some of

the main themes in Kincaid's poem. Through our "multi-modal" representations, we were

able to embody metaphors to attempt to capture the poem's meaning; in my group's case,

setting the table was a material representation of etiquette and social norms.  

Last but not least, I found Villegas' framework particularly useful when considering

the relationships between language and voice, and what it means to "story" ourselves within

and around these intersectional components of identity and selfhood. Each of these

components also relate to Kincaid's "Girl:" 

1. language and power

2. language and race

3. language and space

 Each of these three elements situates language socio-politically, while advocating for

local knowledge in order to better understand language ideologies. By delving deeper into

how language is constructed and by considering one's unique relationship to language(s), we

can push against standardization, colonial and imperialist legacies. As I wrote in my

discussion for Week 4, the oppressor will try to “fit” you into a box. The oppressor will try to

tell you the way you speak your language is "wrong" or "incorrect" according to a standard

system; but this is not where language lives, this is not where language is experienced.  

References:

Kirkland, D. E. (2010). English(es) in urban contexts: Politics, pluralism, and

possibilities. English Education, 42(3), 293–306.

Murray, D. M. (1997). All writing is autobiography. College Composition and

Communication, 42(1), 66–74.

Villegas, K., Yin, P., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2021). Interrogating Languaging Through

Power, Race, and Space in the Schooling of Translingual Student Populations.

In Handbook of Urban Education (2nd ed.). Routledge.