Expanding Teacher Perceptions of Marginalized and Underrepresented Youth Identities Through Critical Theories and Young Adult Literature

• In Event: Interrogating the Social Imagination: Examining the Renegotiation of Self and Others Through Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Objective
This paper shares findings from a qualitative study with preservice and practicing teachers who completed a university course on young adult (YA) literature. In its various iterations, this course has included frameworks from postcolonial theory (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2013), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), or a youth lens (Petrone, Lewis, & Sarigianides, 2013) through which participants analyzed diverse YA texts. The purpose of this study was to examine how preservice and practicing teachers articulate their understanding of youth identities, their social constructions, and their representations in YA literature.

Perspective
Intersectionality considers identities as fluid, overlapping, and intersecting across socially constructed categories related to age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, among others (Crenshaw, 1989). Analyzing literary representations of youth identities similarly requires paying attention to individual characters’ intersecting identities as well as how these align or conflict with the communities and institutions the characters navigate (Blackburn & Smith, 2010; Durand, 2015). Likewise, an intersectional approach is useful for mapping the discourses teachers use to articulate their understanding of youth identities as they analyze YA literature.

Methods
Participants included 26 undergraduate preservice English teachers and 11 graduate students (8 of whom were practicing English teachers), enrolled in a semester-long course on YA literature, a requirement for their degree in English Education. During the course, participants selected diverse YA novels, including stories with characters of color, LGBTQ characters, and stories set the cultural contexts of the U.S., which they subsequently analyzed using either a youth lens, an intersectional lens, or a postcolonial lens.

Data Sources
Data collected included artifacts participants produced for the course: 306 analyses of young adult literature, 121 written reflections on assigned readings, and 37 final projects, which map participants’ conceptualizations of youth identities and representations over one semester. Data were analyzed using structural coding (Saldaña, 2013) during the first cycle of analysis followed by a constant comparison analysis (Maykut & Morehouse, 1994) to generate themes across the data.

Results
Participants engaged their selected YA texts as “metaphorical ethnographies” (Bean, 2004) or plausible representations of young people’s lived experiences. The teacher participants deepened or acquired new knowledge of marginalized and underrepresented youth through their reading, particularly stories featuring Indigenous, immigrant, international, and LGBTQ youth. Analyzing such texts through critical frameworks such as postcolonial theory, intersectionality, or a youth lens invited participants to develop increasingly complex conceptualizations of youth by taking into consideration the social, political, and historical contexts that shape youth identities. For some of the practicing teachers, analyzing global YA texts through a postcolonial lens challenged them also to develop a historicized critical perspective on U.S. racial issues and to reflect on their own positionalities as teachers and as gatekeepers to a racially and culturally homogenous literature curriculum.

Significance
Findings from this study contribute to research on the use of YA texts in teacher preparation courses. Specifically, this study illustrates how teacher perceptions of youth can shift towards more complex conceptualizations of youth identities through reading diverse YA texts and applying critical theories to analyses of YA literature.

Authors

• Chonika Coleman King, University of Florida

• Susan L. Groenke, The University of Tennessee - Knoxville

• Kelly Bailes Wallace, The University of Tennessee