Permission to Question Norms and Assume Agency: Resisting Adolescent Readers Redefine Themselves

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging and Reconceptualizing Pedagogical Frameworks

Abstract

Within educational writings, struggling adolescent readers are often painted as stagnating and perpetually behind, disillusioned with books and the real and imagined stories they offer. Our work suggests that some struggling readers might be better imagined as resisting, acting with intention as they choose how to respond to expectations inherent in the classroom as a discourse community replete with student and teacher expectations grounded in respective positions of power and privilege. Through participation in a Young Adult Literature elective that invited resisting behaviors by honoring individual choice and valuing divergent perspectives, readers identified as struggling shifted their identities in meaningful ways. Through enactment of their own agency, they reimagined their reading identities by rejecting school-sanctioned definitions of who they are.

Authors

• Wendy J. Glenn, University of Connecticut

• Ricki Ginsberg, University of Connecticut