Ethnography of Adolescent Literacy: Sociocultural Understandings of Literacies, Places, Materials, and Social Relationships

Open Access
- Author:
- Schappe, Julie Frear
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 26, 2013
- Committee Members:
- Jeanine M Staples, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jeanine M Staples, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Kimberly Anne Powell, Committee Member
Scott Mc Donald, Committee Member
Booker Stephen Carpenter Ii, Committee Member - Keywords:
- adolescent literacy
literacies
place
mapping
multimodal literacies
multisituated literacies
ethnography
journey - Abstract:
- Literacy, an ideologically rooted social practice, has been researched as reading and writing word-based language; however, literacy and literacies continue to be highly contested. Social practices are dynamic, evolving in response to sociocultural life. Research and policies identify divergences among in and out-of-school adolescent literacy practices and call for research to reconsider definitions of text and what it means to read and write in the 21st century. Based on a twelve-month ethnography of adolescent literacy with the collaboration of fifteen participants (students, teachers, and an administrator) from one northeastern U. S. high school, this study explored the question: How might the study of sociocultural beliefs and understandings about place, social relationships, and material objects inform understandings of adolescent literacy? Representing a portion of the study, this dissertation reports findings from three adolescent participants (all seniors) and their teachers: Tasha, a Haitian female (basic English literature); Colin, a White male (advanced placement English); and Simone, a White female (academic/mid-level English literature). Traditional, multimodal, and multisensory methods were used in a participant-responsive design. Multimodal and multisensory methods included multiple forms of mapping (hand-drawn, hand-tracing, and digital video/photo maps) and walking tours. This study adopted an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and offers a new journey epistemology to explore sociocultural persistence through places, place-oriented social relationships, materials, and adolescent agency implicated in meaning making. The findings contribute to scholarly understandings of texts, reading, and writing and also question established situated definitions literacy events and literacy practices. This research offers literacy purposes as multisituated, traveling with adolescents and influenced by place-oriented, but not place-bound, social relationships. This research also contributes to scholarship seeking understandings about how multimodal literacies entangle with adolescents’ lives. Finally, this study shows how participant-responsive, multimodal research design can be used in conjunction with traditional ethnographic methods to conduct research consistent with participants’ ways of making meaning.