Focus Versus Flow: Students' Understandings and Misunderstandings of Avid Readers' Flow Experiences

• In Event: Roundtable Session 54
  In Roundtable Session: Traversing and Renegotiating Identity Borders: On the Presentation, Representation, and Re-Representation of Fluid Selves in Literature for Young People

Abstract

This paper examines students’ perceptions of reading within the Baltimore City Public School System based on 64 interviews and focus groups with 6th grade adolescents. While some of the students described the flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1998) of being “in the book,” others interpreted these experiences in problematic ways. These students, who self-identified as struggling with reading, described their avid reading peers’ flow experience as being able to “focus” more while reading. Self-identified struggling readers blamed themselves for their lack of focus or inability to mimic their peers. This research demonstrates the importance of unpacking the avid reader experience with those students who have historically struggled with reading.

Author

• Jennifer G. Zwillenberg, University of Pennsylvania