Young Adult Literature and Adolescent Identity Across Cultures and Classrooms

Contexts for the Literary Lives of Teens

Janet Alsup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415876988
• eBook ISBN: 9781136981500
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Taking a critical, research-oriented perspective, this exploration of the theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical connections between the reading and teaching of young adult literature and adolescent identity development centers around three key questions:

• Who are the teens reading young adult literature?
• Why should teachers teach young adult literature?
• Why are teens reading young adult literature?

All chapters work simultaneously on two levels: each provides both a critical resource about contemporary young adult literature that could be used in YA literature classes or workshops and specific practical suggestions about what texts to use and how to teach them effectively in middle and high school classes.

Theorizing, problematizing, and reflecting in new ways on the teaching and reading of young adult literature in middle and secondary school classrooms, this valuable resource for teachers and teacher educators will help them to develop classrooms where students use literature as a means of making sense of themselves, each other, and the world around them.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Identification, Actualization, or Education: Why Read YAL?

Janet Alsup

Young adult literature (YAL), or literature written for readers between the ages of 12 and 20, has been taught in American schools since the 1970s and read by teens since the late 1960s, when books such as S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), Ann Head’s Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones (1968), and Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender (1967) were first published. Today, Newbery, Michael Printz, Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpre, and Américas Award-winning books are regularly taught in middle and high school English classes, and many more young adult novels are available in school libraries. YA books appear on district-approved reading lists, and teachers can either buy or find online multitudes of instructional materials to complement their teaching of books such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Louis Sachar’s Holes (2000). Many books have been published about the teaching of YAL and how teachers can best integrate it into their classrooms, notably those written by Donald Gallo, Virginia Monseau, John and Kay Parks Bushman, and Joan Kaywell. Many more articles by these and other scholars of young adult literature have been published in journals for teachers such as the English Journal, the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and the ALAN Review. One could argue that YA literature has finally achieved a sort of acceptance and respect for which it has been searching since the advent of the genre as a viable publishing category in the 1960s.

However, what has not occurred with YA literature in the past 35 years is a systemic and scholarly examination of the literary and pedagogical effectiveness of the genre. There continues to be a great need for educational and literary scholars to study the genre from a critical, research-oriented perspective. While many articles and books assume the effectiveness of YAL as a genre to be read by young adults to improve both their reading skills and their self-concepts, very few studies or analyses support these assumptions. (Notable exceptions include works by John Noell Moore and Roberta Seelinger Trites.)

As English educators, we work in an inherently multidisciplinary world. As my co-authors and I wrote in the July 2006 issue of English Education (Alsup et al., 2006), “Historically, English education has been defined as an interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry focused on the preparation of English language arts teachers, and, by association, the teaching and learning of all aspects of English studies” (p. 279). The article goes on to list “English studies, education, the scientific study of human behavior, and related fields” as disciplinary bodies upon which English education draws in order to “transform theory and research in these fields into pedagogical-content questions as a basis for enhancing the understanding of the teaching and learning of English in all of its manifestations” (p. 279). In other words, we look to many different disciplines and ways of knowing to understand our students, our research, and our teaching practice. This multidisciplinary point of view serves us well as we try to understand the uses of literature and the effects of literature teaching on adolescent minds, bodies, and emotions. In this book, the contributors and I certainly assume this eclectic stance, drawing upon knowledge from various fields of study, including literary study, psychology, sociology, education, African American studies, feminist studies, and biological science, in order to understand better the effective use of YAL and to address effectively the interests and concerns of our target audience: teachers of young adult literature and English teacher educators.

In this chapter, I introduce the four major themes or ideas around which the book revolves: teenage identity growth and young adult literature; reader response approaches to teaching and reading young adult literature; the connections between psychological and educational theories of identification and young adult literature; and socio-cultural theories linking literacy to social change. Of course, in the chapters that follow, these themes are not discussed in mutually exclusive ways; the authors often discuss them as overlapping ideas, highlighting connections between, for example, teenage identity growth and brain research or social justice and critical reading.

Teenage Identity Growth

The idea of teenage identity formation as it relates to YA literature is central to the ideas explored in this book. I first became interested in theories of identity when I was working on my previous book, Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces (Alsup, 2006). In that book, I explored the identity development of young teachers of English, not teen readers of YA texts. But many of the theories I discussed are useful to this book as well: discourse as an identity spark; narratives or storytelling as central to identity growth and self-perception of identity; and the connection (or disconnection) between discourses, subjectivities, and identity strands. As I state in Teacher Identity Discourses, one of the major theorists of discourse as identity is James P. Gee (see Gee, 1990/1996, 1999). In Gee’s definition of discourse, the individual brings certain subjectivities to a discursive act, while, at the same time, the discourse affects the individual engaging in it. Therefore, discourse has a very real-world effect—what one says or does affects not only others but oneself. To simplify even further: how one communicates determines the person one becomes.

When thinking about reading literature and why a teacher of English might choose to teach literature, I returned to Gee’s theory and began to narrow it to focus on narrative discourse, and, even more particularly, on narrative discourse that one reads. In other words, I switched my focus to stories or novels. I began to wonder if reading a novel might cause a person to change. And, more specifically, could reading a young adult novel cause a teenager to change in some internal way? As we know, teenagers are knee-deep in a particularly volatile time of life. They are rife for change and sometimes seem to change both physically and emotionally before our very eyes, as many developmental psychologists from Piaget to Erickson to Kegan have theorized and researched. As developmental psychologist Jane Kroger (1996) writes, “Although the foundations of ‘I’ are formed in infancy through the interactions of care-takers and child, adolescence does seem to be a time, at least in contemporary, technologically advanced western cultures, when one is confronted with the task of self-definition” (p. 18). The teenage years are also a time of tremendous activity in the frontal lobes of the brain, as scientists have recently discovered (Strauch, 2003). The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain which inhibits actions that might be culturally or personally inappropriate; during the teen years these segments of the brain are not yet fully developed. As scientist Chuck Nelson writes,

A lot of teenagers just don’t see consequences of actions. They don’t think ahead. They don’t see that getting good grades today, for instance, makes a big difference to the person they will be later on. When they get older, they start to get that. And I think it has to do with development of the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, the part that controls working memory, inhibition, impulse control.

(Quoted in Strauch, 2003, pp. 32–33)

Other brain researchers can shed light on what happens during the adolescent reading experience, which might differ from an adult reader’s experience. First, brain researchers such as Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull (2002) also tell us that the adolescent brain is in a critical and fast-paced time of development. During puberty, as during infancy, the teen brain is rapidly developing additional synaptic connections—whether or not these synapses are nurtured depends largely upon the richness of a teenager’s environment. Second, Canadian researcher David S. Miall (1995) writes prolifically about connections between emotional response to reading and the prefrontal cortex of the brain which enables a reader to anticipate the future direction of a narrative and fill in the “gaps” in a text’s meaning, as described by reader response theorist Wolfgang Iser (1978). According to Miall, when the prefrontal cortex is undeveloped (as in teens) or damaged, an individual has a more difficult time processing rapidly changing conditions or stimuli and responding to them appropriately. When reading a novel, processing various subplots, character changes, and developing themes might be more difficult for a teenage reader— at least without the guidance of a more skilled, mature reader, such as a teacher or parent. Furthermore, Miall argues that the foregrounding of literary elements or narrative structures in literary texts triggers emotional responses in the frontal cortex of the brain; these emotional responses draw upon a reader’s personal experiences and memories. However, this emotional response does not necessarily result in a one-way, simplistic transmission from the novel to the reader’s mind. Instead, readers are

invited to reassess the feelings and memories they bring to such a story; the story may impel them to place their first feeling within the context of a second that modifies or limits the first in some way. As a result, an affective marker that, prior to the act of reading, guided a reader’s understanding may be transformed or replaced as a result of reading.

(Miall, 1995, pp. 11–12)

In other words, critical reading results, and readers may understand their emotions in a new way.

An aspect of identity formation of great interest to my work on young adult literature and teen identity development is the notion of narrative identity. Jerome Bruner (2002) has written that “it is through narrative that we create and re-create selfhood, that self is a product of our telling and not some essence to be delved for in the recesses of subjectivity” (pp. 85–86). Other narrative theorists agree. Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich (2006, p. 3) write:

The stories we tell about our personal experiences grow in complexity and detail as we move through childhood and into the adolescent and young adult years. It is not until adolescence, some researchers and theorists have argued, that we are able and motivated to conceive of our lives as full-fledged, integrative narratives of the self (Habermas and Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1985).

So, given the focus on identity development during adolescence, and the importance of building narratives of the self, might not adolescence be the perfect time to read and explore literary narratives that encourage critical reflection? Perhaps literature teaching might be key to positive identity growth and development for teen readers. And taking this argument a step further, could YAL, literature written specifically for an audience of teen readers about teen characters having life-like problems, be the ideal genre to prompt and support such positive identity growth? If YAL has a unique tendency, based on general characteristics it possesses, to assist teen readers in positive identity growth, the teacher is led to ask some hard questions about its classroom use. To what extent is the job of the literature teacher to effect personal change among students? Are English teachers qualified to elicit purposefully the identity change or growth of their students? Is it ethical to teach a book because a teacher believes it will make her students “better,” “more moral,” or “more empathetic” people? If literature can result in such deep, personal change, doesn’t that make it especially dangerous, as many censors already argue? When English teachers themselves defend books they teach based on their enormous power to change readers’ lives, how can they deny the censor’s anger at the very same possibility? It then becomes a matter of whose values are taught and whose values are right—a battle that is surely futile.

However, something everyone seems to recognize is that literature is indeed powerful. It does do something to the reader, especially when the reader is engrossed in the reading process, or, as Victor Nell (1988) writes, “lost in a book,” as his book-length work is titled. Readers can change through vicarious experience; they can grow, develop, ask new questions, think new thoughts, and even feel new emotions. All from reading a book—particularly, Nell argues, a fictional narrative. Total engagement in a narrative world is powerful and can create internal, personal narratives of self that, some argue, might guide a reader’s behavior in the future.

These questions of literature and literature teaching are not new. Plato recognized the power of literature and feared it. He banished the poets from his ideal republic, arguing that they ruled by affect and imagination, not logic or analytical thought, and hence distorted reality and corrupted their audience. Since that time, it seems that “poetry” or other types of imaginative literature, such as fiction, have been simultaneously revered and detested as pedagogical forms. Today, some argue that literature is being pushed out of the language arts curriculum by the teaching of reading strategies and comprehension skills, which seem much less muddy or morally unclear. So what can we as literature teachers do to defe...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Who Are the Teens Reading YAL?
• Culture and Language
• Part II Why Should Teachers Teach YAL?
• Part III Why Are Teens Reading YAL?
• About the Contributors
• Index