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COPYRIGHT 2004 International Reading Association Inc.
After several years of collaborative work in a youth literacy program, we believe that developing the literacies of struggling youth requires a curricular playfulness with students' ideas, biographies, and imaginations across genres and media. We begin our description of the program with a student's poem. Introducing his anthology of poetry, this student wrote the following:
My name is Scott Moloney. I live in B.C. Canada but hang out everywhere. I love the feeling of the street because only a few people know how it works--it has its own mind. I am trying to show everyone what it's like to be on the street and around it. I have my favorite poem at the end because it has no borders--it's what you want it to be--nothing more nothing less. (Moloney, 2002, p. 3) The Girl She dances She spins She jumps She swirls around on the sidewalk Showing her moves The daughter of a father The daughter of a mother No one sees that Because she stops dancing For another hit She eases it in her The needle goes into the skin Slumped against a wall She feels the warmth Of the one she loves The one thing that's never let her down The one thing she can trust She doesn't worry anymore About friends About family All she needs is one more hit That's all Just one little needle is what she looks for Such little needs She does not need food She does not need water Just that last hit As it goes through her blood It hits her heart She's lying on the ground now Too much Her heart slows Lying there with a smile on her face Life was fun she thinks But now it leaves her "Goodbye life I will love you," she said Good-bye girl
Scott's poem illustrates the integration of biography--an adolescent's understandings and experiences--and his imaginative retelling of life on the street: "I came from it, and it still interests me, of how it works, because you could be out there for years and years and you still have no idea of how it worked" (personal communation, March 13, 2002). Our view of multiple literacies, which includes cultural representations across a variety of genres and media, rests on the intersections between our collaborative work with the students and the writings on social literacies; multiliteracy theory and practice; and biography, identity, and imagination.
Social literacies and multiple literacies
As social literacy theorists (e.g., Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Street, 1995) have pointed out, texts do not assume an autonomous life of their own but fit into the practices of the everyday lives of students; therefore, material practices of literacy--the uses to which the acts of reading and writing are put--are central. Just as practice occurs in different contexts, different literacies apply and assume importance in different contexts across homes, communities, and schools. This perspective opens up fruitful avenues of research (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000) and practice, and it reminds us that school literacies are different and unique, that literacy is learned not only inside the classroom, and that curricula focusing on a prescribed range of literacy practices are restrictive.
Multiliteracy theorists have added to this understanding of literacy practices by emphasizing the role of "multimodal" forms of representation and meaning making (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) in students' lives. They argue that "literacy pedagogy must now account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies" (New London Group, 2000, p. 9). They also argue that school curricula should be redesigned to mesh with different subjectivities or experiences of the students, with their attendant languages, discourses, and registers, using these as a resource for learning. In these ways, social literacy and multiliteracy theories are powerful and important reminders that literacy practices are varied and situated across different media and that school-based literacy practices need to be inclusive of a broad range of students, cultures, and text formats (Rogers, 2000). These ideas inform our practice of drawing on multiple literacies for struggling youth, who in turn bring their subjectivities in the forms of biography, imagination, hybrid and fluid identities, and playfulness.
As multiliteracy theorists hypothesize, and our experience confirms, emphasizing only print texts and "school literacies" with these and other students has the potential to push them further toward the margins of school. To overcome this marginalization and encourage various forms of literacy, we have come to rely increasingly on oral and written imaginative play, on rearticulating, transforming, and integrating the narratives and biographies (or the stories of the students' lives) into curricular texts. As O'Brien (1998) observed, for adolescents who struggle with literacy and have been alienated from traditional secondary schools, issues of biography, resistance, and school literacy practices intersect during curricular innovation and the teaching process.
(Auto)biography, identity, and imagination
To explore students' subjectivities in a multigenres and multimedia environment, we began to emphasize the dimensions of imagination (Egan, 1997; Greene, 2000; Searle, 1998) and biography (cf. Fine, 1994) that can transform practice, at times, and lessen or integrate student resistances to schooling. Cope and Kalantzis (2000) argued that transformed practice begins with the situated lives of learners and the multiple layers of their identities. We extend this idea by drawing on Harre's (1998) insight that an individual's life, in addition to a sequence of events and experiences, is "a story which I tell myself and which is forever being...
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