Re‐framing adolescent literacy research for new times: Studying youth as a resource

Abstract

In this paper I analyze various perspectives on adolescence, adolescent literacy, and youth culture to argue that the field of education has not attended adequately to the literacy learning and development of adolescents. Moreover, when researchers and policy makers do attend to adolescent or secondary school literacy, the focus of research or policy is typically on adolescents who struggle with mainstream literacy processes. Drawing from this analysis, 1 contend that if the field would turn its attention to youth and study how they learn increasingly complex literacy practices required in disciplinary discourse communities, how they reinvent literacies for unique contexts, and how they use literacy as a tool to navigate complex technologies and fragmented social worlds, then all literacy could be expanded. Adolescent literacy researchers cannot stop there, however. We must also continue to examine the contexts of secondary schooling, with a focus on the literacy demands made by different content areas, so that we can support students as they navigate the different discourse practices of their everyday lives, secondary schools, and life beyond formal schooling. The future of adolescent and secondary literacy research, I argue, is in research that examines the connections between the everyday discourses of adolescents and the academic discourses they navigate each day in school.