Article

Why High Schools Don't Change: What Students and Their Yearbooks Tell Us

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Abstract

High school yearbook students from five schools in a large suburban school system were surveyed and interviewed to investigate what was meaningful and memorable to them throughout their high school experience. The yearbooks they produced were analyzed to confirm their responses and gain more information about their interests and priorities. Chang's (1992) elements of adolescent ethos, including getting along, being involved, and gaining independence, provided a conceptual framework. Transcripts of focus group interviews, surveys, and yearbooks were examined and analyzed for references to rites of passage and intensification embedded in the high school program and described by Burnett (1969). Yearbook students in this study articulated the importance of the adolescent ethos elements described by Chang (1992). Relationships with friends and acquaintances emerged as students' primary focus. They equated growing up with accepting responsibility. Students identified markers of independence similar to those described by Chang (1992), including driving, having a job, and taking responsibility in extracurricular activities. Additional markers of independence suggested by these students were receiving mail from prospective colleges, earning the trust of adults, and experiencing the death of a classmate. Students' comments, supported by yearbook text and pictures, indicated the presence of and importance attached to high school rites of passage and intensification. Students demonstrated a lack of interest in their academic work through their oral and written responses and the minimal coverage they allotted to academics in their yearbooks. Students' descriptions of academic as compared to their yearbook classes, along with the importance of the adolescent ethos and rites of passage, offer clues for meaningful high school restructuring from students' perspectives.

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... Like the students in Chang's (1992) study and my own of suburban yearbook students (Hoffman, 2002), these rural students presented themselves as incredibly busy and involved, often to the point of becoming stressed with the demands of their school and outside activities. In the Gillette yearbook, a student describing student life wrote: ...
... Students in these yearbook classes described their teachers as part of their most memorable high school experiences and spontaneously discussed them in interviews as they reflected on the importance of their friends. In contrast to the students in Chang's (1992) study, and with my own findings among suburban students (Hoffman, 2002), these rural students perceived their teachers, as well as their peers, as friends. At Gillette, students reflected upon the impact of popular teachers no longer at the school, about the excitement of new teachers, and the positive influence of student teachers. ...
... Working on the yearbook provided students with opportunities and practice in negotiating with their peers to accomplish their tasks without alienating other students. These students counted their teachers as friends, unlike the students in Chang's study or my own (Hoffman, 2002), who reserved that designation for their peers. Through their discussion of their relationships with peers and teachers, including their efforts to maintain positive relationships in conflicted situation, these students confirmed the importance they ascribed to getting along with everyone. ...
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I conducted surveys, focus group interviews, and analyzed the yearbooks of fifty four yearbook students from five rural high schools to investigate students process of yearbook construction and to determine what was meaningful and memorable to them throughout their high school experience. Changs (1992) construct of an adolescent ethos, including the elements of getting along with everyone, being involved, and being independent, provided a conceptual framework, and was affirmed by students responses. References to rites of passage and intensification embedded in the high school program as described by Burnett (1969) confirmed these students perceptions of high school as a four year passage experience.
... As a clash of genres, the school magazine encompasses texts displaying linguistic and functional similarities within a standard set of guidelines that include tone, style, imagery, symbolism and emotion, and take into account text, audience, subject and context (Ljung, 2000). These texts seek to fulfil the social action of interpreting and responding effectively; they also serve as sites for social actions, cultural critique and change, as well as answering questions of how and why texts are produced as cultural artefacts (Bawarshi, 2000;Caudill, 2007;Hoffman, 2002;Miller, 1984, p. 151). The school magazine as a clash of genres is fragile in the sense that it needs to respond to a dynamic, evolving, interdisciplinary world through reflection and assessment of current events (Shavkatovna, 2021). ...
... As such, it is an ideal base for reflection, analysis and sharing of good practices (Kobolt & Žižak, 2013). As a piece of material culture, the school magazine can also be used as data to interpret past and present human activity (Hoffman, 2002). ...
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The paper discusses the school magazine as an important extracurricular activity. We first define the characteristics of school magazines, pointing to aims, content focus, types of texts and the organisation of editorial boards. The fact that school magazines present an important platform for young people to formulate their opinions, challenge societal norms and values, pursue their artistic aspirations, and acquire knowledge, skills and competences, as well as form group identity, is emphasised. The objective of the research was to identify how the theoretical underpinnings of the school magazine as a clash of genres are reflected in the selected corpus of 103 issues of the school magazine Izvir, which has been in circulation since 1967. Particular interest is focused on the content, the types of texts, the presence of the zeitgeist and the edition notice. The research is in the form of a case study, applying thematic network analysis. The results show that the researched corpus covers diverse content, relating mainly to curricular and extracurricular activities, embraced in informative and interpretative journalistic texts, entertaining features and a literary section. The extent of politically oriented content engaging with issues that mark the period 1979–1985 is exceptional. The edition notice shows a significant improvement from the first issues, which lacked much of the required data, to the present perfected issues. Lastly, the magazines mirror the zeitgeist, transitioning from socialist and communist ideology to democracy. All in all, school magazines are an important educational pillar, adding to the formation of young people’s minds, but also encouraging teachers to question their roles, didactic methods and approaches. They also play a role in the formation of the school’s recognition in the local community.
... Qualitative focus groups offer such an opportunity (Morgan, 1996;Nabors, Reynolds, & Weist, 2000). Focus groups have been used effectively when conducting research with children and adolescents (Brice, Lamb, & Bang, 1999;Charlesworth & Rodwell, 1997;Harnish & Henderson, 1996;Hoffman, 2003;Porcellato et al., 2002) and when exploring educational issues (Desimone, Payne, Fedoravicius, Henrich, & Finn-Stevenson, 2004;Lederman, 1990;Nabors et al., 2000). It is argued that one of the benefits of focus groups for children and adolescents is that they model social environments that they are used to at school (Mauthner, 1997). ...
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... The visual language of the yearbook which characterises the Facebook Friends page reflects a cultural form whose chief functions are those of the documentation of relationships, the communication of inclusion and exclusion, the construction of meaning through friends and relationships, and the building of social and cultural capital (Good, 2013;Hoffman, 2002Hoffman, , 2004Panayotidis & Stortz, 2010). There is nothing to 'do' with Friend photographs except, perhaps, sort them into groups. ...
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Although the audience as an industrial media product has been scrutinised by scholars for decades, the visual presentation of the audience has been nearly absent from scholarly analysis. This article examines the interfaces that Facebook uses to present its audience to three different user groups (ordinary Facebook members, publishers, and finally advertisers) using a social semiotic analytical framework to analyse visuals, interactive elements and desired user paths. The interface displayed to ordinary users, the Facebook Friends page, uses a visual language with roots in the college yearbook, showing rows of faces with minimal available interactivity. This interface preserves the humanity of the audience, suggesting egalitarian social structures and timeless space outside Facebook’s ordinary flow. The interfaces displayed to institutional users, Page Insights and Audience Insights, for publishers and advertisers respectively, are quite different, characterised by a multiplicity of charts and high interactivity, with a clear path for the user that ends in ‘boosting’ your page or ‘buying’ your audience. The Audience Insights pages for advertisers feature advanced interactive tools which use the conventions of experimental science. These two interfaces do significant rhetorical work, dehumanising and abstracting audiences into data quantities which can be packaged as products, and encouraging publishers to focus on the production of data measuring engagement. Both the promotion of the value of data and the elision of audience work and surveillance, graphically represented in the different interfaces, help platform businesses like Facebook strategically, by increasing the value of their data and by suppressing audience concerns about surveillance.
... Qualitative focus groups offer such an opportunity (Morgan, 1996;Nabors, Reynolds, & Weist, 2000). Focus groups have been used effectively when conducting research with children and adolescents (Brice, Lamb, & Bang, 1999;Charlesworth & Rodwell, 1997;Harnish & Henderson, 1996;Hoffman, 2003;Porcellato et al., 2002) and when exploring educational issues (Desimone, Payne, Fedoravicius, Henrich, & Finn-Stevenson, 2004;Lederman, 1990;Nabors et al., 2000). It is argued that one of the benefits of focus groups for children and adolescents is that they model social environments that they are used to at school (Mauthner, 1997). ...
Article
A nine-month program entitled Youth Speaks Up is delivered annually to grade 6 students from Sydney, Nova Scotia. One goal of the program is to provide an opportunity for the development of positive communication skills in participants. The purpose of this project was to determine if students participating in the program perceived changes in their communication ability and comfort level as a result of participation in the program. Qualitative focus groups were conducted, and responses suggest that many participants experienced positive changes in their communication comfort levels in public and interpersonal communication contexts, and specifically in their ability and willingness to express their ideas. Participants believed factors such as consistent practice and interaction with new people influenced the changes. Students' recommendations for program development are also presented.
... Secondary schools are elaborate, complex mini-societies whose internal organizational structures have a direct impact on the lives of the individuals, and groups of individuals who inhabit them (Lee, Dedrick & Smith, 1991). In addition to their formal organizational structures, secondary schools are equally inherent cultural entities replete with amazing arrays of artifacts, rituals, and rites of passage all of which impact directly on the manner in which their inhabitants negotiate the terms of their existence within those institutions (Hemmings, 2000& Hoffman, 2003). The degree of success with which these negotiations are concluded has a significant effect on participants' long-term success, or lack thereof, within those walls (Hemmings, 2000). ...
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Public education and so many institutions charged with serving the public are struggling to servecultural minority groups who see the world and interact with it in ways quite foreign to mainstreamAmerica. A lack of knowledge, on the part of public institutions, has led to the further alienation ofcertain minority subgroups and has made the public institutions that serve them ineffective. Increasinginstitutional knowledge of cultural minority groups is one of the critical steps American pubic educatorsmust take towards cultural competency (Hoffman, 2004).
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