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Playing and resisting: Rethinking young people's reading cultures
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In this paper I will argue that while young adult readers may often be represented through ‘othering’ discourses that see them as ‘passive’, ‘uncritical’ consumers of ‘low-brow’, ‘throw-away’ texts, the realities of their reading lives are in fact more subtle, complex and dynamic. The paper explores the discourses about reading, identity and gender that emerged through discussions with groups of young adults, aged between 16 and 19, about their reading habits and practices. These discussions took place as part of a PhD research study of reading and reader identity in the context of further education in the Black Country in the West Midlands. Through these discussions the young adults offered insights into their reading cultures and the ‘functionality’ of their reading practices that contest the kinds of ‘distinction[s]’ that tend to situate them as the defining other to more ‘worthy’ or ‘valuable’ reading cultures and practices. While I will resist the urge to claim that this paper represents the cultures of young adult readers in any real or totalising sense I challenge the kinds of dominant, reductive representations that serve to fix and demonise this group and begin to draw a space within which playfulness and resistance are alternatively offered as ways of being for these readers.
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... However, some research finds that adolescents are now spending more time reading for leisure than they have in any other generation (Johnsson-Smaragdi & Jö nsson, 2006). Even minority youth, who have historically received attention due to their poor literacy rates, are reading more for leisure than ever before (Kendall, 2008). In fact, 51 per cent of black youth between the ages of 16 and 19 reported reading fiction for pleasure on a daily basis and 61 per cent reported daily reading magazines (Kendall, 2008). ...
... Even minority youth, who have historically received attention due to their poor literacy rates, are reading more for leisure than ever before (Kendall, 2008). In fact, 51 per cent of black youth between the ages of 16 and 19 reported reading fiction for pleasure on a daily basis and 61 per cent reported daily reading magazines (Kendall, 2008). Literature is especially important for adolescent females. ...
Adolescents' exposure to violence in the media has been associated with increases in aggressive thoughts and behaviors. While violent content has been studied extensively in other media, aggression portrayed in literature has not been assessed in detail. Given the continued popularity of reading among adolescents and the potential impact of content on cognitions and behaviors, this study aims to increase knowledge in this understudied area. Aggressive behavior was coded in forty bestselling adolescent novels on The New York Times Best-Sellers List (time span June–July 2008). Results revealed that adolescents are exposed to a significant number of aggressive acts while reading novels. Relational and verbal forms of aggression were more frequent than physical forms. Most aggression was portrayed as having no consequences. Thus, books represent one potentially overlooked source of exposure to aggressive content. Content guides on books are discussed.
... The influence that places have on the quality and pleasure of their reading experiences can be brought about by imaginative literature. It is this rootedness of reading in the literary life-worlds of children that should be further explored (Kendall, 2008;Robison, 2011). ...
... Как отмечает А. Кендалл, существует стереотип, согласно которому молодёжь зачастую рассматривается как пассивный, некритичный потребитель «низкопробных» текстов, который редко читает ради удовольствия и предпочитает журналы и телевидение книгам. На самом деле реальность читательской жизни молодых людей более тонкая, сложная и динамичная [7]. Исследование данной реальности представляет особый интерес для дальнейшего моделирования и прогнозирования динамики различных сфер жизнедеятельности общества, в том числе сферы транслирования духовных и нравственных ценностей и ориентиров. ...
Modern social processes (globalization, urbanization, digitalization, succession of generations and others) actualize public and scientific attention to students’ reading culture, reading practices and their various aspects (gender, social, economic, and others). The issue of culture of reading, reading practices, their features and structure is a topical and relatively under-developed topic of interdisciplinary analysis. These phenomena are considered in sociology within the framework of some concepts: as a separate type of practice in the process of personal literacy formation, through the connection of cultural heritage and social class, through the analysis of subjective and existential meanings of the reading experience, and others. It is interesting to study the reading practices of students due to the specificity of the subject-object role of this social group in the process of cultural intergenerational continuity. The article highlights the results of an empirical study conducted among students of Moscow universities. Two types of students’ attitudes to works of fiction are revealed: pragmatic and value-reflective. The characteristics of these two groups are given, compared with other indicators (love of reading, reading as pleasure, volume of reading, genres of fiction, and others). The main conclusions and results presented in the publication will be of interest to teachers, scientists, representatives of state and public organizations and specifically to students.
... These authors discovered that boys preferred to read for school success while girls would prefer to read for pleasure and entertainment during their leisure hours. Similarly, Kendall (2008) and McGeown et al. (2015) found that girls surpass boys in reading engagements with magazines or comics. On the other hand, boys enjoyed reading non-fiction while girls enjoyed reading fiction books (McGeown et al., 2015). ...
The research evaluated among secondary school students the time spent in reading and the reading materials preferred. The purpose for which they read was also identified. A cross-sectional survey design was adopted which focused on public secondary schools of Osun State, Southwest, Nigeria. A multistage random sampling technique was used to select 1101 senior secondary school students from 12 public schools covering the 6 educational zones of Osun State. A 20 item Reading Habit Scale was used. The questionnaire was administered with the aid of a research assistant and retrieved immediately from the volunteers after completion. One thousand and seventy-nine copies of the questionnaire were analyzed, 43% of the respondents were boys while 57% were girls. Only 18.6% of the respondents were daily long-time readers (>1 to 6 hours per day) which comprised 17% of the boys and 20% of the girls. Boys more than girls read past questions and solutions while girls more than boys read textbooks and subject teachers note. Boys (98%) more than girls (97%) indicated they read in order to get better grades in tests and examinations. Conversely, girls more than the boys read for a better understanding of topics taught by the teacher and for pleasure (84:76%). A statistically significant gender difference exists with respect to “reading for pleasure” (x=8.92, p=0.003). Most of the students have poor reading habits with respect to daily reading time. Girls were more daily long-time readers and also read for pleasure.
... For such reasons, researchers are keen to identify the types of texts students choose to read beyond the school context in order to draw implications for mandated reading text selection. This is because mandated reading such as lists of texts selected for the study of literature, may often be seen as an imposition (Kendall, 2008) or a hindrance in the promotion of reading enjoyment (Pflaum and Bishop, 2004). This contrast between reading for pleasure and mandated reading in school, however, is a false dichotomy. ...
This article is based on the premise that mandated reading in literature classrooms may be perceived as an imposition and disliked by students. Attempts to address that scenario have suggested that text selection should be given more consideration to promote reading engagement, particularly by choosing texts which are familiar to the lifeworlds of students. Aside from ideas of familiarity and student preferences in reading, this article argues that text selection could also take into account text potentialities, as proposed by Louise Rosenblatt, from which three aspects are discernible; potentiality for participation, potentiality for a sustained reading experience, and potentiality for an enjoyable reading experience. These aspects of potentiality are illustrated and discussed through the literature classroom experiences of two Malaysian pre‐university English literature students. This article contends that ideas of text potentiality help us interpret students' responses to mandated texts and informs discussion among curriculum constructors and teachers about text selection in the literature classroom.
In our experience, education students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and those becoming and/or developing as teachers in education settings, often struggle to see the value of theory. Whilst this might be partly a product of political changes to education, it can also be attributed to a lack of options about how to put theory to work as an active strategy for influencing thinking and practice. We hope this book offers some possibilities.
This book takes its title from Zizek’s call to ‘do theory’ (see Butler, 2006) on the ‘examined life’. Education students will be at the centre of the process of making clear why theory is important and how it can be used, firstly to make arguments about educational debates more convincing, and secondly to bring more critical charge to the practice of teaching.
Zizek is also well known for using film and other popular culture texts as examples of how theoretical ideas play out in our everyday lives. This book is different to other publications for students of education and emerging teachers because we use media and pop culture texts in every chapter to help us explore the issues and debates around education. We do this in two ways – 1) by looking at the direct representation of education in popular culture and 2) by looking at how ‘ideology’ in media and pop culture relates to ideas about education.
This study examines women???s engagements with popular romance fiction. Framing genres as sites of participation, it explores the digital, social, and literate practices women enact as they participate with and actively shape the popular romance genre. Popular romance reading is a common literacy practice for adolescent and adult women in North America. Thus far, the appeal of romance reading has been largely understood through a model of mass production and consumption, and largely explained as a solitary literacy practice whereby women use romance novels to escape to a fantasy love story. Drawing from interviews and book discussions with romance readers, interviews with romance authors, and analyses of four genre-sponsored websites, this study suggests instead that some women engage with popular romance fiction in order to connect to, as well as escape from, their social worlds. It demonstrates that women???s talk and writing about popular romance allow them to co-construct the genre, demonstrate readerly and writerly expertise, and engage in collective and civic action. It also illustrates that women???s affective and escapist reading practices produce a range of transformative, critical, and genre-specific knowledges. Drawing from rhetorical genre theory, feminist theory, and ethnographic methods, this study shifts the focus away from romance reading as a solitary and single literacy practice to romance genre participation as comprised of varied digital, social, and literate practices. By examining a specific genre in this way, this study aims to help composition scholars draw connections between academic and everyday literacies and encourage students to explore their own subjectivities and expertise within familiar genres as they learn to participate in new ones.
This provocative text considers the state of media and cultural studies today after the demolition of the traditional media paradigm, and engages with the new, active consumer culture.
Research on reading in the lifelong-learning sector has tended to focus on the attitudes, habits and practices of the recipients of further education (FE), or the practices of literacy within the cultural and contextual environments of the subjects and spaces of further education. Although teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy are often acknowledged in this work to be central to the making and shaping of pedagogical practice, little research in the sector has attended specifically to teachers’ meaning-making about literacy. This approach is well developed in other phases where relationships between teachers’ classroom practices and their attitudes and values in relation to textual experience are seen as significant. In this paper we start this work for the post-compulsory sector. The FE Literacy Teachers as Readers Project aimed to explore teachers’ discursive understandings of reading through a qualitative study of their own accounts of their reading habits and preferences, their definitions of reading and the role of reading in their classrooms. Our discussion analyses our participants’ descriptions (figured worlds) of their own and their students’ reading identities to describe the positions they take up in relation to (‘big D’) discourses about readers and reading, and to consider how this might begin to pattern and frame their classroom practice. Coming a decade after the introduction of subject-specialist qualifications for literacy teachers in the FE sector, this study offers a timely insight in to teachers’ conceptualisation of reading in the context of well-embedded professional training, and one that is particularly pertinent at a time when the statutory training model for FE is under review.
This article presents the outcomes of research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England and informed by work in the fields of new literacy research, gaming studies and the socio-cultural framing of education, for which the videogame L. A. Noire was studied within the orthodox framing of the English literature curriculum at A level (pre-university) and undergraduate (degree level) in the United Kingdom. A mixed methods approach was adopted. Firstly, students contributed to a gameplay blog requiring them to discuss their in-game experience through the ‘language game’ of English literature, culminating in answering a question constructed with the idioms of the subject's set text ‘final examination’. Secondly, students taught their teachers to play L. A. Noire, with free choice over the context for this collaboration. Thirdly, participants returned to traditional roles to work through a set of study materials, designed to reproduce the conventions of the ‘study guide’ for literature education. Fourthly, interviews were conducted after each phase. The interviews informed a redrafting of the study materials, which are now available online for teachers. In the act of inserting the study of L. A. Noire into the English literature curriculum as currently framed, this research raises epistemological questions about ‘subject identity’, and the implications for digital transformations of texts for ideas about cultural value in schooled literacy and also the politics of ‘expertise’ in pedagogic relations.
On using Bourdieu in educational research
Does a relationship exist between academic achievement and the time spent in recreational reading? A significant connection was found between achievement and the time these college students spent reading for pleasure during vacations.
How do you picture identity? What happens when you ask individuals to make visual representations of their own identities, influences, and relationships? Drawing upon an array of disciplines from neuroscience to philosophy, and art to social theory, David Gauntlett explores the ways in which researchers can embrace people's everyday creativity in order to understand social experience. Seeking an alternative to traditional interviews and focus groups, he outlines studies in which people have been asked to make visual things - such as video, collage, and drawing - and then interpret them. This leads to an innovative project in which Gauntlett asked people to build metaphorical models of their identities in Lego. This creative reflective method provides insights into how individuals present themselves, understand their own life story, and connect with the social world. Creative Explorations is a lively and original discussion of identities, media influences, and creativity, which will be of interest to both students and academics.
Content teachers must move away from a dependence on text-bound teaching. Adolescents' functional view of literacy includes oral language and technological discourse. T.