Abstract
Despite decades of research on social contexts and cultural practices, contemporary literacy education policies often frame the teaching of literacy skills—and especially adolescent literacy skills necessary for college and career success—as if they can be understood separate from the purposes, audience, and contexts in which they are made meaningful. Culture, context, and social interaction play roles in understanding young people’s literacy skill development and learning. The field has learned from studies of youth culture that emphasize the role of reading, writing, composing, and communicating with multiple media. Taken together, these varied studies imply how we might better engage young people; help them understand the relevance of learning to read, write, compose, and communicate with proficiency; and prepare them to build their own social futures.
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Developing youth literacy skills requires understanding and working from their social contexts and cultural practices.
Key Points
Youth culture, context, and social interaction help understanding their literacy skill development and learning.
New literacy studies focus on connecting with others in a complicated world.
Digital youth cultural studies can inform education.
Youth can lead change, using their cultural practices for social action.
Educators can support youth in navigating literacies, cultures, and learning.
Educators of youth need to be ever more vigilant about helping young people sustain some differences, even as they learn to work across difference.
Introduction
We approach literacy as a set of socially organized practices which make use of a symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it. Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use.
As Scribner and Cole documented in their landmark study, literacy skill can never be separated from the contexts and the social practices in which the skills are used. Echoed by a number of scholars (Graff, 1987; Heath, 1983; Street, 1984), this line of research seemed to lay to rest claims about literacy as autonomous skills, documenting in a range of ways that literacy activity is always domain specific and imbued with power and capital.
And yet, despite decades of research on the relationship among literacy practice, social contexts, and cultural practices, contemporary literacy education policies continue to frame the teaching of literacy skills—and especially adolescent literacy skills necessary for college and career success—as if they can be understood separately from the purposes, audience, and contexts in which they are made meaningful. This review reminds readers of the role that culture, context, and social interaction play in understanding the literacy skill development and learning of young people; it highlights what the field has learned from studies of youth culture that emphasize the role of reading, writing, composing, and communicating with multiple media. Taken together, these varied studies offer implications for how educators might better engage young people; help them understand the relevance of learning to read, write, compose, and communicate with proficiency; and prepare them to build their own social futures.
A Few Disclaimers About the Study of Youth Literacies and Cultures
The word culture included in the title restricts the review to theories that position youth studies as studies of cultures (or subcultures), rather than as phases of physiological or cognitive change. As a consequence, the review draws mainly from sociological, anthropological, and social psychological theories. Cognitive psychological theories of youth development are not analyzed, except insofar as cultural theorists drew from either research or folk theories regarding the motivations for youth practices. (E.g., some explanations posit “deviant” youth behaviors as resulting from pubertal changes, such as popular claims about youth acting wild because of “raging hormones” or experiencing “storm and stress”; see Hall, 1904)
Related to this point is a second disclaimer: I question the singularity (homogeneity) implied by the words literacy and culture, which suggests a shared set of literacy practices by virtue of being of a particular age. The construct of youth or adolescence as a defined, easily marked time period, age, or phase of development is itself contested (Lesko, 2001). Even demarcating when youth/adolescence starts and stops is challenging, with some theorists including everyone between the ages of 8 and 25 years, and others carving those age bands up into early, middle, and late adolescence, together with “emerging adulthood” (Arnett, 2002).
Some aspects of youth bind people between the ages of 8 and 25 years together. One is the repeated demand on youth by adults to take responsibility for themselves while being constrained in ways they had not been as children (see Eccles, Midgley, et al., 1993; Eccles, Wigfield, et al., 1993, on the developmental mismatch of middle schools). This well-documented mismatch may be responsible for the behaviors and practices ascribed to youth, rather than some imagined bond among youth.
Also note that the people who study youth cultures are not themselves members (except in participatory action research, which, if published, is almost always at least vetted by adults, although changing access to social media is allowing for new possibilities on the publishing horizon). Just as when one reads research on women conducted by men, studies of one racial group conducted by a member of another, or analyses of elementary school teachers conducted by researchers who do not teach in elementary school classrooms, scholarship on youth by adults should be read with a critical eye.
One might argue that all adults have once been youth, but the problem with that logic is twofold. First, memory can be an untrustworthy research partner. What may seem to be a completely different practice to the adult who has been long away from such practices may be more familiar than any adult scholar would like to admit. Second, because youth come in many colors, classes, and genders and hail from different social and geographic spaces, what the 16-year-old under study may do or say to a 45-year-old researchers may appear to the adult scholar to be a function of age, when the practice may actually be a function of demographic characteristics that the researcher does not understand. Some of these issues haunt the past traditions of research and theory on youth cultures, so such research must be understood in light of the blinders that many of these theorists likely wear.
Despite these issues, I review youth literacy and cultural theories, explaining why scholars saw fit—and continue to see fit—to coin and join the phrases, together with some challenges to the categories. The review is relevant precisely because teachers, education policy makers, and advertisers believe that youth culture exists. However, to avoid suggesting that a unified youth culture is even a remote possibility, this text refers to youth cultures. Some exemplars of youth cultural research advance complex understandings of youth literacy and cultural theory in education. Space does not permit a systematic review of all theory and research on youth literacies and cultures. Instead, this article reviews research with policy implications for intervening on youth literacy development and learning.
Youth Literacy and Culture: A Brief Review of the Literature
New Literacy Studies: Connecting With Others in a Complicated World
Early research on youth culture—and to a lesser extent on youth cultural literacies—tended to view youth as members of troubled, resistant, or deviant subcultures (cf. Bennett & Khan-Harris, 2004; Hebdige, 1979; Willis, 1977). Notably, these subcultural groups were, at least in early days, almost always composed of White male youth. Social class and age were the main explanations accounting for subcultural practices; race, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status were largely ignored (Huq, 2006).
Late 20th-century changes in communication and information practices have shifted how scholars think about youth cultures and literacy. Young people can access information more easily than in the past; often, young people conduct those searches because they are major users of social media and technology tools (Ito et al., 2009). In addition to accessing information, young people can also access each other, and they can speak easily to people who look and talk like them, reducing the sense of isolation that many marginalized youth feel, but potentially also leading youth—and those who study them—to search for stable identities in what often feels like an unstable, shifting world (Bennett, 2007).
Young people also can now speak with people who look and talk in different ways from them, creating both greater awareness of diversity and greater instability within the taken-for-granted norms of many of their social groups. These changes demand that scholars resist the idea that identities are singularly ethnic, racial, gendered, or cultural (Bhabha, 1994). Instead, scholars study how youth use language and literacy skills to compose multiple, shifting identities (Gutierrez, 2008) and to explore how their raced, classed, gendered, and sexual identities intersect with shifting locations (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2013). These complexities may also produce fragmented senses of self that motivate youth to seek connections with others just like them.
Contemporary youth literacy and cultural studies document young people representing themselves as members of a range of groups, reading and writing a range of texts, and using social media to breakdown stereotypes (e.g., Bennett & Khan-Harris, 2004; Huq, 2006; Lam, 2009; Paris, 2009; van Helden, 2012). For example, young gay men use digital popular cultural texts to learn new information, forge relationships, and craft social identities that transcend their physical locations and allow for new social futures (van Helden, 2012). In the United States, a Chinese male youth used the Internet to correspond with a transnational group of youth both to practice his developing English language skills and to “design a self” (Lam, 2009). This young man’s experimentation with multiple forms of English, including “adolescent Internet talk” (Lam, 2009, p. 1206), self-help and identity discourses, and religious discourse, afforded him new possibilities in his everyday physical social interactions in his school.
Another line of work in youth literacy and cultural studies situates youth not as resistant or struggling for community, but as meaning makers who actively seek social connections through their cultural practices, including their literacy practices (Fiske, 1989; Gustavson, 2007; Jenkins, 2006; Kirkland & Jackson, 2009; Lewis & Fabos, 2005; Willis, Jones, Canaan, & Hurd, 1990). Youth who identified as connected to street gangs (Moje, 2000), for example, were motivated by the desire to have a voice in a social—and school—world that did not seem to hear or see them. The youth all identified as low-income, youth of color—and some as recent immigrants to the United States—used what they called “gangsta” literacy practices (e.g., elaborate and artistic “tags” made on walls, notebooks, and even bodies), to, in the words of one young woman, “be part of the story.” In other words, they did not engage in gang practices to be “deviant” or to “resist,” but rather to give meaning to their daily lives and to connect themselves to other people in a space where they felt often marginalized. Youth engage in particular practices to make meaning, experience pleasure, and feel fulfilled, rather than to resist, even when those youth are members of marginalized groups. Equally important, these young people demonstrated both linguistic skill and metalinguistic awareness, when they engaged with the complex texts they valued, but they appeared to be struggling readers and writers in school. How might their out-of-school literacy skills be leveraged for in-school learning if teachers and school leaders could see beyond their concerns about the domains in which the skills are practiced (e.g., gangs or other peer groups) and use these skills to help youth navigate multiple domains, including the disciplinary domains of schooling (cf. Moje, Overby, Tysvaer, & Morris, 2008)?
Drawing From the Digital: How Digital Youth Cultural Studies Inform Education
Understanding the digital literacy practices of youth cultural groups has much to offer the next generation of education policy. Learning from game designs, social media, and Internet-based writing networks that captivate youth attention can inform designs for school-based learning environment and curricula that might be equally captivating (e.g., Black, 2008; Buckingham, 2003; Ito et al., 2009; Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009; Leander & Lovvorn, 2006; Steinkuehler, Black, & Clinton, 2005).
To encourage such translation, Gee (2007) outlined 36 design principles of computer games that support the gamer’s independent (at least independent from the game designer) learning. By using principles documented in education research about how people learn (Bransford, 2000), videogame designers seem able not only to draw youth into their games but also to keep them playing—by ensuring that youth have access to just-in-time information that allows them to move to new game levels. Unlike schools that often test youth, without adequate supports to enable deep learning, games allow youth to use knowledge in the moment (Squire, 2008). This design motivates engagement, while advancing skill (cf. Barron, Gomez, Pinkard, & Martin, 2014; Gee, 2007). The question, of course, is how school learning environments might build on similar principles.
Drawing from research on the classroom use of digital tools offers three overarching aspects of “new literacies” critical to youth engagement: agency, performativity, and circulation (Lewis, 2008). Games, social media, and other digital tools offer opportunities for people to act as agents in their own learning. Because students can easily access information and the just-in-time knowledge, they feel a sense of power and agency over their learning.
Similarly, schools can use these tools to offer meaningful opportunities to perform aspects of self, both present self and imagined future selves. For example, young people claimed (or “authored”) selves that represented their ethnic and cultural identities in meaningful ways (Vasudevan, Schultz, & Bateman, 2010). These tools allow youth to try on identities, at times, in dangerous ways, but more often than not, in ways that empower the youth to experience and examine what such an identity would afford (Lam, 2009; cf. Ito, et al., 2009; Lewis & Fabos, 2005; Peppler & Kafai, 2007).
Finally, digital social tools are just that—social. And as such, they are in constant circulation (Lewis, 2008). Unlike the relatively cumbersome products of pen on paper, these tools move with lightning speed not only across the room but also across the globe. The circulatory power of these tools brings both potential and problem. Potential can be observed in the power of such media tools to make change even at a national level (Bruce, 2003), but the problematic is also easily evident: Once unleashed, one’s self- and other-representations cannot be recalled. Moreover, youth might turn inward and fail to engage deeply with any given topic or social issue (Lewis, 2008).
Still, the power of circulation makes these tools engaging and exciting for youth and thus advances their power. Possibly (e.g., Leander, 2007; Leu, Leu, & Coiro, 2004) classroom practice can turn into spaces for using such agency, performativity, and circulation in productive ways to advance student learning. Those possibilities, however, remain just that without the necessary resources of digital tools, open access, and time. Despite claims that classrooms are “wired,” students and teachers often have variable access to the benefit of that wiring (Leander, 2007), due both to lack of tools and to teachers’ and district officials’ concerns whether students will engage with others when digital resources are made available.
Youth Leading Change: Using Youth Cultural Practices for Social Action
Attention to youth practices with social media—both electronic and paper—can help engage youth in positive social action for change (e.g., Bitz, 2008; Bruce, 2003; Bruce & Bishop, 2006; Heath & Smyth, 1999). Consider the Arab spring of 2012 for evidence of social movements’ power and of youths’ role in those movements. The work in this area draws energy from such movements even as it examines the ways that youth need support in developing sophisticated analytic and communicative practices to advance equitable social change. In contrast to emphasizing translation to classroom practices for advancing student learning, these projects draw from what scholars have learned about youth cultures to entice youth into projects designed to advance social change. The most successful youth activism programs engaged adults with youth in joint work, rather than adults either making all decisions for youth or leaving youth completely to their own decisions (cf. Heath & McLaughlin, 1993; Kirshner, 2008).
Bruce and Bishop (2006) used youth passions for social media and new literacies to engage them in community inquiry that redressed the problematics of social media engagements (e.g., the potential for solipsism or lack of deep learning). Youth are able to not only make change but also learn new ways to think about their worlds and themselves: “When we speak about literacy, we need to do so with the view of the world we hope to inhabit” (Bruce & Bishop, 2006, p. 735).
Those interested both in studying youth literacy cultures and in making policy to shape youth literacy learning must consider the worlds that youth hope to inhabit. What are the futures they see for themselves? What school activities and experiences can best provide youth with both reasons and skills to help them shape their own social futures (van Helden, 2012)? Such questions suggest that policies about youth would be best informed with input from youth themselves.
Supporting Youth in Navigating and Sustaining Literacies, Cultures, and Learning
Finally, education policies should focus on helping teachers help youth to navigate across multiple cultures, disciplinary domains, or groups (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014; Moje, 2013). Youth use language and literacy to navigate in their various cultural relationships. Schooling should help them learn the language skills and practices necessary to engage with and move across powerful groups, relationships, and spaces (cf. Gutierrez, 2008; Lee, 2007; Moje et al., 2008). Similarly, a pedagogy of “multiliteracies” posits that developing “metadiscursive awareness,” or the ability to recognize and analyze the differences in discourse across domains, should be the hallmark of a 21st-century education (New London Group, 1996).
Rather than seeking a stable state of hybridity, many youth, by virtue of their social media relationships, know that even the stability of hybridity is unlikely. Instead, youth cultures are often about learning to navigate, talk, read, write, dance, play, and work with people from vastly different backgrounds. Youth use literacies to build new networks—cultures—of play and possibility (Ito et al., 2009). If schools are to engage youth, then education policy needs to tap into the possibilities that youth have for connecting across difference and for building new social futures.
Possibilities for Education Policy
What might these various findings mean for education policy related to youth literacy learning and development? First, the trend toward trying to “monoculturate” youth is dangerous. Instead, efforts to build pedagogical practices and school structures should sustain young people’s cultural identities, even as they help them navigate different practices, discourses, and norms (Paris, 2009; Moje, 2013). Educators of youth need to be ever more vigilant about helping young people maintain meaningful difference, even as they learn to work across difference. “Cosmopolitanism” is also relevant to policy, particularly in regard to the need to provide opportunities for youth to write to understand each other, rather than to persuade, to prepare them for a cosmopolitan world where the greatest challenge to society may be learning to work across difference (Hull & Stornaiolou, 2013).
Indeed, youth may need more opportunity than ever to practice informed interactions across disciplinary and other school-based boundaries. They need opportunities to use sophisticated digital tools that connect them to people and problems they care about, but they also need to learn how to use those tools effectively. They need to learn multiple languages and discourses to help them as they interact with people with different backgrounds, interests, and commitments around the world.
To do these things, youth (and their teachers) need time in school for long-term, sustained engagements with real-world problems to motivate reading and writing for real purposes. In effect, children and youth need to apprentice to the ways of reading and valued in college and career domains. Without the time they need to develop the language and literacy skills and practices valued in a range of domains, most youth will struggle to find success in college, career, and life. Young people with adequate home and community resources begin these apprenticeships early in life and have many opportunities out of school to hone their skills (e.g., afterschool and summer enrichment experiences). The children of working poor and impoverished families have fewer such opportunities. Thus, absent policies that make these resources available to all youth, schools are the only place for this kind of apprenticeship.
In addition, youth need writing instruction that encourages them to understand as well as to argue, together with practice in connecting what they read to their lives and the lives of others, to solve problems or to engage in inquiry. In short, youth need to read and write with purpose in school, if we hope to keep them reading, writing, and learning. The many opportunities that youth have to engage with and learn from the world outside of school—coupled with what some youth see as shrinking opportunities for them to be successful inside school—suggest that we need to find ways to restructure schools to become engaging spaces where youth can learn literacy with and from each other and with others literally around the world.
Some Limits of the Research for Producing Education Policy
Several points are worth noting here as policy makers consider what to do with these findings. First, literacy and cultural studies rarely address working poor youth, not poor and not rich, but those just getting by. Researchers and policy makers interested in the impact of youth culture on students’ literacy learning should consider attending to such groups because this demographic increasingly represents the bulk of young people in U.S. society (Duncan & Murnane, 2011).
More generally, studies of the sophistication and power of digital tool use by do not always explicitly attend to the level of social and economic privilege of the youth they study. As such, these studies risk unintentionally portraying such youth as representative of all youth, suggesting that all youth are all wired, all the time. More privileged youth are brought together by access to powerful digital tools that allow them to use sophisticated social media and often to make the cultures that they and others consume (e.g., playing massively multiplayer games, participating in “maker spaces,” editing and posting fanfiction video). Despite exceptions (e.g., Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009), accounts of power and sophistication are generally offered from youth of privilege, not because they are more skilled, but because they have greater opportunity to demonstrate complex skills. For example, the digital and cultural divide experienced by young people in a study of more than 1,000 Latino/a youth was about more than access to hardware or even software; it was a divide in quality of access, as much as it was quantity, and it resulted in differential access to knowledge, discourse, and power (Moje et al., 2008). To avoid widening the divide, education policies should account for differences in access to high-quality tools and software. Moreover, policy makers need to be aware that even in “wired schools,” adults’ fears about the circulation of information, identities, and desires can limit the possibilities of the digital for youth (Leander, 2007).
Second, analyses of youth as makers of youth cultures tend to present youth cultural activity as sophisticated, generative, and endlessly adaptive. In contrast, cultural studies of poor youth of color show that these youth, although creative and engaged, are not only left out of the power circles engendered by access to sophisticated media and literacy tools but are also actively kept from those circles.
Finally, regardless of where these youth sit on the socioeconomic and power scale, many studies reveal that they are disaffected from schooling and, for many, from the social world that has denied them opportunity to learn and thrive (Willis, 2003). Apropos of these concerns and the growing income inequality in the United States (Duncan & Murnane, 2011), youth literacy education policy needs to attend to how youth in this global and continually shifting world develop the agency that comes with the ability to navigate language and culture, even as youth engage in the powerful linguistic and cultural values and practices of the groups to which they belong.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.