Aesthetic Literacies: Stances, Scales, and Practices in Youth Literary Interpretation of Digital Texts

• In Event: Expanding Media Literacy Through Critical Digital Aesthetics

Abstract

Recently, literacy scholars have been investigating how youth make meaning from non-neutral digital texts including scholars concerned with critical interpretation (Janks, 2010) disinformation (Nichols & Leblanc, 2021), civic participation (Mirra & Garcia, 2022), and evaluating online sources (McGrew, 2021). This work is vital for engaging youth in critically-conscious meaning-making, a promising practice for moving toward social justice (Freire, 2003). This line of inquiry often attends primarily to issues of what the text says—its meaning or substance—but has yet to explicitly consider how the text is written or constructed—issues of its aesthetics or form. A parallel line of scholarship has long worked to interrogate the relationship between meaning and aesthetic form in textual interpretation (Dewey, 1931; Eagleton, 2013; Greene, 1973; Lee, 1995; Rosenblatt, 1978; Sipe, 2008) but has less regularly engaged with digital texts. My paper brings together these two lines of inquiry to better understand youth aesthetic interpretation of non-neutral texts in complex digital environments.
This paper is part of a multi-method multi-year study that took place in a digital summer literary salon. Inspired by queer-led literary salons and radical queer bookstores, this salon engaged youth of color, many of whom also identified as queer, in discussing a wide range of digital texts. This paper draws on a series of thinking and reading aloud sessions (Pressley & Afflerbach, 2012) that youth participated in throughout the literary salon. The youth in this study (n=18) each thought aloud across eight digital texts which yielded a total of 144 verbal protocols or transcripts of youth textual analysis. Texts included videos, songs, excerpts of novels, literary theory, text messages, social media posts, and other genres.
Data analysis of the 144 verbal protocols focused on youth interpretive practices, stances, and scales. To understand practices and stances, I used descriptive, structural, and process codes (Saldaña, 2021) to describe how youth were engaging with aesthetics. This analysis led me to notice that youth also seemed to be working across interpretive scales where some analysis was more zoomed in scale focused within a text to a more zoomed out scale focused on the world or society. To systematically capture interpretive scale, I drew on linguistic anthropology’s use of indexicality (Wortham & Reyes, 2015), as grounded in Peirce’s (1902) theories of semiotics which helped to capture the ways that youth interpreted signs in social life.
Findings suggest that youth engaged with aesthetic literacies in their reading and thinking aloud in ways that: a) youth took up three distinct interpretive stances—an affective stance, a critical stance, and an analytic stance; b) youth engaged through multiple interpretive scales (literal-inferential scale, aesthetic scale, interpretive community scale, and societal scale); and c) youth drew on four interpretive practices (noticing, speculating, diffusing, and aligning). Complicating understandings of what it means to read digital texts in civically-driven ways, youth drew on different permutations of practices, scales, and stances, for their own interpretive purposes, sometimes employing multiple of these tools often in ways that worked toward critical and justice-oriented readings.

Author

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY