Connecting My Reading Course to My Digital Writing Course

I found an interesting quote, when I was reviewing my notes in my Reading course, for my final paper, which I thought applied to my Digital Writing course as well.

Donna Alvermann, in her "white paper," "Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents" (2001), offers the following analysis:

Without critical literacy instruction that is sensitive to youth’s and adults’ needs, however, little may be gained from venturing into these environments. For example, in a study of two girls’ out-of-school instant messaging (IM) practices, Lewis and Fabbo (2000) documented the girls’ intricate manipulations of friends and social situations as the two adolescents simultaneously went about constructing their own identities, seemingly with little critical awareness for how the chat/IM technology might be manipulating them and their literacy practices. Adults who worry about young people’s identity constructions vis-à-vis the new technologies would do well to examine the parallels and disjunctures between their own such constructions and those of adolescents (Hagood, Stevens, & Reinking, in press; Lewis & Finders, in press). For in doing so, they may come to understand better the futility of asking young people to critique the very texts they find most pleasurable. For such a request, as Luke (1997) has adroitly noted, would likely “cue a critical response which can often be an outright lie…[because while youth] are quick to talk a good anti-sexist, anti-racist, pro-equity game…what they write in the essay or what they tell us in classroom discussion is no measure of what goes on in their heads” (p. 43).

This calls to mind my previous post about asking students to analyze and evaluate a blog or a website. Will their analysis be critical, in-depth, and honest, or will they just be telling me what they think I want to hear? Will this be a problem with any inquiry-based project? I definitely need to give this more thought!

Work Cited

Alvermann, D. E. (2001). Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents. Executive Summary and Paper Commissioned by the National Reading Conference. Chicago, IL: National Reading Conference.