Disciplining "Youth Voice": Discourse Itineraries in an English Language Arts–Based Community Journalism Unit

• In Event: Learning Identities: Trajectories of Identification and Participation in Digital Learning Publics

Abstract

This paper examines the complex discourse itineraries (Scollon, 2008; Blommaert, 2013) of high school students participating in a community journalism unit in an ELA classroom. The focal project is part of a school-wide technology integration initiative and exemplifies many principles of connected learning: it is production-centered, interest-driven, supported by expert journalist mentors and peers, openly networked and academically oriented. As part of the unit, students produce short articles about community issues of their choice, that are then published via an online blog. In this neighborhood school located in an economically divested urban area, students frequently select topics that reflect their daily experiences with violence, infrastructural neglect, street drug industry, and frustrating school policies. While the project aims to give underrepresented youth "a voice" and a channel through which to share their stories, it does so in service of academic goals of the English Language Arts classroom and disciplinary conventions of journalism. The preparation to publish students’ work on an online blog, where "anyone on the internet can see it," influences how the youth are encouraged to represent their stories and perspectives.

In this study, I ask: what kinds of semiotic resources do students draw on in the process of making sense of their community experiences (including neighborhood divestment, racial stigmatization, violence and the like) and how do these discursive tools get disciplined by ELA and journalistic conventions in order to become appropriate and legible for various publics? What kind of literacy practices and epistemologies get redacted (in the name of Standard English, journalistic objectivity, etc), and what happens when semiotic slippages occur that don't fit within the bounds of these conventions? The term “disciplining” is used to mean both the process of training students to develop a particular set of (literacy) behaviors, and the act of organizing texts into a form associated with a specific discipline (Stevens and Hall, 1998). Through ethnographic analysis of classroom observations, interviews with students and teachers, and multimodal analysis of youth-authored artifacts from various stages of the iterative production process, I trace the discourse itineraries – multiple, intersecting literacy paths – that weave through and unravel in the course of the unit. Ultimately, I argue that rich collaborative sensemaking routinely enrolls multiple forms of "unauthorized" linguistic and semiotic repertories including local, digital and criminal slang, emojis, copyrighted google images and clip-art, the telling of personal histories and anecdotes, and spontaneous debating of controversial issues. As student work progresses towards eventual public display, these complexities get smoothed out to fit the genre requirements of the journalism project. The English teacher and journalist mentor both routinely ratify and engage with students’ multiple forms of literacy, and play the role of gatekeepers and guides in the process of “disciplining” their voices. The online blog and its imaginary audience act as socio-technical agents that enable youth to construct viable public identities as journalists, athletes, thinkers, and future college students, actively resisting perceived stereotypes ascribed to their demographic categories.

Author

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University