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2 LIBRARY
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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

EXCAVATING READERS: FINDING MIDDLE SCHOOL BOYS'
LITERACIES IN A PERMEABLE LANGUAGE ARTS CLASSROOM

presented by
SEAN KO‘lTKE

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

Ph.D. degree in Educational Psychology and

Educational Technology

CV Major Professor’s Signature
IO .5 l. O 7’

 

Date

MSU is an afiinnative-action, equal-opportunity employer

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/07 p:/C|RC/DateDue.indd-p.1

 

EXC AV AT ‘

 

EXCAVATING READERS: FINDING MIDDLE SCHOOL BOYS’ LIT ERACIES IN A
PERMEABLE LANGUAGE ARTS CLASSROOM

By

Sean Kottke

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Program in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology

2007

 

 

EXCAVAT

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ABSTRACT
EXCAVATING READERS: FINDING MIDDLE SCHOOL BOYS’ LITERACIES IN A
PERMEABLE LANGUAGE ARTS CLASSROOM

Sean Kottke

Adolescent literacy researchers frequently recommend that teachers incorporate lots of
opportunities for students to self-select personally interesting texts to read as part of the
language arts curriculum, and the literature suggests that this may be especially powerful
for improving boys’ motivation for and attitude toward reading for multiple purposes.
However, the literature does not contain a detailed analysis of the texts that adolescent
readers might choose in such a permeable curriculum, the extent to which boys’ and
girls’ reading selections might overlap or differ, or the extent to which choices made for
academic purposes resemble those that students might make for recreational (or
vernacular) purposes. During the 2004-2005 school year, texts selected by 48 sixth
graders for a variety of academic contexts in which students were encouraged to choose
personally interesting reading materials were documented and analyzed, as were the text
selections made by a subgroup of focal students for vernacular purposes. Fantasy and
realistic fiction were the most popular genres among participants' text selections, with
boys’ selections more evenly spread across a wider range of genres than were represented
among girls’ selections. Sports-themed texts from multiple genres and media as well as
supernatural mystery/thrillers had an especially greater prominence among the text
selections made by boys. Boys selected texts from a wider range of media than did girls,

particularly for vernacular purposes. This trend was observed at both the group and

 

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boys' text set
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individual levels. While serial works were extremely popular among both boys and girls,
boys’ text selections for vernacular purposes were more heavily concentrated around
serial works than were girls’ and their text selections for academic purposes were more
skewed toward non-serial works than were girls’. Girls’ serial reading interests were
almost exclusively print-based, and were visible in the text selections they made for
academic purposes. Boys, on the other hand, were more likely to be interested in
multimedia series, that is, series that had unique manifestations in print, visual and
interactive media. While the majority of both boys’ and girls’ text selections across
contexts were works created specifically for a young adult audience, boys were more
likely to select more linguistically difficult texts to read for vernacular purposes than for
academic texts, while the opposite trend was observed to a lesser degree among girls’
selections. While the distribution of genres within the text selections made by girls for
vernacular purposes was echoed in the distribution of genres within their academic text
selections, the distribution of genres within boys’ academic text selections was more
reflective of boys’ vernacular print-literacy practices than the overall portrait of their
vernacular literacy practices. Boys expressed a number of strong genre preferences, and
the database of text selections reveals that these boys engaged frequently with these
genres not only in their vemacular literacy lives, but also within the more permeable
contexts of their Language Arts curriculum. However, as permeable as the teacher made
his classroom to the texts of students’ vernacular literacy practices, a focus on print
literacy practices over the course of the school year limited the extent to which the full
range of boys’ vernacular literacy practices could become visible within academic

literacy contextsi

Copyright by
SEAN KOTTKE
2007

Aum

 

 

 

To Angus
fascinate.

And to ‘5
school it

To August and Alexis, whose text selections and pop culture commitments constantly
fascinate, and who always wondered why 100 pages wasn’t enough.

And to Nick, who has no idea what letting me hang out at the library every day in middle
school has wrought

 

 

Thanks firs:
David Won
recommend
of eminent
early cours
the pages t.
thanks to l
in lanuary
Fellovt'shi
and. espet
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SChOOL

Finally

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first go out to my Dissertation Committee, Drs. Nell Duke, Matthew Koehler, E.
David Wong and Chairperson Mark Conley. Their support, guidance and
recommendations at all stages of this dissertation have been invaluable. This same team
of eminent scholars also aided me at every stage of my doctoral career, from advising and
early coursework through preliminary exams, practicum research and comps. Nothing in
the pages that follow could have been accomplished without their expertise. Special
thanks to Matt for getting the ball rolling on this doctoral career with his initial phone call
in January 2002 to let me know that I’d received the University Distinguished
Fellowship. That call was the best birthday present of my life. The faculty, administration
and, especially, students, of Harwell Middle School deserve deepest thanks for allowing
me to spend a year with them observing and asking questions. As of this writing, the
students who participated in this study are embarking on their next great journey, starting
their freshman year at Homestead High School. While Ed Connors, the teacher whose
classroom served as the site of this study, is no longer teaching language arts at Harwell,
he has embarked on his next great journey into the waters of principalship. To my
colleagues and students at Miller College, thank you for patiently listening to my ideas,
sharing your stories and occasionally kicking me in the rear to get this writing done.
To all of the Humanities Block students who passed through my room at Tomball High
School, thank you for letting me learn as much fi'om you as I hope you learned fiom me.
Finally, I owe an enormous debt to my parents, who have supported me in every way
possible at every stage in my education and who let me hole up in their guest room for

many marathon writing sessions. Thank you for your generosity and patience.

vi

 

l
on or t __

llST OF Fl

CHAPTER
INTRODU
Self-selcl
V’isualiz. I
Literatur
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CHAPTER
REVIEW (
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Summa:

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. ix

LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ x

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
Self-selection .................................................................................................................. 6
Visualization ................................................................................................................... 9
Literature Circles .......................................................................................................... 10
The Study ...................................................................................................................... 11

CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE .................................................................................. 15
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 15
Theoretical Perspective ................................................................................................. 17
Review of the Literature ............................................................................................... 20
Summary and Research Questions ............................................................................... 35

CHAPTER 3

METHODS ....................................................................................................................... 39
Chapter Overview ......................................................................................................... 39
Setting ........................................................................................................................... 39
Research Design Overview ........................................................................................... 56
Participants .................................................................................................................... 58
Procedures ..................................................................................................................... 59
Data Analysis ................................................................................................................ 66
Role of the Researcher .................................................................................................. 73

CHAPTER 4

RESULTS ......................................................................................................................... 75
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 75
Question One ................................................................................................................ 76
Question Two ................................................................................................................ 95
Question Three ............................................................................................................ 104
Question Four ............................................................................................................. 1 18

CHAPTER 5

DISCUSSION ................................................................................................................. 122
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 122
The Texts — Currents of Diversity .............................................................................. 124
The Contexts — (Im)Permeable Semiotic Social Spaces ............................................. 135
The Teacher - Negotiator of Literacy Events and Practices ...................................... 141
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 1 52

vii

 

 

 

 

APPENDlX
TABLES”.

APPENDN
norREs-

APPENDI.‘
LIST OF T
Books
Magazin
Motion l
IClEViSlt
Video (71

REFEREX

 

APPENDIX A

TABLES ......................................................................................................................... 157

APPENDIX B

FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ 172

APPENDIX C

LIST OF TEXTS SELECTED BY MEDIUM AND TITLE ......................................... 188
Books .......................................................................................................................... 1 89
Magazines and Comic Books ..................................................................................... 203
Motion Pictures and DVDs ......................................................................................... 203
Television Series ......................................................................................................... 205
Video Games ............................................................................................................... 205

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 207

viii

 

 

 

Table A]:
Table A2:
Table A3:

Table A4:

Number ti.

Table A5:

Number o.

Table A6:

Academic

Table A7:

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Table A8:

Gender ur

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Table A

Table A.

LIST OF TABLES

Table A1: Median Household Income Distribution by District ..................................... 157
Table A2: Enrollment Distribution by Race/Ethnicity by District ................................. 158
Table A3: Text Selections by Gender and Context ......................................................... 159

Table A4: Most Popular Texts Selected By All Students for Any Purpose, Based on
Number of Text Selections Documented for Each Text (in Parentheses) ....................... 160

Table A5: Most Popular Authors Selected By All Students For Any Purpose, Based on
Number of Text Selections Documented for Each Author (in Parentheses) ................... 161

Table A6: Distribution of Focal Students’ Text Selections by Genre, Gender and
Academic/ Vernacular Context ........................................................................................ 1 62

Table A7: Fog Readability Levels of Focal Students ’ Text Selections by Gender and
Academic/ Vernacular Context ........................................................................................ 163

Table A8: F lesch-Kincaid Readability Levels of Focal Students’ Text Selections by
Gender and Academic/ Vernacular Context .................................................................... 164

Table A9: Distribution of Focal Students’ Text Selections by Medium, Gender and
Academ ic/ Vernacular Context ........................................................................................ 1 65

Table A10: Distribution of Focal Students ’ Text Selections by Series, Gender and
Academic/ Vernacular Context ........................................................................................ 166

Table A11: ERAS Recreational and Academic Subscale Comparisons by Gender, Fall

2004 ................................................................................................................................ 1 67
Table A12: ERAS Recreational and Academic Subscale Comparisons by Gender, Spring

2005 ................................................................................................................................ 1 68
Table A13: F all/Spring ERAS Recreational Subscale Comparisons by Gender ............ 169
Table A14: F all/Spring ERAS Academic Subscale Comparisons by Gender ................ 170

Table A15: F all/Spring ERAS Recreational Subscale Comparisons by Homeroom ..... 171

ix

 

 

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Bl: Classroom library of Mr. Ed Connors ......................................................... 172
Figure B2: Classroom library of Ms. Julie Price ........................................................... 173
Figure B3: Reading corner in Ms. Julie Price ’s classroom ........................................... 174
Figure B4: Visualization quiz administered by Mr. Connors ......................................... 175
Figure BS: Genre Project assignment sheet ................................................................... 176
Figure B6: Sample book review form for all genres except biography, completed by Ciera
S., a focal student ............................................................................................................ 177
Figure B7: Continued from Figure 36, back side of sample book review form ............. 178
Figure B8: Sample book review form for biographies, completed by Ciera S., a focal

student ............................................................................................................................. 179
Figure B9: Book Project assignment sheet ..................................................................... 180
Figure B10: T imeline of classroom activities, data sources (with associated research

questions) and data analysis strategies employed in study ............................................ 181
Figure B11: Text Selections of All Students by Age of T ext (Base Year 2005) ............... 182
Figure B12: Mr. Connors’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR ............................ 183

Figure B13: Second view of Mr. Connors’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR... 184
Figure B14: Third view of Mr. Connors ’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR ..... 185
Figure B15: Fourth view of Mr. Connors ’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR 186

Figure 316: The Long Tail ............................................................................................. 187

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

“R.AT.O6.01: Students will be enthusiastic about reading and do substantial reading and

writing on their own.” (Michigan Department of Education, 2006, p. 60)

“Reading books can be a lot of ftm when they’re not the same ones that they make you

read over and over and over till you want to shoot yourself.” (Portman, 2006, p. 60)

I first became aware of Ed Connors” approach to reading instruction during the
2003-2004 school year, when my daughter was enrolled in his sixth grade homeroom at
Harwell Middle School. At the time, I was immersed in the literatures on reading
motivation and adolescent boys’ literacy practices, and had become convinced that
maximizing opportunities for students to self-select texts for language arts instruction
might abate the well-documented free-fall of children’s attitudes toward reading for both
academic and recreational purposes over the middle school years. Indeed, my own
experiences teaching ninth grade English had given me first-hand evidence of the power
of self-selection to build reading motivation among teenagers (particularly boys) who had
at some point in middle school lost much of whatever enthusiasm they had previously
had for reading.

For seven years, I taught language arts in the gifted/talented program in a
suburban comprehensive high school. The final four years of my teaching career were

within an interdisciplinary Humanities Block, which I designed in conjunction with a

 

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social studies teacher. Ninth graders would enroll in designated honors sections of
freshman English and World Geography, while tenth graders would enroll in designated
honors sections of sophomore English and World History. My teaching partner and I
would typically share 30-50 ninth graders and 20-40 tenth graders, each group separated
into two sections that would meet concurrently. Instructional units in the paired language
arts and social studies classes were thematically coordinated, and the majority of
activities in both classes involved cooperative grouping on short- and long-term projects
that incorporated content and skills from both disciplines.

Two required elements of the Humanities Block transcended disciplinary
boundaries and served to distinguish the Humanities experience from other honors or pre-
AP options available at the school. One element was the I-Search Project, in which
students selected a topic of personal interest and designed a yearlong program of
investigation into that topic. Students generated research questions during the first few
weeks of school, then spent the majority of the first semester reviewing the literature on
their chosen topic. This research culminated in the writing of an I-Search paper at the end
of the first semester. During the second semester, students engaged in further research as
well as designed materials for a three-hour, culminating exhibition at the end of the
school year. The exhibition was designed like a science fair, with students displaying
their work in the high school commons while peers, other teachers, administrators and
community members were invited to circulate among the displays and query the students
about their projects.

The second distinguishing feature of the Humanities Block experience was a

program of self-selected reading, in which students chose their own reading materials for

 

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self-defined purposes each grading period and made brief presentations of their own
design for each item that they read. Over the course of four years, we experimented with
different ways to encourage students to read broadly and for multiple purposes. One year,
we required that each grading period’s reading selections be from a different genre (for
example, non-fiction/biography one grading period, a novel the next, a poetry collection
for a third). Another year, we assigned point values to different kinds of reading materials
(for example, a poem might carry one point, while a novel might carry 10) and then
required that students complete a certain number of points' worth of independent reading
each grading period. This program was developed in accordance with a mandate from our
local administration to increase students' sheer amount of reading, whether or not that
reading was tied to specific classroom activities or state objectives. The goal was to
increase reading, period.

Over the course of our four years of administering the self-selected reading
component of the Humanities Block, we witnessed the most enthusiasm from students
when we dropped all general restrictions on the reading that students could choose from
each grading period and instead worked with students to fashion individual reading diets.
After studying each student's reading history (based upon an autobiographical essay
centering on prior literacy experiences and the particular experiences each student had
while completing summer reading assignments), I had individual reading conferences
with every student, during which we jointly developed a reading contract for the
semester. Included on the contract were an inventory of possible titles (based upon the
students' prior reading interests as well as the topics they chose for their I-Search

Project), and an expectation for the number of pages that the student would read over the

 

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course of the semester. Contracts were revised each grading period as students
encountered additional reading materials of interest or discovered new reading interests.

As my role as teacher began to morph from repository of literacy knowledge to
facilitator of individual students' literacy development, I began to hear more testimonials
from students about their rediscovery of a passion for reading once their academic and
recreational literacy practices had an opportunity to converge. Boys especially who had
resolutely rejected reading as a hobby came to embrace reading and take great joy in
sharing books and other reading materials. They had been turned off, they said, in middle
school, during which they perceived reading being recast as an instrumental activity to be
applied to high stakes tests and other information management tasks, rather than as an
avenue of pleasure. Sharing my stories of excavating readers with other teachers at
annual meetings of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), I came to
understand the value of choice as a powerful motivator in adolescent literacy
development. The convergence of my experiences with the findings of empirical
investigations into choice increased my enthusiasm for finding ways in which teachers
could incorporate choice into their classrooms, but it also increased my frustration as I
found many teachers skeptical about the possibilities.

When my daughter enrolled in Mr. Connors’ homeroom and explained the unique
arrangement that he had made for incorporating students' self-selected texts as the
primary vehicle of literacy instruction into his classroom, I became intrigued by the
possibilities this classroom offered to investigate boys’ reading choices and habits. At a
parent-teacher conference early in the school year, Connors outlined for me the rationale

behind his pedagogy. Connors noted that his teaching practice was heavily influenced by

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Robb’s Teaching Reading in Middle School (2000), and he felt that the cornerstone to
achievement of Michigan’s Grade Level Content Expectations (GLCE) for reading was
the first objective listed in the domain of Reading Attitude for every grade level, K-8 (and
the only one for grades 3-8): “Students will be enthusiastic about reading and do
substantial reading and writing on their own” (Michigan Department of Education
[MDE], 2006, p. 60). If students are unmotivated to read widely and enthusiastically, he
reasoned, they will neither choose to read on their own for recreational purposes nor
stand much of a chance of mastering the other GLCEs in other domains such as
Comprehension, Fluency, Word Study and Metacognition. Although the Michigan
Department of Education lists Reading Attitude last among domains within the English
Language Arts Reading Strand (MDE, 2006), Connors argued that attitude should be seen
as the foundation for success in other domains of reading achievement, not as a
pedagogical lagniappe to be addressed after the work of teaching comprehension is done.
Furthermore, over the course of five years of teaching sixth grade language arts, he
noticed that the boys in his class have typically had poorer attitudes toward reading than
girls. To promote positive reading attitudes among all his students — but especially boys —
Connors built his language arts curriculum around three key elements that his own
reading of the professional literature suggested carry great power in generating and
sustaining positive attitudes and high motivation toward reading: opporttmities for self-
selection of personally interesting texts, an emphasis on building students’ visualization
skills, and a reading workshop framework for instruction based on the Literature Circles
model.

Having witnessed my own daughter’s reading attitude and motivation increase

 

 

 

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over the course of her year in Mr. Connors’ class, I decided to spend the next school year
observing Connors and his students to learn more about whether and how his approach to
teaching language arts, which resonated so strongly with my own teaching experiences as
well as my research into adolescents’ attitudes toward reading, might encourage more
young adult readers (especially boys) to join the “literacy club.” How Connors
incorporated each of the above components into his instruction will be briefly described
here, with more details about both the specific practices enacted in the curriculum and the
research supporting those practices to follow in subsequent chapters.
Self-selection

The amount of fieedom given to students to self-select personally interesting
reading materials for their language arts instruction was for me the most striking element
of Connors’ language arts cuniculum in terms of both its departure from traditional
norms of reading instruction for middle school students and its similarity to what I had
attempted to do in my own classroom. Connors’ own background as an unmotivated
reader in middle school informed his decision to structure his language arts curriculum
around students’ self-selected texts. He recalled a healthy reading diet of magazines,
newspapers and other kinds of sports-related texts, but this enthusiastic reading was
conducted entirely exclusive of the reading instruction he received in school. He did not
enjoy reading as defined and assigned by his middle school teachers. “I don’t really like it
when people give me books to read,” he said. “It’s too schoolish. I like to read what I like
to read.” Connors admits that even as an adult, he is “a voracious reader,” but only within
the domain of texts that he self-selects.

One kind of text that Connors avidly collects and reads is professional books for

 

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teachers, especially books about language arts instruction. In his reading of the
educational literature, he has noticed “a trend toward the Reader’s Workshop approach
over whole-class novel approaches” among the best practices advocated in professional
monographs such as Teaching Reading in Middle School (Robb, 2000) and In the Middle
(Atwell, 1998). Connors believes that by incorporating students’ self-selected texts into a
Reader’s Workshop setting, he can learn more about what his students are interested in
reading and can expand their reading interests through a process he calls “webbing.” As
he explains:

Take a student who likes the Series of Unfortunate Events books. This is about

children who have to overcome something. Here is another book, totally unrelated

to the Series of Unfortunate Events, that deals with the same thing. And gradually,
your reading interests expand. You can’t just stick with horse books or Series of

Unfortunate Events in upper grades, where the reading gets more complex.
Through “webbing” off of students’ self-selected texts, Connors creates a permeable
language arts classroom (Dyson, 1993, 2003) in which students’ personal reading
interests are honored and Connors can promote positive attitudes toward reading a variety
of different kinds of texts.

The Homestead Public School District, in which Harwell Middle School is
located, organizes the school year on a trimester basis, and Mr. Connors used a different
strategy for incorporating students’ self-selected texts into the reading curriculum each
trimester of the 2004-05 school year. During the first trimester, students were expected to
engage in independent reading with self-selected texts, recording titles and number of

pages read each night on a calendar, which Connors checked at the end of each week.

 

 

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Upon completion of a text, students would complete a brief book report worksheet. While
Connors did lead the class in read-alouds and mini-lessons on various reading
comprehension strategies (e. g., visualizing, drawing inferences) for which students
received participation grades, the overall language arts grade that students received for
the first trimester was determined almost entirely by the students’ independent reading
logs and book reports.

During the second trimester, Connors introduced the Genre Project, in which
students’ self-selection of texts for independent reading was structured around five
genres: realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, biography, and science fiction. For
each genre, Connors provided students with a differently formatted book report
worksheet, and completed book reports were kept in a folder in the back of the room for
students to peruse and discover new titles that they might be interested in reading.
Because students complained about a relative paucity of science fiction titles in the
school and classroom libraries, Connors changed the assignment mid-way through the
trimester to allow students to choose their fifth book from any of the other genres if they
were unable to find a science fiction text that interested them.

Finally, the third trimester was devoted to a culminating Book Project, in which
students were to select a book from any genre to read and around which to structure a
poster presentation to be delivered to the class during the final weeks of the school year.
The only restrictions on text selection for this project were that the book have more than
150 pages, and that it be a title that the student had not read previously. Every day
throughout all three trimesters, Connors included Drop Everything and Read (DEAR)

time, usually first thing in the morning, during which students were free to read any text

 

 

 

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narrative
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that they liked.
Visualization

A reader’s mental ability to visualize the actions and world of a text has been
identified as a successful reading comprehension strategy (e.g., Harvey & Goudvis, 2000;
Parsons, 2006; Robb, 2000; Sadoski, 1983; Wilhehn, 1997) as well as an indispensable
skill for aesthetic engagement with a text (Kaj der, 2006; Parsons, 2006; Rosenblatt,
1978). According to Kajder (2006), “[e]ngaged reading is a visual experience, evoking
the creation of an imagined story world often referred to as a ‘mental movie’” (p. 44).
Connors believed that helping students with their visualization skills is the place to start
building positive attitudes toward reading. He reasoned that students who are unable to
visualize meaning in a text will not be able to engage with a text beyond the surface level
and not enjoy reading print in the way that they enjoy engaging with other media
narratives that directly appeal to their visual imaginations such as television and video
games. By Connors’ logic, an inability to visualize meaning in a text could impair other
higher level reading comprehension processes, such as the ability to draw inferences.
Thus, a strong emphasis on building students’ visualization skills formed the foundation
upon which Connors built most other cognitive and affective objectives in his language
arts curriculum.

This concern for building visualization skills permeated the reading and writing
activities that Connors set up for his students. He presented vocabulary lessons as
explorations of “picture words,” emphasizing the power of many words to evoke vivid
mental images (Robb, 2000). Mini-lessons based on short readings from the Daybook of

Critical Reading and Writing (Claggett, Reid & Vinz, 1999) consistently focused on

 

 

 

identifilng
they evoke
(Spinelli. l
led into St:
the novels
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identifying “picture words” in poetry and prose and representing the visual images that
they evoked in a variety of ways. Read-alouds from novels such as Maniac Magee
(Spinelli, 1990) and A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning (Snicket, 1999)
led into small-group activities that involved storyboarding and acting out key scenes from
the novels. The culmination of this emphasis on visualization skills was an invitation
issued by Connors to his students during the second trimester of the school year to bring
in texts that they enjoyed reading and that they felt were especially effective in terms of
conjuring vivid imagery in the reader’s imagination. On the specified day, students
brought in a variety of traditional and non-traditional texts, and Connors then led his
classes through a series of writing tasks in which students identified “picture wor ” in
their texts, described the effect that those words had on them as they read, and finally
drew pictures of the images that they saw.
Literature Circles

The third component of Connors’ language arts pedagogy — a reading workshop
framework based on Daniels’ (2002) Literature Circles model — was perhaps the least
developed element of the curriculum during the year I spent observing Connors and his
students, despite Connors’ strong faith in the power of positive peer support to motivate
reluctant readers. During the 2003 -2004 school year (the year in which my daughter was
a student in Mr. Connors’ class), most mornings’ DEAR periods were followed by small
group conversations about the materials that students had been reading, which segued
into a brief, informal whole class discussion in which both Connors and his students
talked about what they were reading and swapped recommendations for future reading.

To facilitate peer discussions after DEAR time and during regular language arts lessons,

10

 

 

 

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per cluster]
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students were seated in clusters of two tables the entire year (seating four or five students
per cluster), and students were free to choose with whom they wished to be seated. There
was, to say the least, a great deal of conversation about reading in Connors’ language arts
classroom.

However, during the 2004-2005 school year, Connors and his teaching partner
faced a group of students that they felt was in general less well-disciplined than the
previous year’s class. Connors began the year as he had his four previous years, with the
students seated in rows facing the chalkboard in order to facilitate matching names and
faces, but rather than rearranging the tables into clusters as he had previously, he retained
the classroom’s original arrangement for the entire year. Only twice during my
observations were tables arranged in clusters, and only then for particular activities, with
a return to the original arrangement immediately after the activity was completed.
Connors did retain small group conversations throughout the year’s language arts
activities, but in contrast to the previous year, these conversations were mostly limited to
pairs of students (rather than to groups of four or five) with little to no “travel” away
from the seats in which they began the day. This resulted in a classroom environment that
was more teacher-directed than I had anticipated, and I believe has important
implications for interpreting the findings of this study, which I will address in Chapter 5.

The Study

Connors indicated in a series of interviews that a key assumption underlying all of
the strategies he incorporated into his language arts instruction was that students come to
school with rich literacy lives that operate under the radar of the literacy practices valued

and assessed by traditional language arts pedagogy. Rather than being wholly averse to

11

 

 

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the practice of reading, a child who appears unmotivated to read and underachieves in the
language arts may actually be a voracious reader of a wide variety of texts that do not
happen to fall within the narrow limits of ‘that counts as reading,” as defined by
classroom norms. Students who in a classroom context appear aliterate (that is, they are
able to read well yet deliberately avoid doing so) thus may be adopting a stance against
externally defined norms for reading in the classroom context, but outside of that context
may be leading a literacy life characterized by reading deeply into and across texts from a
variety of print and non-print genres, engaging in the very sorts of literacy practices that
educators believe good readers should engage in, although with a different array of texts
than many educators like to assign.

This is precisely the attitude toward reading for academic versus self-defined (or
vernacular) purposes that Connors claimed to have adopted as a middle school reader.
This is also the attitude that many of the boys in my own language arts classrooms took
toward reading, defining themselves as non-readers while sifting through backpacks
stuffed with well-read magazines, newspapers, Internet printouts, technical manuals and
comic books for the barely-read Turtlebackc edition of whatever classic novel we were
studying that day (Cavazos-Kottke, 2005). Such contextual aliteracy is also the attitude
found among the participants in studies by Smith and Wilhelm (2002, 2006), Newkirk
(2002), Fink (2006) and Kajder (2006), who perfectly summarizes the attitude of the
alternately voracious and aliterate reader with this quote from her student Gus:

Here’s what it is I don’t read books. I do all we do in class, and pick up a lot. I

talk to the gang in here that does read, and pick up some more. I go online. But,

be real. When I want to read, this isn’t it I read the paper in the morning. I read

12

Lt. fi‘
M

4;
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MI. Cor

his bOyg

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implen

 

articles and guides on PS3. I read what I get when friends text me. I read a ton of

blogs, but I aggregate them or else it would take scads of time I go there for

the cheats I used to read liners of CD’s, but now I just read online because I

download MPB’s from iTunes. I had to read my car manual last night because one

of the lights got busted. But, I know that stufldoesn ’t count. (p. 5, emphasis
added)
Kajder continues with her thoughts on Gus’ comments:

As a reader, he read authentically and purposefully. He was reading selectively

and critically, evaluating online gaming sites and blogs. His reading involved

multiple genres and modalities. He was savvy enough to know how to navigate
in-class tasks, but he needed to be drawn into higher-order tasks that addressed

texts as tools for learning. And clearly, his perception of his own competency as a

reader was impacting his work in the classroom. Gus was a reader. Just not in the

English classroom (p. 5)

Mr. Connors’ assumption about the vernacular literacy lives of his students, particularly
his boys, thus carries the warrant not only of personal experience but also of published
research into adolescent literacies.

Connors was convinced that the best way to facilitate his students’ literacy
deveIOpment was to break down as many barriers as possible between the vernacular
literacies his students carried with them and the academic literacy practices enacted in the
classroom. The above three strategies — self-selection of personally interesting reading
materials, an emphasis on visualization skills, and a reader’s workshop framework — were

implemented with this goal in mind. The present study was designed to interrogate

13

I

Connors a

assumption

 

particular g
llhat are ti
classroom?
enact in the.

practices ir

 

between he
students' a
Connors‘ 1
reading ar

mastery Q

Connors’ assumptions about his students’ literacies and the practices he based on those
assumptions, to discover the extent to which those barriers were broken down for a
particular group of sixth graders over the course of one year in his language arts class.
What are the vernacular literacies engaged in by Connors’ students outside of the
classroom? Do they differ markedly from the academic literacy practices the students
enact in this classroom? When invited to bring the texts of their vernacular literacy
practices into the classroom context, do students choose to do so? Are there differences
between boys and girls in this regard? Does any of this have a noticeable impact on the
students’ attitudes toward reading? Ultimately, how successfully do students in Mr.
Connors’ permeable classroom achieve R.AT.06.01, “Students will be enthusiastic about
reading and do substantial reading and writing on their own,” (MDE, 2006) the one
Michigan Grade Level Content Expectation that Connors sees as the bedrock upon which

mastery of all other objectives rests? These were the questions that launched this study.

14’

1 "3

mar"

 

In T
Krassotkir.
.. . [They]

(p. 292). t.

 

conclusio
motivatior
Valued sil
love of re
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Conclusit
label The
(p. 451)
35 the n
c0115.:q

le Ell-1n

CHAPTER 2
Review of the Literature
Introduction
In The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky, 1880/1952), the preteen boy Kolya
Krassotkin claims that studying Greek and Latin in schools “is simply a police measure
...' [They] were introduced because they are a bore and because they stupefy the intellect”
(p. 292). One hundred twenty five years later, some researchers have drawn similar
conclusions in their attempts to explain boys' disengagement with school and low
motivation for reading. Newkirk (2002) argues that the educational establishment has
valued silent reading more as a means of social control than as a means of nurturing a
love of reading, the tacit goal being to tame impulsive behavior in children (which is in
turn associated more with boys than with girls). Clark (1998) comes to a similar
conclusion regarding foreign language instruction. O'Brien, Stewart and Moje (1995)
label the dominant instructional paradigm of secondary schools a “pedagogy of control,”
(p. 451) in which a one-way flow of information from teacher to student has been reified
as the most efficient model for the delivery of information to students. A major
consequence (unintended or not) is the branding of a narrow range of knowledge as
legitimate, implicitly and often explicitly devaluing much of students' extracurricular
funds of knowledge as illegitimate (Alvermann, 1998; O’Brien, Stewart & Moje, 1995).
Perhaps the most strident recent indictment of schools as institutions of social control
comes in a historical essay by Gatto (2003): “it is in the interest of complex management,

economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from

one another and to discard them if they don't conform. [Schools are] drill centers for

15

 

the habits a
children or

Stu
number of
girls on a ti
Schmelzer

Operation

 

Sommers.
boys tend
themselve
Skills (Bi:
Brozo. 2(
Particular
(mite V01
’iaPPrOp

2003 )_

ClaSSl’0(
read'mE

descn'b

the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves
children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants” (pp. 37-3 8).

Studies of adolescent boys’ reading habits and achievement have highlighted a
number of problematic trends. Cognitively, boys consistently underperform relative to
girls on a number of standardized measures of reading and writing ability (Brozo &
Schmelzer, 1997; Gurian, 2001; Newkirk, 2002; Organisation for Economic Co-
Operation and Development & UNESCO Institute for Statistics [OECD-UIS], 2003;
Sommers, 2000; Smith & Wilhehn, 2002; Young & Brozo, 2001). Affectively, many
boys tend to have such a strong aversion to literacy that they will resist identifying
themselves as “readers,” actively avoiding opportunities to read despite having adequate
skills (Bintz, 1993; Moss, 1999; OECD-UIS, 2003; Smith & Wilhelm 2002; Young &
Brozo, 2001). This tendency among boys to reject the descriptor of “reader” is
particularly odd, given that most boys profiled in the some studies do indeed read (many
quite voraciously), although not from sources typically sanctioned by schools as
“appropriate” reading material (N ewkirk, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002; Wilhehn,
2002)

Why did these boys resist identifying themselves as readers, and are there
classroom contexts in which they may have been more likely to count their personal
reading habits as constitutive of an identity as a reader? This case study was designed to
describe the different literacies in which middle school boys engage within the context of
a language arts classroom built around students' self-selected reading materials. To what
extent would middle school boys in such a literacy curriculum draw distinctions between

academic and personal literacy practices and to what extent might their attitudes toward

16

my

 

   

reading ch

(in en the t

M;
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reading change over the course of a year’s experience with such a reading curriculum?
Given the linkages between reading attitude, reading frequency and reading achievement
(Bean, 1998), answering those questions should yield a better understanding of the
personal literacies that middle school boys engage in outside of the radar of a traditional
literacy curriculum, which might in turn help teachers better scaffold meaningfirl literacy
instruction for boys.

Theoretical Perspective

My conceptual framework for understanding literacy is rooted in the idea that
literacy is a social practice in which peOple engage for multiple purposes. As articulated
by Barton and Hamilton (2000), the fundamental unit of analysis from such a perspective
is the literacy practice, a “general cultural way of utilising written language which people
draw upon in their lives, [involving] values, attitudes, feelings, social relationships
awareness of literacy, constructions of literacy and discourses of literacy, how people talk
about and make sense of literacy [as well as] the social processes which connect people
with one another [including] shared cognitions represented in ideologies and social
identities” (pp. 7-8). In short, “literacy is best understood as a set of social practices
[which] are observable in events which are mediated by written texts” (p. 9).

Different literacies are associated with different contexts. For example, the
literacy practices encouraged and rewarded by certain literacy classrooms may appear
radically different from those in which middle schoolers eagerly engage outside of
school. While both may involve social interactions around a common text, the discourses
governing those interactions as well as the texts themselves may differ considerably.

Thus, it is more useful to conceive of an individual's literacy in the plural, that is, an

17

 

 

individual
social or it.
literacy.

A l ’
vemaculai

literacies :

 

power anc|
p. 13). In
and revva
example
reflects '
ans PTO:
are the ‘
radar 0
relativt
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individual practices multiple literacies over the course of his or her life, with particular
social or institutional contexts enforcing different boundaries for “what counts” as
literacy.

A literacy as social practice perspective distinguishes between dominant and
vernacular literacy practices within an individual's repertoire of literacies. Dominant
literacies are “part of whole discourse formations, institutionalised configurations of
power and knowledge which are embodied in social relationships” (Barton & Hamilton,
p. 12). In other words, dominant literacies are those literacies that are publicly practiced
and rewarded within major institutional contexts, such as school and government. For
example, close reading and textual analysis of literary texts is a literacy practice that
reflects the dominant literacy enforced and rewarded by traditional secondary language
arts programs (O’Brien, Stewart & Moje, 1995). Vernacular literacies, on the other hand,
are the “underground” literacy practices in which people engage, typically outside of the
radar of institutional authority. Sharing a comic book with a peer and debating the
relative strengths of a superhero and his or her archenemy is an example of a literacy
practice in which many young people engage, but which typically occurs in non-
classroom contexts. This is not to say that vernacular literacy practices are necessarily
subversive of or antithetical to the goals of traditional academic literacy practices. These
practices are simply the funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992) that
children utilize outside of the classroom and that are not typically embraced by the
language arts curriculum enacted in many classrooms.

A key element of this perspective on literacy is the purpose that an individual has

for engaging in a given literacy practice, and a major factor in many boys' opting to

18

 

disenf-Ia
student
Csiksze
bervveer
like to p
for futur
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purposes
work” 01
way to ft
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disengage from active literacy practice in academic contexts is the positioning of a
student and classroom at cross-purposes. Newkirk (2002), Clark (1998), Bean (1998),
Csikszentrnihalyi (1990b) and Ivey (1999), among others, see a fundamental mismatch
between school’s purposes for teaching literacy and the purposes to which students would
like to put their abilities. Whereas schools stress the instrumental importance of literacy
for future individual success (an especially visible phenomenon in classrooms centered
on preparing students for high-stakes testing), children tend to value literacy for social
purposes. Newkirk (2002), Finders (1997) and Dyson (1993, 2003) emphasize the “social
work” of writing, in which students incorporate their peers into their creative fictions as a
way to forge social bonds and exchange social capital. Other investigators focus on the
social work of reading, by which students network, build relationships and solve
personally relevant problems through discussions of shared reading (Bean, 1998; Davies,
1998; Dutro, 2001; Galda, Ash & Cullinan, 2001; Guzzetti, Young, Gritsavage, Fyfe, &
Hardenbrook, 2002; Millard, 1998; Raphael, McMahon, Goatley, Bentley Boyd, Pardo &
Woodman, 1992; Raphael & McMahon, 1994; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002). This mismatch
between what schools want students to do with literacy and the immediately relevant
purposes that students see literacy as valuable for pursuing was one of Dewey’s

(1902/ 1990, 1915/1990, 1938) most persistent complaints about “traditional” modes of
education, in which “the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the
textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and
activities of the child himself” (1915/ 1990, p. 34). Contemporary researchers have made
common cause with Dewey in identifying this mismatch of purpose as particularly

demotivating for students of literacy and in suggesting that an academic context for

19

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

literacy in
hteracies l

facilitating

In
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and conte
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attivit'.

literacy instruction that creates spaces for students' personal interests and vernacular
literacies has potential for supporting positive attitudes toward literacy as well as for
facilitating achievement in academic literacy practices.
Review of the Literature

In this section, I will begin by reviewing a number of theories for boys’
disengagement from academic literacy practices, including developmental theories that
focus on boys' lower self-efficacy as a result of early negative experiences with reading,
and contextual theories that focus on a mismatch of purposes for reading between
teachers and students as well as the gender politics of reading that emerge in adolescence.
I will then review the research on boys' vernacular literacy practices and how they
contrast with the dominant literacy practices of school. Finally, I will review a number of
instructional recommendations based on this understanding of adolescents' literacy
practices. I will focus on two models — Book Club and Literature Circles — that synthesize
these recommendations into an approach to literacy instruction that appears especially
promising for promoting boys' participation in academic literacy practices.
Reading Competency and Motivation

Feelings of competency form an essential component in several domain-general
(Eccles, Wigfield & Schiefele, 1998; Schunk, 1985) and literacy-specific (Clark, 1998;
Guthrie & Wigfield, 2001; Hinchman, Alverrnann, Boyd, Brozo & Vacca, 2003) models
of motivation. Social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) privileges self-efficacy for a given
activity (a competency judgement based upon feedback from myriad sources) as a
primary factor in determining one's future engagement in that activity. Self-determination

theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) conceptualizes motivation as a three-way interaction

20

 

 

 

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theory
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level at

undera
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between self-assessments of competence, autonomy and relatedness. According to flow
theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990a), the kind of intense engagement that is most conducive
to further development is impossible without an appropriate match between one's skill
level and the demands of a particular task.

Similarly, developmental explanations for boys’ disengagement with and
underachievement in reading typically argue that boys tend to have more negative
attitudes toward reading than girls do because many boys' earliest school reading
experiences are marked by fiustration. At five or six years of age, the average girl has
undergone sufficient cognitive development to position her for success in learning how to
interact with an abstract symbol system. However, many boys at this age lag behind girls
by a year or two, and so the age at which literacy instruction begins is more amenable to
the average girl's developmental readiness than the average boy's (Kindlon & Thompson,
1999; Soderman, 1986). Many boys are thus set up to experience frustration with early
reading experiences, which may predispose them to disengage from reading in the future
(Ivey, 1999).

However, a biographical study of twelve successful adults with dyslexia suggests
that there may be more to literacy motivation than a sense of competency or self-efficacy.
Contrary to the researcher’s expectations, all participants in the study reported avid
reading despite having significant disabilities from a young age (Fink, 1995). Many had
read widely enough from an area of passionate interest to call themselves experts well
before they achieved reading fluency norms established by their respective schools and
well before they had been instructed in strategies for overcoming their disabilities. The

same phenomenon appears in autobiographical and anecdotal accounts of boys whose

21

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motivation to read, sparked by access to personally interesting reading materials, allowed
them to rapidly overcome gaps in reading achievement due to dyslexia (Buchanan, 2001)
as well as to chronic disengagement from literacy instruction (Brozo, 2002).

In these studies, avid reading within domains of personal interest and self-
generated purposes for reading allowed individual vernacular literacies to blossom, and
students' attitudes and abilities in dominant literacy practices showed positive gains. In
other words, the development of students' vernacular literacies facilitated the
development of their skills in dominant literacies. Several themes emerge from a review
of investigations into particular features of recreational and academic contexts that
support (or hinder) boys' positive engagement with multiple literacies.

Purposes For, and Stances Toward, Reading

One important theme, introduced above, is the congruence (or lack thereof)
between students' and teachers' purposes for engaging in literacy practices. On one level,
an incongruity between students' and schools' purposes can shut down active participation
in classroom literacy events. Through the lens of Reader-Response Theory (Rosenblatt,
1978), a mismatch between efferent and aesthetic stances toward reading might also
bring students and schools to cross-purposes. The efferent stance, favored by
standardized tests and the New Critical close reading paradigm, focuses readers’ attention
on what information or concrete understanding they can take away from a text. It is at the
heart of the pedagogy of control (O'Brien, Stewart & Moje, 1995). The aesthetic stance,
on the other hand, involves engagement with a text at an experiential level, in which
readers connect their “lived-through experiences” with those of literary protagonists.

Rosenblatt claimed that the aesthetic stance is the most appropriate to take toward

22

 

literafuf“
can inVll
Kottke. I
adopt an
“back-to
engagent
exposed
classroor
2000; Be
Pardo &
1992 ).

Lherac}

 

 

literature, although one can imagine informational texts (for example, biographies) that
can invite aesthetic response beyond their efferent purposes (Alexander, 1997; Cavazos-
Kottke, 2006). Fowler (1988) and Barrs (2000) theorized that encouraging students to
adopt an aesthetic stance would better motivate them to engage with reading than a
“back-to-basics” emphasis. Several studies have demonstrated that greater student
engagement — as well as levels of achievement equal to those displayed by students
exposed to a traditional, skills-based curricula — occurs in the context of literacy
classrooms in which aesthetic stances toward reading have been emphasized (Barrs,
2000; Bean, 1998; Cox & Many, 1992; Raphael, McMahon, Goatley, Bentley, Boyd,
Pardo & Woodman, 1992; Raphael & McMahon, 1994; Wiseman, Many & Altieri,
1992)

Literacy and Gender Discourse

Most of these studies emphasize that a congruence of purposes for literacy
mastery and an aesthetic stance toward engaging with a text are motivating for all
students, not just boys. Why then don’t we see equal levels of disengagement from the
school-sanctioned practices of literacy between the genders? Why do boys disengage
more readily than girls?

Many researchers point to the predominantly feminine environments of
elementary and middle school instruction (particularly in literacy) as a prime source of
boys’ disengagement and underachievement in literacy (Barrs, 2000; Dressman, 1997;
Dutro, 2001; Kindlon & Thompson, 1999; Martino, 1995, 1999, 2000a, 2000b; Millard,
1998; Sadker & Sadker, 1994; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002; Young & Brozo, 2001). As boys

become more aware of themselves as actors within a gender regime (typically during the

23

 

 

middle sch
lenitrhnllb'
into a fat
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middle school years), they begin to adopt markers of masculinity and reject markers of
femininity in their construction of a gender performance that will facilitate their induction
into a favored social clique. Why boys are more adamant about rejecting anything
associated with femininity than girls are about rejecting markers of masculinity is not
well understood. Martino (2000a, 2000b) suggests that homophobia is the driving force
behind such rejections, although he does not address the question of why homophobia
should be stronger among boys than among girls. To be seen as a “sissy” raises more
hackles among adults and peers than to be seen as a “tomboy.”

Whatever the source of this double standard, it remains clear that rejection of
some forms of literacy is a standard feature of the masculine “identity kit” (Gee, 1989)
that many boys appropriate in adolescence. Reading widely and well, and with good
cheer, becomes strongly associated with femininity, and hence serves as a litmus test in
the social negotiation of boys’ gender identities. Boys who transgress these gender
boundaries may risk especially virulent social ostracism (Martino, 1999, 2000a).
Boys’ Vernacular Literacy Practices

Despite the exclusion of the label “reader” from the masculine identity kits
appropriated by many adolescent boys, it would be a mistake to call such boys aliterate.
Close study of the literacy practices of middle school and adolescent boys reveals a
paradox. While many boys refuse to identify themselves as readers, openly denigrating
reading as something irrelevant to their lives, most boys actually do read, some quite
voraciously (Hinchman, et al., 2003; Newkirk, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002). Many
boys do not reject reading per se, but rather school-defined norms of reading, choosing

instead to engage with texts that are considered “disreputable” by school standards (and

24

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hence. “no

 

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control ox I
resistancel

literacy pr

Vemacula

 

literacy or
indit'idua
the textuz

of readir.

hence, “not really reading”) in order to resist what they perceive as encroaching external
control over their identities (Newkirk, 2002). Disaffected girls often take this line of
resistance, too (Bintz, 1993). The “pedagogy of control” that privileges a narrow range of
literacy practices as dominant erects boundaries of legitimacy that often exclude students'
vernacular literacies (O'Brien, Stewart & Moje, 1995). To indulge in an alternative
literacy outside of the school establishment’s literacy norms is to assert one’s
individuality and gender identity. Inside of this fi'amework are arguments that examine
the textual content of the literacy curriculum as well as that of students’ preferred kinds
of reading to find sources of disengagement from literacy.

What kinds of texts most engage boy readers? Not surprisingly, boys’ favorite
types of reading material are not often in great supply in school or classroom libraries
(Worthy, 1996; Worthy, Moorman & Turner, 1999). Also not surprisingly, boys’ least
favorite types of reading material are ofien abundant in schools (Worthy, Moorman,
Turner, 1999). Texts that are most likely to engage boy readers tend to be short, highly
visual (both in description and graphic accompaniment), challenging to a boy’s notions
about the world, edgy, closely connected to real life (even in a metaphoric sense, as is the
case with fantasy novels), current and humorous (Newkirk, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm,
2002; Wilhelm, 2002; Worthy, 1996). Broadly, genre fiction (such as science fiction,
fantasy, horror and mystery), series fiction, magazines, and graphic novels and comic
books constitute the texts of many boys' vernacular literacies (Cavazos—Kottke, 2006;
Hall & Coles, 1999; Nell, 1988; Newkirk, 2002). However, few teachers surveyed were
inclined to honor these reading preferences for inclusion in the literacy curriculum,

despite evidence that so-called “light” reading does not stunt children’s literacy

25

developmc‘
Se‘

about stud
representa
classroom
arguments
education
Brozo an;
as boys (‘
Wilhelm.
to better
C
Dressma
adolesce
context-
iS intere.
interest I
[10m ta”:
(2000):
materia

mCllnek‘

 

could S

Yemat

 

development (Galda, Ash & Cullinan, 2001).

Several authors have explored the instructional implications of our knowledge
about students’ reading preferences. Brozo and Schmelzer (1997) advocate for greater
representation of positive male archetypes in the shared reading materials used in literacy
classrooms as one means of orienting boys toward engagement with reading. Like
arguments for bilingual education that stress building early success into students’
educational experience by teaching content area coursework in students’ native language,
Brozo argues that boys must be booked with material that speaks to their life experience
as boys (Young & Brozo, 2001). Other authors (N ewkirk, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002;
Wilhelm, 2002) present similar arguments for changing the content of literacy instruction
to better incorporate boys’ reading preferences.

Other researchers urge caution in taking such findings at face value, however.
Dressman (1997), Bintz (1993) and Smith and Wilhelm (2002) assert that children’s and
adolescents’ reading preferences are never stable constructs, but are instead highly
context-sensitive as young people perform different aspects of their identity. What a boy
is interested in reading at home today might be very different from what he expresses an
interest in reading at school tomorrow, and both preferences may in turn differ radically
fiom what he is motivated to read next week. Young (Young & Brozo, 2001) and Barrs
(2000) both note that simply substituting current texts for more “boy-friendly” reading
materials can be just as oppressive to readers as the status quo. Indeed, if boys remain
inclined to define themselves in opposition to school norms of literacy, shifting nomis
could simply lead to resistance on a different fiont as the institutionalization of

vernacular literacies might strip such reading materials of their original appeal

26

 

(Alterman
Shakespea
work" (’19
new Eminl
expresses
advocates

finding be

Choice

 

A
between i
into the 1
them anc
199313
€51nge
Worth}
attit'et
literac
may ‘

Hidi.

(Alvermann, 1998; Dressman, 1997; Neilsen, 1998). In the words of William
Shakespeare, “If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to
wor ” (1974, p. 851). The boy in a recent MAD Magazine feature who throws away the
new Eminem CD, proclaiming it “totally ruined” because his mother bought it for him
expresses the same sentiment (Hempel & Sinberg, 2005, p. 23). Barrs (2000) instead
advocates not changing the texts, but rather changing boys’ orientation toward them,
finding better ways to engage them on an aesthetic level.
Choice

A different solution, proposed by many researchers, is to disrupt the opposition
between vernacular and dominant literacies by building as many opportunities as possible
into the literacy curriculum for students to choose both reading materials that interest
them and means of expressing their insights about those readings (Appleby, 1989; Bintz,
1993; Fink, 1995; Guzzetti, Young, Gritsavage, Fyfe & Hardenbrook, 2002; Hektner &
Csikszentrnihalyi, 1996; Hunt, 1970; Millard, 1998; Whalen & Csikszentrnihalyi, 1991;
Worthy, Moorman & Turner, 1999). A “permeable curriculum” (Dyson, 1993, 2003) that
actively incorporates students' personal interests, “unofficial” texts and vernacular
literacies into the classroom discourse is a model for nurturing intrinsic motivation that
may even extend beyond the literacy classroom to other content areas (Alvermann, 1998;
Hidi, 1990; Neilsen, 1998). This line of argument dovetails neatly with those calling for
increased sensitivity to the purposes students bring to literacy activity (e. g., Duke,
Purcell-Gates, Hall & Tower, 2006), which finds its roots in Dewey (193 8). This is not a
case of dumbing down the curriculum or letting the inmates run the asylum, as none of

these studies support teachers’ total abdication of authority for determining the direction

27

.£.L!.u_.i§3

of literaCl
individua
proximal
1998).

G
motivate:
det'elopn
influence
list of ch.
includes.
and stud
learning
with pee
e\‘aluati
and rep;-
Charact:
COhere:

Coordjn

Pm de

 

 

the fol

[Itera3

 

mere}.

of literacy instruction. Rather, the teacher’s role is reconceived as facilitator of
individuals’ literacy development, bringing instructional goals within children’s zones of
proximal development and within sight of children’s immediate experience (Alvermann,
1998)

Guthrie and Wigfield (2001) synthesize these contextual insights into what
motivates children to engage in literacy in their engagement model of reading
development. In their model, particular instructional processes and contexts positively
influence the cognitive, motivational and social aspects of engagement. Their extensive
list of characteristics of learning environments that support engagement with literacy
includes, among other items, the following elements: connections between the curriculum
and students’ personal experiences; teacher support for students’ autonomy in choosing
learning goals and reading materials; use of interesting texts for instruction; collaboration
with peers for social construction of knowledge; personalized and student-centered
evaluation; and, teachers’ active involvement in developing individuals’ reading skills
and repertoire. They caution that a classroom that exhibits only one or two of these
characteristics may do little to increase students’ engagement, and that an overall
coherence of instructional processes is necessary. Strategies should be integrated and
coordinated to create an entire classroom culture that supports engaged reading. Over the
past decade, a number of instructional paradigms have been designed to do just that. In
the following section, I will discuss two of these: Literature Circles and Book Club.
Literature Circles and Book Club Defined

Despite their many similarities, Book Club and Literature Circles are not

interchangeable terms. Book Club was developed in the early 1990's by a team of

28

. {I

researcherl
as a teachi
ttithln the
|
WritingR
I
group disl
|
skills take
I
reading or_
apically '
might als
chance tc
artistic re
prompt c
indit'idu,
instructi
their “T;
about th
lflStruct:
thlSlm
Widely ;

“titans

 

researchers led by Tafly Raphael and Susan McMahon (see Raphael & McMahon, 1994)
as a teaching strategy that includes four major components, all of which are experienced
within the course of a single instructional period: Community Share, Reading,
Writing/Representing, and Book Club discussion. Community Share is a time for whole
group discussion and/or instruction. Any direct teaching of literary concepts or language
skills takes place during this time, as does whole class discussion of ideas raised by the
reading or by small group discussions. Reading is the time set aside for reading texts,
typically involving individual silent reading, although large- or small-group oral reading
might also be utilized. The period of Writing/Representing gives individual students a
chance to reflect on what they have read, in the form of either a written journal or an
artistic response in a particular medium. Students may write/represent in response to a
prompt offered by the teacher or may be encouraged to respond freely, reflecting their
individual reactions to a given text. The Book Club phase of the lesson is the heart of this
instructional approach, a phase during which students break into small groups to share
their writing/representations and to discuss both teacher- and student-generated questions
about the reading material. While the order of these phases may vary within a given
instructional period, all four are necessary components of the Book Club program as
envisioned by Raphael and McMahon. In its original conception, Book Club was more
widely implemented with younger students than with secondary students, among whom
Literature Circles were the discussion strategy of choice.

Literature Circles is also an instructional strategy developed by a number of
action researchers in the 1990's to create more authentic, discussion-based contexts for

engaging with literature in the middle school and secondary language arts curriculum (see

29

Daniels. 2
engaged ir
strategy be
experience
material a
response 1
contraSI lt

Circle ac:

 

reading. I

SllOLlld bt

 

 

the $ch

“pen:

 

inlIOdL

 

Daniels, 2002). In contrast with Book Club, which specifies four distinct activities to be
engaged in within a single instructional period, Literature Circles is a more informal
strategy based on eleven principles for increasing authenticity of classroom literacy
experience. A Literature Circles classroom incorporates student choice of reading
material and small temporary groups of students who are free to form new groups in
response to new book choices. Diflerent groups of students can read diflerent books, in
contrast to Book Club, in which the whole class usually reads a core text. Literature
Circle activities should be implemented according to a regular and predictable schedule
and student small group discussions are to be guided by students' notes, taken during
reading. Discussion topics are to be student generated and small group discussions
should be marked by natural conversation, that is, students talking about what they have
read in a manner similar to how they might converse about books outside of the
classroom. In a Literature Circles classroom, the teacher serves as a facilitator to
encourage discussion, often participating actively within small-group discussions rather
than acting as a monitor or a purveyor of discussion questions. Evaluation is
collaborative, with teacher and students working together both to determine standards for
assessment and to evaluate the quality of students' Literature Circle participation. Finally
-— and for Daniels (2002), most importantly — a sense of playfulness should pervade the
entire experience.

As originally conceived, Literature Circles are more informal than Book Club, to
the extent that there is no set of prescribed activities that constitute a Literature Circles
experience. However, as Daniels (2002) acknowledges, one of the most popular means of

introducing Literature Circles to students is to provide students with “role sheets” that

30

 

mecify par
intent of r
books too
the classrc
outside of
Daniels (2
particular
books. tht
means. lr.
than \tith
character
strenuou]

Benefits

I/)

file Sim;

 

ACCOIdi:

  
 

“ill be

  
      
  
 

‘ for the
Llleram;
“Semit-
”Stiller;
Sptcifi; :

specify particular tasks for individuals to perform in the group discussion. The original
intent of role sheets was to provide a launch pad upon which natural conversation about
books could begin. As students become as comfortable conversing about books within
the classroom as they would feel conversing about other topics of personal interest
outside of school, the role sheets were supposed to disappear. Unfortunately, according to
Daniels (2002), some teachers found comfort in holding students accountable to
particular roles, and thus instead of being used as a key to unlock conversation about
books, the role sheets themselves often became the end of conversation rather than the
means. In many quarters Literature Circles became synonymous with role sheets rather
than with free-flowing, authentic conversation about books. Daniels has objected to this
characterization, and in his most recent book about Literature Circles has made a
strenuous appeal for the original intentions of the strategy.

Benefits of Book Clubs]

Several authors suggest that book club activities may increase motivation because
the structure of such activities aids students in becoming more self-determined learners.
According to the self-determination theory of motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000), students
will be more motivated to engage in activities that satisfy their needs for relatedness,
competence and autonomy. Such activities can satisfy adolescents' needs for relatedness
by presenting opportunities for peer interactions (Combs, 2003; Raphael, Goatley,
McMahon & Woodman, 1995; Riddle, 1996) as well as for informal interactions with

teachers and more knowledgeable others (e.g., McMahon & Raphael, 1997). Teachers in

 

' For the sake of readability, I have chosen to use the general lower-case term “book clubs” to embrace both
Literature Circles and Book Club activities as well as small-group discussion activities that closely
resemble either strategy but may leave out one or more key element of the originally conceived
instructional paradigm. I will use the upper-case Literature Circles and Book Club when speaking
specifically about the original programs as envisioned by their designers.

31

. my;

boolclubt

 

(thriller.
participatt
ditersity t
by engagi
connectio
stakes on
competen

Blunt. Lir

 

 

 

(Katz & l
who part
Confiden
assertior
actit‘itie
Choice :
Particir
atlit‘iti

Noll. 1

by lncr
Other a:
elltl Ofl

199M

book club-oriented classrooms report more inclusive discussions (Ahang, 1999;
Chandler, 1997; George & Stix, 2000; Peralta-Nash & Dutch, 2000), with more students
participating in small- and whole-group conversations and demonstrating respect for the
diversity of their peers' opinions. In one classroom, a sense of relatedness was nurtured
by engaging parents and students in book club activities, increasing home/school
connections (Dias-Mitchell & Harris, 2001). Other authors suggest that the informal, low-
stakes atmosphere of conversation about books has a positive impact on students' sense of
competence as readers by increasing their self-efficacy for reading and discussion (e. g.,
Blum, Lipsett & Yocom, 2002) and by bolstering students' confidence in their own ideas
(Katz & Kuby, 2001/02; Kong & Fitch, 2002/03). Chandler (1997) reports that students
who participated in a summer book club program returned to school with greater
confidence in their ability to formulate “valid readings” (that is, evidence-based
assertions; see Rosenblatt, 1978), which they promptly displayed in similar literacy
activities during the regular school year. Finally, allowing students a high degree of
choice in reading materials and discussion topics, as well as giving them opportunities to
participate in the evaluation process have been singled out as elements of book club
activities that increase students' sense of autonomy (Burns, 1998; Katz & Kuby, 2001/02;
Noll, 1994; Riddle 1996).

Beyond those authors who have argued that book club activities motivate students
by increasing their sense of competence or expectancy for success in reading, several
other authors have made the case that book clubs motivate by also working on the value
end of the Expectancy-Value model of motivation (e. g., Eccles, Wigfield & Schiefele,

1998). By giving students greater ownership over the entire reading experience, from

 

7‘ it‘ll”
‘ I i

book selection to guiding and evaluating class discussions of books, students may come
to value reading as a vital part of their adolescent identity (Raphael, Goatley, McMahon
& Woodman, 1995; Raphael, Kehus & Damphousse, 2001). Lesperance (2002) observed
that students who participated in a school-wide book club came to value recreational
reading more as they perceived that their personal reading interests were validated
through book club activities, while Ahang (1999) found that students enjoyed and valued
a wider range of reading materials through their exposure to other students' reading
interests in book club activities. As Hall (2003) notes in “The 'Oprahfication' of
Literacy,” the kinds of literacy practices enacted in book clubs have become a defining
feature of vernacular literacies in the past decade, making the book club format a more
authentic context for the study of literature than the traditional close, analytical reading
approach.

While the above theories can help illuminate a general relationship between
participation in book club activities and motivation for reading, many authors have
argued that book clubs may be especially effective with adolescents because they address
this age group's unique developmental needs. Raphael, Kehus and Damphousse (2001)
make the case that Book Club accommodates young adolescents' physical needs by
providing opportunities for movement around the classroom, which can help students
cope with their sometimes wildly fluctuating energy levels. Book clubs can capitalize on
adolescents' newly developed formal operational skills by offering opportunities for
perspective-taking (Raphael & McMahon, 1994), and for “vicariously [experiencing]
events they might not want to live out, but need to ponder and imaginatively explore”

(Smith, 2000, p. 31). Such “subjunctive engagement with text” (Broughton, 2002, p. 35)

33

 

. m‘flu‘

is a unique
adolescent
(Erickson.

structure '

 

who play
2001).

\\
relationsl'
and incre
Studies h;
identity c
low Slahi
aclltitles
rtgintes
identitie.

amldtll:

 

is a unique affordance of adolescent cognition that can also aid the grand task of
adolescent social/emotional development, the need to construct a personal identity
(Erickson, 1963). In addition to the vicarious experiences garnered from reading, the very
structure of book club activities provides adolescents with direct experiences with peers
who play such a vital role in adolescent socialization (Raphael, Kehus & Damphousse,
2001)

While the bulk of the literature on book clubs has argued strongly for a
relationship between participation in book club activities and positive attitudes toward
and increased motivation for engaging in multiple literacy practices, a small number of
studies have explored the consequences of book club participation on adolescents' gender
identity development. Smith (2000), Dutro (2001) and Broughton (2002) noted that the
low stakes discussion among small groups of peers that is at the heart of book club
activities empowered both girls and boys to take more critical stances toward gender
regimes within their classrooms and to construct more flexible, comfortable gender
identities for themselves. Dutro’s (2001) observational study of a Book Club approach in
a middle school classroom revealed that as boys’ engagement with the text intensified,
policing of gender boundaries disappeared. Indeed, high status boys who had given the
most stereotypical gender performances at the start of the observation period were
transformed into avid readers of books from the “American Girl” series. This suggests
that gendered resistance to dominant literacy practices might be addressed more
effectively by nurturing a classroom culture in which boys directly engage with texts than
by forcing boys to confront latent assumptions about gender through critical literacy

activities.

34

‘I
gums—J

lo

 

boys' resi‘
I
comprehe
self-select
and liter.
many of t
readers. i

into a pen

 

literacy i
play a Sp
boys fror

“Umber t

discours

exclusit
titties or
Small- a
SUbject
0{the s
to read

Studen:

 

‘0 Cloc‘a

 

 

Summary and Research Questions

To summarize, research suggests that an effective means for overcoming many
boys' resistance to active participation in academic literacy practices is to implement a
comprehensive program that privileges (among other features) student autonomy through
self-selection of personally interesting texts and student-centered discussion. Book Club
and Literature Circles are two frameworks for instruction that incorporate and coordinate
many of the best practices identified by research as especially motivating for adolescent
readers, incorporating self-selection, aesthetic engagement and a strong social component
into a permeable approach to language arts instruction that values students’ vernacular
literacy practices. A few key studies have further demonstrated that such programs can
play a special part in disrupting the development of a gender regime that alienates many
boys from active participation in academic literacy practices. However, there are a
number of limitations in the current literature on book club activities and gender
discourse that the present study was designed to address.

For one, the majority of studies on book club based classrooms have focused
exclusively on the tasks in which students engage in such contexts. The chief (and often
times only) source of data in these studies is the in-class discourse of students involved in
small- and large-group discussions, with very little consideration of the texts that are the
subject of those discussions (e. g., Johnson, 2000; McMahon & Goatley, 1995). Only one
of the studies of book club based classrooms has analyzed the texts that students choose
to read (Dutro, 2001), and none of the studies have analyzed the processes by which
students select reading materials in the context of such programs. In this study, I sought

to docmnent and analyze the texts that a group of middle school boys chose to read in the

35

 

context of
interesting

Se
classroom:
determine

events. In

 

honoring
documen

freedom l

|
work of l
analyzed

I
those set
COmpara~
Periheab
cornpare

ClaSSYOO

PTESEm

longituc

i“Spire ..

 

context of a book club based classroom in which students self-selected personally
interesting texts that formed the basis of their literacy instruction.

Secondly, none of the published studies on Book Club or Literature Circle
classrooms have attempted to document the vernacular literacy practices of students to
determine the extent to which those practices manifest themselves in academic literacy
events. In other words, despite the promise of such permeable instructional contexts for
honoring students' extracurricular funds of knowledge, the published literature has neither
documented nor analyzed what happens when adolescents are given a high degree of
freedom to cross boundaries between vernacular and academic literacy practices. The
work of Dyson (1993, 2003) on young elementary school students learning to write has
analyzed children's extracunicular firnds of knowledge and explored the ways in which
those vernacular literacy practices permeate academic contexts. However, there is not a
comparable study of the vernacular literacy practices of adolescent boys in a similarly
permeable classroom environment for reading instruction. In this study, I sought to
document the vernacular literacy practices of a class of middle school boys in order to
compare them with the academic literacy practices in which they engaged to determine
the extent to which the borders between literacy practices actually became permeable in a
classroom structured around students' self-selected texts.

Thirdly, the majority of the published studies on book club based classrooms
present either one-shot or short-term observations of classroom interactions, rather than a
longitudinal analysis. This is ironic given many authors' claims that such activities can
inspire once reluctant readers to develop a long-term reading habit. In this study, I

documented and analyzed students' reading selections over the course of a full academic

36

. *1

year to ex
literacy pr
Ft
participati
of attitude
club has:
based cla
attitudes.
address ti
toward re
between
there we:

reading i

academi

_r_

bQOlC clt.

gmllps C

 

Same lC;t
a SChoo';
qualllitg'

mane c

Header,”

 

year to examine what kinds of changes took place in students' academic and vernacular
literacy practices.

Fourth, despite the claim that students had better attitudes toward reading after
participating in book clubs, none of the publications reviewed here offers a measurement
of attitude, only one (Raphael & McMahon, 1994) makes comparisons with a non-book
club based classroom, and none draw comparisons between students within a book club
based classroom. This begs the question: how do we know that the students had better
attitudes, and what or whom are those attitudes better than? In this study, I attempted to
address this gap in the literature by taking multiple quantitative measurements of attitude
toward reading in two book club based language arts classes to make comparisons
between individuals and groups of students within those classes and to explore whether
there were significant differences between, for example, boys and girls of different
reading abilities within the same classroom over the course of the year.

In summary, I sought in this study to document and analyze the vernacular and
academic literacy practices of middle school boys in the context of a language arts
classroom that scaffolds instruction on students' self-selected reading materials and on
book club style interactions. My goal was to draw comparisons between individuals and
groups of students within two book club based language arts classes (both taught by the
same teacher) in terms of both the literacy practices they made visible over the course of .
a school year and the attitudes toward reading for multiple purposes they expressed on
quantitative and qualitative assessments of reading attitude. I hope through this study to
enhance the adolescent literacy literature by documenting both the vernacular and

academic literacy practices of a class of middle school boys over the course of a full

37

academic year, and by comparing these practices with those of girls in the same class.
These results should also enhance the teacher education literature by providing insight
into the ways in which a teacher can fulfill a consultative role in facilitating individual
students' literacy development in a permeable classroom.
This study was guided by four overarching research questions:
1. What are the vernacular literacy practices of a class of middle school boys and
what kinds of texts do these boys engage with in those practices?
2. How and to what extent do these boys' vernacular literacies become visible
within a language arts program structured around students' self-selected texts?
3. How and to what extent do the vernacular and academic literacy practices of
these boys differ from those of the girls within the same class? and,
4. What attitudes toward vernacular and academic literacy practices do these
boys hold, how do they compare with the attitudes of other students, and how
do those attitudes change over the course of an academic year in a book club

based classroom?

38

l
0t

 

the Home
|
school \V.
has been
The dent.
of the de:
profile th
classroor
in Chaptp
account r
the conc‘
participa

dillerem

The Con

l

ilh'lng 0f

 

Ofiiciaj'

area, it;

 

 

halite:

 

CHAPTER 3

 

Methods
Chapter Overview

Observations and interviews for this study took place at Harwell Middle School in
the Homestead Public School District over the course of the 2004-2005 school year. This
school was chosen because of Mr. Connors' unusual approach to teaching reading, which
has been briefly discussed in prior chapters and will be described with more detail below.
The demographics of the school and district population also provided a good combination
of the demographic profiles of surrounding school districts in the region. I will first
profile the district and school before telescoping down to a discussion of the particular
classroom that was involved in this study, expanding on the description previously given
in Chapter 1 of this dissertation. Following discussion of the setting, I will present an
account of the methods used in this study to answer the research questions presented at
the conclusion of Chapter 2. Included in this account will be information on the
participants, data gathering and analysis strategies, and a timeline demonstrating how
different methods were employed during different phases of the school year.

Setting

The Community

The Homestead Public School District serves approximately 3,000 K-12 students
living on the western side of Ilium, a mid-size city in Michigan's Lower Peninsula.
Officially, Homestead is an “urban fringe” district. It encompasses two large residential
areas within Ilium's city limits as well as all of the unincorporated neighborhoods

between Ilium and Birch Creek, the closest suburban community to the west. Ilium's

39

populatior
wealth or
west arter
which fre
facilities.
and scrap
end. The
Homeste,
notjust g

T
$51,343
the Iliun:
Poor‘s [s
The distr
[he SEW;
distribut
indicate.
reIlectit-
malOI er
goi'errm
industry
While 8

BaChElr.

 

population is predominantly working and middle class, with few observable extremes of
wealth or poverty. Traveling westward fiom downtown Ilium along the city's main east-
west artery, you officially enter Homestead by passing underneath a railroad bridge upon
which freight trains shuttle between a complex of four large automobile production
facilities. These factories constitute a vertically integrated system that takes in raw steel
and scrap metal at one end and turns out new, fully assembled automobiles at the other
end. They also comprise the single largest employer of working households in
Homestead, which lies snugly between the Ilium and Birch Creek Public School Districts
not just geographically, but also economically and demographically.

The median household income in the Homestead Public School District was
$51,243 in 2002, slightly above the state average and roughly midway between those of
the Ilium ($33,220) and Birch Creek ($64,445) public school districts (Standard and
Poor's [S&P], 2003). Median housing values for the three districts are similarly ranked.
The distribution of households by income in Homestead is relatively homogeneous across
the seven income brackets used by Standard & Poor's, whereas the household income
distributions for Ilium and Birch Creek skew in opposite directions (see Table A1). As
indicated by Table A1, this relatively even distribution across income categories is more
reflective of the overall distribution in the state. In addition to the automotive industry,
major employers of Homestead citizens include the State of Michigan (many state
government offices lie within Homestead and its immediate vicinities) and the service
industry, as Homestead's neighborhoods orbit one of Ilium's largest commercial zones.
While 81% of adults in Ilium have at least a high school diploma and 27.1% have a

Bachelor's degree or higher, 90.4% of Homestead adults have at least a high school

40

-_.

diploma
are 91.60i
Creek in i
percentag
free or re
students r
county m

0
suburban
by racial
Ilium an.
SUburbs .
Of Black
impolite
Categori ;
raider pe-
Passing
of the s:

Ilium a:

 

7779 Sch

l

bIOCks t

Honles:

 

 

diploma and 36.1% have a Bachelor's degree or higher, and for Birch Creek the figures
are 91.6% and 34.4% respectively (S&P, 2003). Similarly, Homestead is more like Birch
Creek in terms of the number of students classified as economically disadvantaged as a
percentage of overall student enrollment. While 57.1% of the students in Ilium qualify for
free or reduced-price lunches, 16.6% of Homestead students and 13.9% of Birch Creek
students receive these services. These figures compare to a state mean of 30.7%, and a
county mean of 18.9% (S&P, 2003).

Other features of the Homestead community indicate a similar blend of urban and
suburban trends. As Table A2 shows, the distribution of Homestead's student population
by racial/ethnic background forms a middle ground between the race/ethnicity profiles of
Ilium and Birch Creek. Proceeding from the urban environment of Ilium to the semi-rural
suburbs of Birch Creek, the proportion of White students increases, while the proportions
of Black, Hispanic and Native American students decreases. Although the relative
proportions of Birch Creek's student body are closer to the state averages for most
categories, the greater representation of minority students in Homestead should afford a
wider perspective on the diversity of literacy practices within the community. Finally, the
passing and excelling rates of Homestead students on the most recently available results
of the state's assessment of student progress stand midway between the rates posted by
Ilium and Birch Creek across grade levels and subjects.

The School

Harwell Middle School is situated on the far east side of Homestead, only three

blocks fiom the automobile plant that stands on the border between the Ilium and

Homestead districts, and four blocks fi'om one of Ilium's three large comprehensive high

41

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schools. Harwell is, in fact, much closer to this high school than it is to Homestead's own
high school, which is more centrally located in the district. The neighborhoods
surrounding Harwell are solidly working class, filled with the modest, mid-20'h century
homes of automobile plant workers. The area also serves as home to several union halls,
representing the various trades employed at the factories, at least two bars frequented by
factory employees, many small and home-based automobile repair facilities, and the local
VFW and American Legion posts. There is not a more traditional rust-belt neighborhood
in all of Homestead, or perhaps in all of Ilium.

Students come to Harwell Middle School, Homestead's only campus for fifth and
sixth graders, from four elementary schools. They leave Harwell for the Homestead's
single junior high (grades 7 and 8) and, eventually, Homestead High School. Harwell
itself is shaped like a stout letter H, with large rectangular east and west wings united by
a thick central hub. The hub contains the school's library/media center and the
administration offices. The east wing of the school contains the school's gymnasium,
cafetorium, swimming pool, art and music rooms. The west wing is the home of the
guidance offices, all of the regular classrooms and all of the student lockers. Fifth grade
classrooms are south of the central hallways leading past the library to the east wing, and
sixth grade classrooms are to the north. Students in both grades are assigned to two-
teacher teams for their core academic instruction, and are able to choose between choir,
band and orchestra for music. Due to budgetary constraints, there are no foreign language
course options for students at Harwell.

All students at Harwell are assigned to a team of two teachers, one of whom is

their homeroom teacher. Teaching duties for the core content areas are shared between

42

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the two teachers, and students switch between their teachers multiple times each day, as
well as report to various special classes, such as PE, music and art in their homeroom
groups.

The Classroom

During the 2004-2005 school year, Mr. Connors taught language arts to 48
students1 who were enrolled in two homerooms, one assigned to Mr. Connors and the
other assigned to Ms. Julie Price. Teaching duties for each homeroom were divided such
that Connors was responsible for language arts and science instruction and Price was
responsible for math and social studies instruction. Students began each day in their
respective homerooms and switched classrooms at least twice daily in order to receive
instruction in all core areas of the curriculum.

Reading in a variety of formats and for a variety of purposes was built into the
general routine of both Connors’ and Price’s classrooms, independent of reading
instruction in the content areas. Both homerooms began each day with 20 to 30 minutes
of Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) time, during which students were expected to read
silently fiom self-selected texts. No restrictions were placed on the kinds of texts that
students could read during these periods, although as will be discussed later in this study,
students mostly read texts that they had selected to read to fulfill language arts
assignments during their DEAR time. In addition to the regularly scheduled DEAR times,

both teachers also had their classes engage in brief, impromptu DEAR periods after

 

1 Mr. Connors and Ms. Price began the year with a group of 50 students split evenly between their two
homerooms. One student in each homeroom moved out of the school district during the first trimester, and
mid-way through thesecond trimester, one new student moved into the district and was added to Mr.
Connors homeroom. At various times during the school year, a handful of students were moved from Mr.
Connors’ and Ms. Price’s homerooms into other teachers’ homeroom classes, and vice versa. Forty-eight
students were in Connors’ classes for at least two trimesters and participated in all major reading
assignments, and the dataset for this study is limited to information about these 48 students.

43

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students completed assigned tasks in independent work times and frequently included
DEAR in the plans they left for substitutes.

Both classrooms featured small libraries of books from a variety of genres from
which students could check out reading materials (see Figures B1 and B2). These
classroom libraries were organized by genre, with Connors’ library containing separate
baskets marked Realistic Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction and
Biography, which are the five genres from which students were to select books for the
Genre Project. Price’s classroom library also featured a reading comer, a small carpeted
area with bean bag chairs and special lighting where students could spend their DEAR
time. This area also included a reading recommendation wall, where students (and Ms.
Price) could post notecards with comments on books they had read (see Figure B3). It
should be noted at this point that neither classroom library featured any reading materials
other than books, which represents an implicit constraint on the permeability of the
classroom context. While students were not explicitly constrained from reading non-book
texts during DEAR sessions, the lack of availability of magazines, newspapers or even
non-print texts in the classroom libraries did restrict choices of students who had not
brought reading materials fiom home. Nevertheless, the school library did contain a wide
selection of magazines, newspapers and videotapes for student check out, in addition to
books. Connors’ and Price’s students made regular weekly class visits to the school
library over the course of the year, and during DEAR time, Connors would allow one
student at a time to visit the school library to check our or return materials.

Both teachers included read-alouds from popular novels in their regular daily

routines. During the first trimester of the 2004-2005 school year, Connors read A Series

44

 

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of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning (Snicket, 1999) to his homeroom, while to her
homeroom, Price read Jaguar (Smith, 1997) and Joey Pigza Loses Control (Gantos,
2000). Additionally, Price read the following books to both her and Connors’ homeroom
classes during the second and third trimesters: The Magician ’s Nephew (Lewis, 1955),
Number the Stars (Lowry, 1990), Warriors Don’t Cry (Beals, 1994), and Joey Pigza
Swallowed the Key (Gantos, 2000). Read-alouds were typically scheduled as buffers after
content area lessons and before whole class movements, such as to lunch, recess, special
classes or the other teacher’s classroom. These read-aloud periods usually lasted between
10 and 20 minutes, always involved the teacher reading a chapter (or substantial portion
thereof) fiom a book, and were never followed by extension activities. Read-alouds
would occasionally be interrupted for definitions of unfamiliar words, questions for
clarification or brief commentary by the teacher on particular moments in the narrative. A
Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning was especially suited to this style of
read-aloud, as the book’s narrator frequently interrupts the story to define words he uses
in relating the story, often giving off-beat definitions that are tangentially related to the
common uses of the words, affording Connors the opportunity to discuss the denotative
and connotative meanings of the words with his students.

Beyond these routines and activities that both teachers built into their daily
schedules to promote reading, Connors’ language arts curriculum, as would be expected,
involved a great deal of reading. As discussed in the first chapter of this study, Mr.
Connors’ approach to language arts instruction places a premium on attempting to bridge
the gap between students’ vernacular and academic literacy practices in an effort to

promote more positive attitudes toward reading. Each trimester of the 2004-2005 school

45

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year featured a unique suite of activities geared toward that end, but incorporating
students’ self-selected texts into reading instruction, emphasizing the development of
visualization skills, and maintaining a book club framework were components of
Connors’ language arts curriculum that persisted across the three grading periods.

First trimester. During the first trimester, a typical day in Connors’ language arts
class began with a shared reading of a selected text, usually from the Daybook of Critical
Reading and Writing (Claggett, Reid & Vinz, 1999, hereafter referred to as “the
Daybook”), followed by a writing response activity. The response activity was often
taken directly from the activities presented in the Daybook with each selection. Beyond
the published activities, Connors would also challenge students to identify “picture
words” in the reading selection, words that conjured up especially vivid images in
students’ minds as they read. In addition to the Daybook, each student also had a
composition book that they used as a journal in which to complete follow-up activities
not included in the Daybook, engage in various response activities to selected texts fi‘om
sources other than the Daybook and write drafts of essays for major writing assignments.
In these journals, students would frequently be asked to record the picture words that they
identified in the text and sketch the images that these words conjured in their minds. In
this way, Connors would both engage students with the intended focus of the activities
presented in the Daybook (such as how to identify point of view in a story) and reinforce
students’ abilities to visualize meaning from text, the skill that Connors saw as the
cornerstone to effective (and affective) engagement with print. Connors checked
students’ Daybooks and journals each night and assigned daily grades based solely on

completion of the day’s activities.

46

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Connors’ language arts students were also expected to complete a course of
independent reading during this first trimester. Students were to read a certain number of
pages from self-selected “chapter books” (defined very loosely by Connors as books
containing “at least 100 pages”) each month. The precise ntunber of books required was
negotiated individually between Connors and his students, in accordance with each
student's reading level and the particular length and reading level of books that the
student chose. Students kept weekly reading logs in which they recorded the number of
pages they read each day, the author and title of each book they read, and a brief
summary of what happened in the reading they accomplished each day. After completing
each book, students were expected to write short book reviews to be shared with other
students to recommend (or in very rare cases steer other students away from) further
reading. Every two weeks, Connors assigned independent reading grades by assessing the
students’ reading logs for completion and for the number of days on which a parent had
signed the log to confirm that the student had read at home for at least 30 minutes. These
grades were given the greatest weight in the calculation of students’ cumulative language
arts grade for the trimester.

Consistently throughout the first trimester, Connors structured activities in his
language arts classes to integrate students’ independent reading with the mini-lessons
derived from the Daybook. To illustrate how Connors brought students’ self-selected
independent reading into his language arts lessons, I provide the following description of
a typical day’s activities in Connors’ class during the first trimester. This lesson took
place early in the school year, soon after students had been taught the concept of “picture

words,” and it began with Connors reading aloud the following information from the

47

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Daybook about point of view:
A Story’s Point of View. The third ingredient for a successful story is point of
view — the angle from which a story is told. Ifthe point of view changes, so does
the story. Active readers know that understanding point of view is as easy as
deciding who the narrator (or storyteller) is. Read another excerpt from Danny the
[sic] Champion of the World. As you read, highlight or circle any information you
find about the narrator. Use the response notes to make observations about what
point of view the author is using. (p. 45)
Connors then gave students approximately seven minutes in which to read the selection,
and as suggested in the directions given in the Daybook, he encouraged the students not
only to write “response notes” about point of view in the margins of their Daybooks but
also to circle any “picture words” they encountered while reading. After soliciting student
volunteers to share their response notes with the whole class, Connors directed students
to this follow-up question given in the Daybook:
How would the scene the narrator describes be different if it were told from the
father’s point of view? Use what you know about Danny and his father to rewrite
the kite-flying scene from the father’s point of view. Be as creative as you like,
but make sure you give readers an adult angle on the events. (p. 46)
Students were given a few minutes to write responses to this question in their Daybooks,
then encouraged to share their responses first with a partner and then with the whole
class.
Connors then directed students to share the picture words that they had circled as

they read the selection. In their journals, students recorded their picture words and made

48

sketches of the scenes that they imagined in their minds as they read the selection. After
sharing their sketches with partners and discussing how their sketches were inspired by
the picture words presented in the selection, students were challenged to find picture
words in the books that they had been reading for the independent reading component of
language arts and sketch the mental images that those words inspired. Connors then
called on students to share the picture words and sketches they made from their
independent reading selections. As a further challenge, Connors asked students to think
about the point of view in their independent reading selections, calling on volunteers to
share their insights. During the next session of language arts, students were given a few
minutes to revisit the selection from Danny Champion of the World (Dahl, 1975), review
the picture words they had previously identified and enhance the sketches they had made
in preparation for a closed-book (but open-journal) “visualization quiz” (see Figure B4).

This basic lesson structure, in which students explored a literary element — such as
characterization or point of view — and a reading comprehension strategy — such as
visualization — in both a short Daybook selection and self-selected texts was repeated
throughout the first trimester. During the subsequent trimesters, Connors continued to
utilize this framework, although less frequently as students’ self-selected texts were given
more prominence in in-class activities and as more time was devoted to building
students’ writing skills. Because my primary interest was in students’ literacy practices as
revealed through their text selections for academic and recreational purposes, my data
gathering was limited to the reading activities in Connors’ language arts class. In the next
sections, I will thus only describe how the reading curriculum for the respective

trimesters reflected Connors’ commitments to student choice, building visualization skills

49

and soc
literary

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llltm

and social practices in the literacy classroom, themes that emerge from the review of the
literature on the kinds of classroom contexts that support positive attitudes toward
reading and high motivation to read.

Second trimester. While several mini-lessons such as the one described above
were presented during the second trimester to reinforce students’ ability to visualize
meaning fi'om text, Connors also built mini-lessons on other topics, including making
personal connections to text and identifying and retelling main events/ ideas in different
genres of writing. The Daybook continued to be a source of reading selections for mini-
lessons, but Connors also incorporated readings from Time for Kids, a classroom
magazine that all students received weekly, and short picture book biographies such as
John Henry (Lester, 1994) and Freedom River (Rappaport, 2000). Connors also used
short films, such as Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers (Park, 1993) and Rikki T ikki
T avi (Jones, 1975), as texts for students to practice their skills in retelling main events
and drawing personal connections to text.

Most of the mini-lessons during the second trimester were based on selections
from the novel Maniac Magee (Spinelli, 1990), which Connors read aloud to the class.
During these mini-lessons, students were occasionally given copies of Maniac Magee in
which to follow along with the read-aloud, but just as often they were challenged to
record picture words or other responses to the novel without the aid of the text. This was
done to stimulate students’ mastery of picture words in both print and oral language. A
typical mini-lesson with Maniac Magee would involve Connors reading a chapter aloud
to the class, during which students would record picture words and attempt to represent

the mental images evoked by those words via sketches in their journals. On one occasion,

50

groups of students expanded upon the sketches they had made individually to recreate a
key scene from the novel first in storyboard format, then as a skit that was performed for
the whole class.

The main focus of reading instruction during this trimester was on expanding
students’ exposure to different reading genres through their self-selections. To that end,
Connors not only incorporated a greater variety of informational texts into his mini-
lessons, but he also introduced the Genre Project, in which students were challenged to
select at least one book from each of five genres: fantasy, realistic fiction, science fiction,
historical fiction, and biography (see Figure B5 for the assignment sheet Connors gave
students). These five genres coincided with the genre divisions used by Connors for his
classroom library, and the only restriction that Connors placed on students’ selections for
this project was length. All selections were to be a minimum of 100 pages long, except
for biographies, which were to be at least 60 pages long. This distinction was made in
recognition of the different demands made on readers by non-fiction and narrative fiction,
Connors’ sense that students were relatively inexperienced in reading long-fonn non-
fiction texts, and the large selection of biographies in the school library that contained
fewer than 100 pages. Midway through the trimester, Connors added “free choice” as a
sixth option for students to select in completing the project because of the relative paucity
of science fiction books in the school library.

After finishing a book, students completed book review forms, and students’
overall grade for the Genre Project was based on the number of reviews they completed.
Connors provided students with a generic book review form for all genres except for

biography, which had its own form (see Figures B6, B7 and B8). These reviews focused

51

on topics such as making text-to-life connections, identifying and retelling main
ideas/events, and exploring story elements such as setting, all of which were addressed in
mini-lessons. Connors assessed each book review for completion, and then made all book
reviews available in a binder for students to peruse and discover additional titles that
might pique their interests. At several points throughout the trimester, Connors solicited
student volunteers to give brief book chats about their Genre Project selections as well as
had students engage in informal, small-group conversations about the books they were
currently reading.

Connors’ twin emphases on developing students’ visualization skills and honoring
students’ vernacular literacy practices cuhninated midway through the second trimester in
an activity in which Connors encouraged his students to:

Bring in something that you enjoy reading, something that you think you are

interested in reading, something that you can make a picture in your head as you

read. Many students don't enjoy reading because they approach it as reading
words, rather than creating pictures. I want you to think that reading is more fun
than you thought it could be by the end of the year.
Connors put no restrictions on the kinds of text that students could bring in for this
activity, even encouraging students to bring in video game instruction booklets, owner’s
manuals for electronic appliances or DVD case inserts, all of which he noted were the
kinds of texts that he regularly enjoyed reading.

On the day of the activity, students wrote extensively in their journals about the

materials that they brought in. They first wrote a general description of the text they had

brought and then a brief explanation of what they most liked about the text. Next, they

52

shared their texts with each other in small groups, and individual volunteers were
solicited to share with the whole class. Connors had the students engage in ten minutes of
DEAR with their texts, and students were expected to record picture words in their
journals as they read. Finally, students wrote about how the picture words they identified
helped them generate mental images as they read and made sketches of those mental
images.

Third trimester. Connors’ language arts curriculum culminated in the third
trimester with the Book Project. Very little class time during this marking period was
spent on reading mini-lessons. Most language arts sessions were either devoted to
writer’s workshop activities or to the Book Project, which built on the skills developed in
the reading mini-lessons of the prior trimesters. Connors built more DEAR time into
language arts lessons during the third trimester than previously and specified that students
read their Book Project selections during that time, unless they had already completed the
book. Connors was also out of the classroom for various reasons more often during this
trimester than previously, and DEAR time for the Book Project was a routine feature of
the plans left for his substitutes. It should also be noted that there were fewer language
arts sessions during this last trimester. The annual human growth and development unit
was scheduled not only during the third trimester, but also during language arts time, as
between Price and Connors, only Connors had the proper certification to teach this
material to the two homerooms.

For the Book Project (see Figure B9), students were to select a single book from
any genre that was at least 150 pages long‘(bonus points were offered to students who

selected biographies, science fiction, or books with over 250 pages) to read and create a

53

poster presentation about. These poster presentations represented a culminating
exhibition of the concepts students had explored and the reading skills they had
developed over the course of the school year. Posters were to contain basic information
about the book (e.g., author, title, genre), descriptions of the main character and setting, a
retelling of major events in the book (including the chief problem to be solved by the
main character and how that problem was resolved), the book’s main theme, text-to-life
connections, a brief review, and sketches of vivid moments from the story. All of these
literary elements had been taught individually via mini-lessons using the Daybook or
other short texts in conjunction with students’ self-selected reading materials during the
previous trimesters, and the Book Project gave students an opporttmity to demonstrate
mastery of those topics cumulatively using a text of their own choice.

Connors aided individual students in the selection of appropriately challenging
and personally interesting texts for the Book Project during class visits to the school
library shortly after assigning the Book Project. Students were also encouraged to bring
texts from home or to borrow texts from the classroom library as their reading interests
led them. During the library visits, Connors met with all students individually to record
their book choices and guided any students who were having trouble finding something
interesting to read toward texts that resonated with reading selections they had made and
enjoyed in previous activities.

After book selection was completed, students were given one month in which to
read their chosen texts and prepare their presentations. During this period, language arts
class time was primarily devoted to bolstering students’ writing skills in an expository

essay unit to prepare for the MEAP writing test, but Connors incorporated brief mini-

54

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lessons to review each of the literary elements that students were expected to address in
their Book Project presentations and encouraged students to focus on reading their Book
Project selections during DEAR time. In the week prior to the due date for the Book
Project, Connors devoted two language arts sessions to helping students construct their
posters, providing each student with poster board upon which to construct their
presentations. Markers, colored pencils, construction paper and gluesticks were also
provided for student use. The final presentations were scheduled over the course of three
language arts sessions, during which writing workshop activities and visits to the semi-
annual Scholastic Book Fair were also scheduled in order to maintain variety and student
engagement. Activities related to the human growth and development unit were also
scheduled during this period in fulfilhnent of state and district requirements for health
instruction. Connors assessed students’ Book Project presentations using a simple
checklist rubric, and the grade for this presentation constituted the entirety of the reading
component of students’ language arts grades for this trimester.

Opportunities for choice. As described in the preceding section, Connors’
classroom afforded several opportunities for students to self-select reading materials for
academic purposes and potentially make their vernacular literacy practices visible within
the classroom. The most potentially permeable context was DEAR time, as Connors
placed no explicit restrictions on what students could spend their time reading. However,
DEAR time was not wholly impermeable; unless students brought texts from home,
choices of reading materials were restricted to books from the classroom library and
books and periodicals from the school library. The next most potentially permeable

context was the culminating activity on visualization skills, as students were explicitly

55

encouraged to bring a text from home that was effective at conjuring visual images.
While Connors described a wide range of texts that students could bring in, from the
traditional (books, magazines) to new media (DVD cases, video games), students were
restricted to bringing in a single text, andthe text did have to include print. Independent
Reading (first trimester), the Genre Project (second trimester) and the Book Project (third
trimester) represent the least potentially permeable of the academic contexts for which
Connors’ students were given the opportunity to self-select texts. In all three of these
contexts, students were restricted to selecting books, and in the Genre Project, choices
were restricted to books falling within five pre-specified genres. Thus, Connors’
curriculum was not a completely open-choice environment, but rather offered varying
levels of permeability to the texts of students’ vernacular literacy practices. Because the
potential of a permeable classroom to scaffold students’ development in academic
literacy practices on their vemacular literacies depends on both the openness of the
teacher to those literacies and the willingness of students to take advantage of
opportunities to make those literacies visible, the structural and de facto constraints
placed on students’ text selections for academic purposes are important delirniters to
recognize before enmnerating the procedures used to document Connors’ students’ text
selections. The second research question of this dissertation was included to assess
whether and to what extent boys would take advantage of these opportunities for choice.
Research Design Overview

To document the vernacular and academic literacy practices of a group of sixth-

grade boys, I designed a case study (Yin, 2002), patterned after the work of Finders

(1997) and Hynds (1997). I spent the 2004-2005 school year at Harwell Middle School

56

observing and interviewing students in Connors’ language arts classes. As will be
described in greater detail below, the focus of my data gathering was on the texts that
students in these classes selected: 1) to fulfill specific reading assignments in the
language arts curriculum; 2) to read during Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) periods;
and 3) to interact with outside of school in their free time. The basic unit of
documentation and analysis in this study is the text selection, defined here as an
individual student’s interaction with a single text in a particular context, and different
data gathering methods were employed to document the text selections that students
made for different purposes.

For texts selected by students to fulfill academic assignments, the sources of data
were archives of student work in the Genre Project and Book Project saved by Mr.
Connors for inclusion in students’ reading portfolios, observations of student Book
Project presentations and student activities during language arts sessions, observations of
read-aloud periods, and interviews with individual students. These records account for
choices made over the course of the full academic year by all students in Mr. Connors’
homeroom as well as those made by students in Price’s homeroom who came to Mr.
Connors for language arts instruction.

For texts selected by students for DEAR periods, I observed students in Connors’
homeroom during their daily DEAR period at least twice each week during the second
and third trimesters of the school year, during which most of their major language arts
assignments were completed. I also observed students in both of the homerooms for
which Mr. Connors was responsible for language arts instruction during occasional

impromptu DEAR periods within regular language arts instructional time.

57

Finally, to document texts selected by students for extracurricular, recreational
purposes, I interviewed a group of 22 focal students on multiple occasions over the
course of the second and third trimesters of the school year. These interviews involved
both self-reports of recreational reading and text interactions by students and
observations of students browsing for personally interesting texts at a local book store
and at a school-sponsored book fair.

Participants

The participants in this study were the two sixth grade language arts classes
taught by Mr. Ed Connors at Harwell Middle School during the 2004-2005 school year.
This age group was chosen because many studies have demonstrated a significant decline
in boys' and girls' attitudes toward reading and school in general during the middle/junior
high school years, indicating that boys at this age may be particularly vulnerable to
disengagement from reading (Andermann & Maehr, 1994; Bean, 1998; Eccles, Midgley,
Wigfield, Buchanan, Reuman, Flanagan & Maclver, 1993; McKenna, Kear & Ellsworth,
1995).

Among the 48 students in Connors’ two language arts classes were 24 boys and
24 girls. The ethnic composition of the students was as follows: 50% White (14 boys, 10
girls), 31.25% African-American (6 boys, 9 girls), 8.3% Mixed ethnicity (2 boys, 2 girls),
6.25% Latino (2 boys, 1 girls), 2.1% Asian (1 girl), and 2.1% African (1 girl). The
average grade equivalent reading level of Connors’ students as measured by the Gates-
MacGinitie Reading Test administered at the end of the 2003-2004 school year was 6.64
(SD = 3.24, range = 2 to 13). The average grade equivalent reading level for boys was

6.19 (SD = 3.01, range = 2 to 13), and the average grade equivalent reading level for girls

58

 

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was 7.10 (SD = 3.46, range = 3 to 13). This difference was not statistically significant (t =
-0.09364, p > 0.1). In Connors’ and Price’s classes, each student was assigned a number
to be used throughout the year to facilitate record-keeping. These numbers were used in
all field notes and other documents in this study to ensure anonymity.

From the whole group of Connors’ language arts students, 22 students
volunteered to be interviewed further about their reading attitudes and habits over the
course of the year. This sample contained 11 boys and 11 girls, and represented the range
of ethnic backgrounds found in the two homerooms: 50% White (7 boys, 4 girls), 27%
Afiican-American (2 boys, 4 girls), 13.6% Mixed ethnicity (1 boy, 2 girls), 4.5% Latino
(1 boy), and 4.5% African (1 girl). The average reading level of this sample was 7.25
(range = 2 to 13) as measured by the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test at the end of the
2003-2004 school year. This is higher than the average reading level for the whole group
of Connors’ language arts students (6.09, range = 3 to 13), but not significantly different
(t—=0.669, p>0.5).

Procedures

Figure B10 provides a graphic illustration of the classroom activities, data
sources, data analysis strategies, and research questions addressed during each trimester
of the 2004-2005 school year. Over the course of the year, I took a concurrent
triangulation strategy toward data collection (Creswell, 2003), gathering qualitative and
quantitative data from multiple sources to find converging information and themes
relative to my original research questions. Qualitative data that I gathered for this study
included field notes from classroom observations, transcriptions of audiotaped open-

ended and semi-structured interviews with focal students and conversations with Mr.

59

Connors, samples of written work - including book reports — completed by focal
students, and lists of books selected by all students in both homerooms over the course of
the school year. Quantitative data I gathered included aggregate and individual results
from the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test-given to all students at the conclusion of the
prior school year, a reading attitude assessment (the Elementary Reading Attitude
Survey), administered by Connors at the beginning and end of the school year, and
aggregate and individual results from a word reading assessment administered by
Connors during the third trimester of the school year. What follows in this section is an
in-depth discussion of the data gathering and analysis procedures employed in this study,
organized chronologically.

Data collection for this study began with a series of in-depth conversations with
Ed Connors. I spoke with Connors three times during the 2003 -04 school year to gather
specific information about how he structured his language arts curriculum around
students’ book choices and his justifications for the different activities he included in that
curriculum These conversations were informal and open-ended, and were not audiotaped.
Field notes were taken and read back to Connors at the time of the conversation for
confirmation and clarification. During the 2004-05 school year, three additional
conversations were conducted with Connors - one each trimester — focusing on his
assessment of students’ progress over the course of the preceding trimester, planned
activities for the following trimester, and his background as a reader. These conversations
were, like their predecessors, informal and not audiotaped. Field notes taken during these
conversations were also shared with Connors for confirmation and clarification.

At the start of the first trimester of the 2004-05 school year, all students in

60

Connors’ language arts classes2 were administered the Elementary Reading Attitude
Survey (ERAS; McKenna & Kear, 1990), a 20-item, 4-level Likert-type assessment in
which respondents circle a drawing of the cartoon character Garfield that most closely
approximates their feelings about each item. Ten items on the survey assess respondents'
attitudes toward recreational reading (sample items: “How do you feel about spending
free time reading?” “How do you feel about reading for fun at home?”), and ten items
assess respondents' attitudes toward academic reading (sample items: “How do you feel
about the stories you read in reading class?” “How do you feel when it’s time for reading
class?”). For sixth graders, McKenna and Kear (1990) report a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.87
for the recreational subscale, 0.81 for the academic subscale, and 0.89 for the full scale,
indicating that the ERAS is a highly reliable measure of reading attitude across these two
dimensions. Norms for the ERAS were established by a national norming project
involving 18,138 students grades 1-6 (including 2,442 sixth graders). For sixth grade, the
normed means are as follows: for the recreational subscale, 27.9 (SD = 6.2), for the
academic subscale, 24.7 (SD = 5.8) and for the full scale, 52.5 (SD = 10.6).

Connors administered the ERAS as part of his routine instruction in order to
gather data about his students’ reading habits and attitudes. Scores were calculated and
individual results were placed in each student’s language arts portfolio to be shared with
parents during conferences later in the school year. Individual and aggregate results from
the ERAS were provided to the researcher as part of the classes’ archival data.

After the ERAS was administered early in the first trimester of the 2004-2005

school year, I gave a brief presentation to both of Connors’ language arts classes (as well

 

2 Due to absences, only 41 of the 48 students completed the ERAS at the start of the 2004-2005 school
year, and Mr. Connors did not conduct a make-up administration for the absent students.

61

as to a group of parents who came to the first Parent Night of the school year) to solicit
volunteers for further interviewing, distributing informed consent and assent letters.
Sixteen students (6 boys, 10 girls) responded to the original call for volunteers, returning
signed consent/assent forms midway through the first trimester. Each volunteer was then
individually administered the interview protocol of the Motivation to Read Profile (MRP;
Gambrell, Palmer, Codling & Mazzoni, 1996) at the start of the second trimester. In the
MRP interview, participants discuss particular texts and authors that most interest them,
as well as give a richer account of their reading habits (sample items: “Tell me about the
most interesting story or book you have read this week.” “What are some things that get
you really excited about reading books?”). All interviews except one (at the student’s and
parents’ request) were audiotaped and then transcribed. At the conclusion of the standard
MRP questions, I asked each student to list texts that they had read to fulfill the
independent reading component of the language arts curriculum during the first trimester.
As Connors had not maintained records of the independent reading selections made by
his students during the first trimester, I had to rely on students’ recollections of the texts
they selected for this component of the language arts curriculum, which is one limitation
on the comprehensiveness of the dataset’s representation of text selections made by focal
students for academic purposes.

Midway through the second trimester, Connors identified five additional boys and
one additional girl whose reading habits he felt might be of interest in this study and who
had expressed a belated interest in participating. These students were immediately given
another copy of the informed consent and assent letters, which were all returned within a

week. As with the first group of focal student volunteers, I administered the MRP

62

interview protocol to this second wave of volunteers, and all interviews but two (at the
student’s and parents’ request) were audiotaped and transcribed. These students were also
asked to list texts that they remembered reading to fulfill the independent reading
component of the language arts curriculum during the first trimester. All student
interviews were conducted during specials periods (i.e., PE, art), which were usually
scheduled between Connors’ language arts sessions, as well as during language arts
sessions that were not devoted to reading activities. Students were pulled out from the
classroom and interviewed in the school library and the school conference room when the
library was not available. All focal students were asked to generate their own
pseudonyms for this study.

Classroom observations began near the start of the second trimester and continued
through the end of the school year. I visited Connors’ class two to three times per week in
this period, arriving for each observation at the start of the school day in order to observe
Connors’ homeroom students during DEAR time and stayed until the lunch break. This
afforded me the opportunity to observe regularly scheduled DEAR sessions, both
language arts class periods taught by Connors (to his and Price’s homerooms), read-
alouds conducted by Connors with his homeroom, and any additional, impromptu DEAR
time incorporated into the morning’s activities. Field notes were taken during all
observed sessions, focusing primarily on documenting the texts selected by individual
students (both focal and non-focal) for DEAR and reading class activities. Students’
behaviors with their selected texts were recorded in field notes, as were scripts of teacher
behaviors during all reading activities. Text selections made by all students in the Genre

Project were documented by examining the notebook containing all book reports students

63

 

had submitted, which Connors made available for students to peruse as they sought
recommendations for future reading. Text selections made by all students in the Book
Project were documented first by observing students during their initial library visits to
select books for the project and second by observing the student presentations at the end
of the third trimester.

A second wave of interviews with focal students was conducted late in the second
trimester after the Genre Project had concluded and extending into the start of the third
trimester. These interviews were focused on the texts that the students had selected for
the Genre Project and that they had brought to class for the culminating activity on
visualization skills (see pp. 51-52). Focal students were first asked to list the texts that
they had selected for the Genre Project, both by title and genre (copies of the book
reports that students had submitted were supplied by Mr. Connors to help spur students’
memories if they were unable to remember all of the titles they had read). For each text
that they had read, focal students were asked why they chose that particular text for this
assignment, how and where they obtained the text, what the text was about, and what
their feelings about the book were. The same questions were asked regarding the texts
selected for the culminating activity on visualization skills. Focal students were then
asked to identify their most and least favorite texts from those they selected for the Genre
Project, as well as their most and least favorite genres of the five included in the project.
Finally, focal students were asked to identify any other texts they had been engaging with
outside of school and to describe them briefly. All but two of these interviews (at the
students’ and parents’ request) were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim soon thereafter.

Six focal students (3 boys, 3 girls) volunteered for a third and final round of

64

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interviews that were scheduled late in the third trimester and modeled on the bookstore
observation protocols developed by the author in a previous study (Cavazos-Kottke,
2006). For this interview, I met with three of the focal students (2 boys, 1 girl)
individually and two of the focal students (2 girls) together at Schuler Books, a large,
locally-owned independent bookstore. Each student was given a shopping basket and was
told to fill the basket with reading materials that he or she would be interested in reading.
The students were given unlimited time to complete this task, and while each student
browsed, field notes were taken, focusing on the sections in which students conducted
their browsing. Because of transportation issues, one boy who volunteered for the third
interview was unable to meet at Schuler Books, but was able to meet at the semi-annual
Scholastic Bookfair that was held at Harwell near the end of the third trimester. The same
observation and interview protocols as used with the focal students at Schuler Books
were followed with the focal student at the Bookfair.

Each student was then interviewed individually (except for the two girls who
engaged in their browsing together) about the selections he or she made. For each
selection the focal student made, he or she was asked the following questions:

1. Describe this item in your own words.

2. Why did you select this item?

3. What is it about this item that interests you?
Finally, each participant was asked to make a list of texts (either specific titles or genres)
that he would have liked to include in the basket but could not find in the bookstore.
Answers to the questions were taken down in field notes by the interviewer as these

interviews were not audiotaped. Each participant received a $10 gift card to the bookstore

65

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as compensation for participation in this third interview.
Data Analysis

Qualitative data (including field notes, interview transcripts and written work
produced by focal students relating to their text selections) were analyzed using the
constant-comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to discover themes within
interview and transcript data. Individual documents were read multiple times and
categories were constructed from concepts and unifying themes that emerged from the
data. On the first reading, transcripts, field notes and student-produced artifacts were read
to document titles of texts that students read for academic and vernacular purposes, and a
database of text selections was then constructed using Microsoft Access. As discussed
earlier, the text selection is the basic unit of analysis for this study, and is defined as an
individual text selected by an individual student for a particular academic or vemacular
purpose. Thus, a particular book chosen by only one student to fulfill the requirements of
a project qualifies as a single text selection, whereas a single book chosen by three
different students for various purposes qualifies as three text selections. Fields for title,
author, and student number were created and filled in for each text selection upon initial
documentation from the field notes. In some cases (most especially among, but not
limited to, biographies selected in the Genre Project), precise title and author information
about particular text selections was not provided. In these cases, as much information as
possible about the text as could be gleaned from the field notes and student artifacts was
input to the database, while “N/A” was input to any field for which precise
documentation was impossible. To generate more information about the texts selected by

students in this study, all text selections in the database were further analyzed recursively,

66

 

 

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iterating between raw data and emergent categories until no new categories became
salient and no texts remained unaccounted for by the set of categories that emerged, and
the key properties of these categories were then formalized as fields in the database. As a
result of this analysis, nine additional fields were created.

The first new field created was Context of Text Selection. Categories for context
of text selection were the following: Self-report Independent Reading, Self-report
Recreational, Self-report Interest, DEAR Shared, DEAR Solitary, Genre Project, Book
Project, Visualization Text, Book Fair/Bookstore and Multiple Contexts. This last
category was developed to account for the few cases of texts that students selected for
either the Genre or Book Projects that were also brought in for the culminating activity
on visualization skills.

The next field created was Medium. Categories in this field were the following:
Book, Magazine, Game, Movie/Video, TV Show, Short Story and Consumer Product. An
associated field was created to indicate whether or not the text was part of a series of
texts. This field contained just two categories — Series or Not Series — and was reserved
for texts with the Medium classifications of Book, Game, MovieNideo and Short Story,
because within these media, texts were selected that satisfied both categories. Because
they are periodical in nature, texts classified as Magazine and TV Show (at least all
particular texts selected by students in this study from these media) are inherently series,
and thus did not need to be distinguished from non-series texts with the same Medium
classification.

The next field created was Year of Publication/Production. For this field, the year

in which the text first appeared was documented for the media of Book, MovieNideo and

67

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Short Story. For the medium of Magazine, the current year was used, as all magazines
that were documented among the text selections were current issues. For the medium of
TV Show, the year in which the program first premiered on television was documented.
For the medium of Consumer Product, N/A was documented in the database. For any text
selections for which an exact year of publication or production was impossible to
document due to incomplete information, N/A was input to the database in this field.
Sources used to determine year of publication or production were the copyright pages of
books when available, and Amazon.com, iBistro (Homestead Public School’s online
library catalog), and the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) for texts that were not
physically available for inspection. Conflicts between sources were resolved by
consulting additional information sources on the web, such as publishers’ and authors’
websites, other libraries’ online catalogs, and Wikipedia.

Two fields were created to document readability levels of the texts. Readability
levels were only sought for texts with the Medium classification of Book, as these texts
are first and foremost print-based and all existing readability calculation methods can by
their very nature only be run on print-based texts. Readability was not sought for texts
classified as Magazine, despite the fact that they are print-based, because by their
periodical nature, readability may vary both within and between issues. In this regard,
books are in some sense more fixed in their readability than magazines or other periodical
texts. Multiple readability scores were sought because individual calculation methods
focus on different elements of language in a text, and having multiple scores can give a
fuller appreciation of the linguistic complexity of a given text than any single score can

give. Readability levels were first obtained using Amazon.com, which reports Fog and

68

 

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Flesch-Kincaid readability scores for many of its products. From those text selections for
which Amazon.com did not report readability scores, 66 were selected to be calculated
manually. To calculate readability levels using the F lesch-Kincaid formula, three 200-
word samples from different parts of a text were selected. The average sentence length
(L) was calculated for each sample by dividing the number of words in the sample (200)
by the number of sentences in the sample. Where necessary, the number of sentences was
estimated to the nearest tenth. The average number of syllables per word (N) was
calculated for each sample by dividing the number of syllables in the sample by the
number of words (200). The readability level for the sample (expressed in terms of grade
level) was then calculated for each sample using the following formula: (LX039) +

(N X1 1 .8) - 15.59. The readability levels for the three samples were then averaged
together to obtain the Flesch-Kincaid score for the whole text. To calculate readability
levels using the Fog readability test, three 100-word samples from a text were selected.
The average sentence length was calculated for each sample by dividing the number of
words in the sample (100) by the number of sentences in the sample. Where necessary,
the number of sentences was estimated to the nearest tenth. The average sentence length
across samples (L) was then obtained by averaging together the figures obtained for each
sample. Next, in each sample, the number of words with three or more syllables was
counted, and these figures were averaged together to yield N. The readability level for the
text (expressed in terms of grade level) was then calculated using the following formula:
(L + N) x 0.4. Mean readability levels of texts selected by boys and girls for vernacular
and academic contexts on both readability measures were calculated, and t-tests were run

to compare means.

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The final three fields that were created to code each text selection in the database
were generated to capture different aspects of genre. The first of these fields documented
the intended audience of the text. For texts with the Medium classification of Book, the
following categories emerged for Genre-Audience: Young Adult and General Readers.
For texts with the Medium classification of TV Show or Movie/Video, the following
categories for Genre-Audience were used: G, PG, PG-l 3, R and General Viewers. The
first four categories correspond to the movie ratings classification system of the Motion
Picture Association of America, and texts categorized by Medium as Movie/Video were
categorized by Genre-Audience in accordance with their MPAA ratings, when available.3
The category of General Viewers was used for all Movie/Video texts that did not carry
MPAA ratings (such as direct-to-video programs) as well as for all texts classified as TV
Show. TV Show texts were assigned to this category rather than using the ratings
classification system promoted by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences because
TV ratings are assigned to individual episodes of television series based upon the content
of particular programs, rather than assigning general ratings to whole series. Because the
TV Show text selections documented in this study referred to favorite series watched by
students, it was not possible to categorize TV Show selections by individual episode
ratings. Finally, for text selections categorized by Medium as Game, the following
categories for Genre-Audience were used: T-Teen, M-Mature, and E-Everyone. These
ratings correspond to those assigned to video games by the ESRB. All games documented

in this study were video games, and none of the video games documented among the text

 

3While some readers may be concerned that any MovieNideo texts selected by sixth graders carried R
ratings, it should be noted that no MovieNideo text selections made by students in this study carried the
even more restrictive MPAA rating of NC-l7.

70

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selections carried ratings of Y-Youth or A-Adult. Thus, those ratings were not included
in the Genre-Audience categorization scheme.

The second field dedicated to Genre was used to indicate whether the text
selection was fiction or non-fiction. The following categories for Genre-
Fiction/NonFiction emerged: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Mixed and N/A. All texts classified
by Medium as Book were categorized either as Fiction or Non-Fiction, all Movies/Videos
were categorized as Fiction (no documentaries were selected by any students in this
study) and all Games were categorized as N/A. TV Shows billing themselves as “reality
programs” were categorized as Non-Fiction, while all others (except one) were
categorized as Fiction. The sole exception was WWE Smackdown!, which was
categorized as Mixed because it explicitly bills itself as “sports entertainment” rather than
as sports programming, carving a middle ground between unscripted sports competition
and scripted drama. Most Magazines were categorized as Non-Fiction, with the exception
of those such as American Girl that regularly feature works of short fiction in addition to
information articles. Such texts were categorized as Mixed.

The third and final field dedicated to Genre was used to capture the subject matter
of the text selections. The following categories emerged in the analysis: Action,
Automotive, Animals, Comic Book, Comedy, Fantasy, Gaming, Science Fiction,
Historical Fiction, Biography, Mystery/Thriller, Realistic Fiction, Sports, Multiple
Genres, Inspirational, Poetry, History, General Non-fiction, Reference, Popular Culture,
and Reality/Simulation. Unlike the two previous sets of genre categories, categorizations
by Genre-Subj ect Matter were not cleanly associated with particular Medium

classifications.

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To summarize the coding procedures for text selections in this study, all text
selections were initially documented in a database and categorized according to author,
title and student number. Further iterative analysis of the text selections yielded a number
of factors by which each text selection could be further categorized: Medium, Year of
Publication/Production, Series/Not Series, Genre-Audience, Genre-Fiction/Non-fiction
and Genre-Subj ect Matter. The Query and Report functions of Microsoft Access were
used to generate a series of reports in which text selections were grouped by each of the
fields used to categorize each item in the dataset, and these reports were analyzed
recursively to discover patterns in the text selections made by the whole group of
students, between subgroups of students (i.e., differences between boys’ and girls’
selections in different contexts), and within the sets of text selections made by individual
students over the course of the school year in a process of cross case synthesis (Yin,
2002)

Interview transcripts, artifacts of student work and field notes were further
analyzed using the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) beyond their
yielding of information to contribute to the text selection database. Emerging themes
regarding the reasons why particular texts appealed to students and the functions of those
texts within the students’ academic and vernacular literacy lives were identified and
categorized as these documents were analyzed recursively until no new themes became
salient.

ERAS scores and achievement data were used to triangulate emerging themes
from the qualitative analysis, to gauge students' attitudes, abilities and changes in both

over time, and to group student data for qualitative analysis. Simple t-tests were run on

72

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the fall and spring ERAS data to determine the extent to which differences in reading
attitude for recreational and academic purposes existed between boys and girls, between
focal and non-focal students and between homerooms, as well as the extent to which
reading attitudes differed between fall and spring administrations of the ERAS.

This case study used multiple, nested units of analyses. At the highest level, the
set of text selections made by all students in Connors’ language arts classes formed a
unit, fi'om which general patterns of students' reading selections over the course of a
school year, and mean levels of reading ability and attitude could be determined. The
next level of analysis was on the boys in Mr. Connors' classes, to determine the extent to
which boys' literacy practices within the classroom differed from girls' as well as from
general trends for the class as a whole. The text selections made by individual focal
students constituted the next unit of analysis, to develop rich descriptions of individual
literacy practices as exemplars of (or contrasts to) more general trends seen in the class.
Finally, the smallest unit of analysis was the individual text selection.

Role of the Researcher

As discussed previously, my role in the classroom was primarily as an observer of
classroom activities and interviewer of individual students pulled from the classroom
context during the second and third trimesters of the 2004-2005 school year. I made only
two presentations to Connors’ classes over the course of the year. Early in the first
trimester, I introduced the goals of my study and solicited volunteers to participate as
focal students. Near the start of the third trimester, I donated three books by Eoin Colfer
to the classroom library (Artemis Fowl, Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident and The

Supernaturalist) and was asked by Connors to speak briefly about each of the books as a

73

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model for the kinds of book talks he wanted students to engage in. This author talk
qualified me for an Extra Effort Award, a good citizenship honor system by which
Connors and his students would recognize positive contributions made by students to the
learning environment.

Beyond these two occasions, my interactions with students were limited almost
entirely to scheduled, semi-structured interviews with focal students and occasional
informal chats with individual focal students during free time or transitions between class
sessions. During the library visitations to select texts for the Book Project, Connors
encouraged students to solicit my opinion on particular titles they were considering;
however, such consultation was limited to conversations with focal students and a couple
of general suggestions in response to Connors’ inquiries regarding ideas for titles on
particular subjects (e. g., a good baseball book).

While I spoke individually with Connors during all of my visits to his classroom,
at no time did I offer unsolicited commentary on classroom proceedings. My
conversations with Connors were mainly of the informal interview variety, with me
asking him questions about what would be occurring in class on a given day, how
successfully he felt particular activities turned out, and how he saw his background as a
reader influencing his beliefs about reading instruction. On a couple of occasions,
Connors asked me to offer an opinion on ideas for classroom activities, but never did I
actively engage with Connors in detailed conversations geared toward developing future
lesson plans or classroom activities, nor did I ever attempt to persuade Connors toward or

dissuade him from a particular course of action in his classroom.

74

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CHAPTER 4
Results
Introduction

This study was designed to investigate four research questions about the academic
and vernacular literacy practices of a class of middle school boys. Specifically, this study
sought to answer:

1. What are the vernacular literacy practices of a class of middle school boys and

what kinds of texts do these boys engage with in those practices?

2. How and to what extent do these boys' vernacular literacies become visible

within a language arts program structured around students' self-selected texts?

3. How and to what extent do the vernacular and academic literacy practices of

these boys differ from those of the girls within the same class? and

4. What attitudes toward vernacular and academic literacy practices do these

boys hold, how do they compare with the attitudes of other students, and how
do those attitudes change over the course of an academic year in a book club
based classroom?

Because literacy practices are not directly observable, but rather are implied from
literacy events, before directly answering these research questions it is necessary to
provide some definition of the literacy events upon which this study’s results are based.
Over the course of the 2004-2005 school year, the 48 students in Mr. Connors’ language
arts classes made a grand total of 672 documented text selections across academic and
vernacular literacy contexts, and as detailed in Chapter 3, each text selection was

analyzed through a number of lenses, including medium, genre and readability. A full list

75

 

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of texts for which complete author and title information was available that were selected
by students in this study is given in Appendix C. Table A3 summarizes the numbers of
text selections made by boys and girls for each of the academic and vernacular contexts
documented in this study. Totals for all academic contexts except Independent Reading
represent text selections made by all 48 of Connors’ students, and as noted in Chapter 3,
these were documented through direct observation of classroom behaviors and analysis of
students’ written work. Totals for all vernacular contexts as well as for Independent
Reading4 represent text selections made by the 22 focal students who volunteered for a
series of one-on-one interviews, during which these selections were documented.
Question One
What are the vernacular literacy practices of a class of middle school boys and what
kinds of texts do these boys engage with in those practices?

The vernacular literacy practices in which the boys who participated in this study
engaged can best be described first by considering the particular texts that boys selected
for vernacular purposes and secondly by considering the social and psychological
contexts in which boys engaged with those texts.

Texts. In their vernacular literacy practices, there were few individual titles or
authors around which boys’ text selections congregated very strongly. Four authors,
Jonathan Rand, Matt Christopher, Gordon Korman and Jude Watson, appear in the
dataset exclusively among boys’ text selections. Of these four, only Rand and

Christopher were named as favorite authors exclusively by boys in follow-up interviews

 

4Because Mr. Connors did not maintain a record of the titles read by students for Independent Reading
credit during the first trimester, text selections coded as Independent Reading are based entirely on self-
reporting from focal students during the first round of interviews. None of these text selections are
attributable to non-focal students.

76

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with focal students, and only Rand and Christopher’s works appeared among the text
selections of more than five boys. However, only Rand’s books appear among the text
selections made by boys for vernacular purposes in significant numbers; only one of the
eleven text selections by Christopher was made for recreational reading purposes,
compared with ten of the 33 Rand selections. The overall diversity of titles and authors in
the entire dataset of text selections, regardless of gender or context, is one of the most
striking findings of this study. As can be clearly seen in Table A4, which lists all of the
texts that were selected by five or more students for any purpose over the course of the
school year, and Table A5, which lists all of the authors whose works were selected five
or more times, while a few titles and authors were represented multiple times in the text
selections, no single title or author appeared in a majority of the students’ text selections.
While Lemony Snicket was represented in the dataset by 72 text selections, making him
the most frequently selected author, his works appear among the text selections of only
20 students, less than half of the sample of 48 students. Jonathan Rand, the second most
frequently selected author with 33 text selections, appears among the text selections of 15
students, although unlike Snicket, Rand’s works were selected exclusively by boys.
While this represents less than a third of the whole set of students, it does constitute a
majority of the boys, indicating that Rand’s popularity among boys was more widespread
than any other author’s popularity among the whole group. Furthermore, the majority of
the text selections made fiom the top 15 most selected authors, with the exceptions of J K
Rowling and Electronic Arts, were made for academic purposes, indicating that academic
text selections were slightly more likely to congregate around a set of popular authors

than were vernacular text selections. Looking at the dataset through the lens of which

77

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titles are most represented among students’ text selections (Table A4) demonstrates an
even more extreme level of diversity, as the most popular titles were selected by no more
than seven students.

However, this diversity should not be mistaken for randomness, and in the relative
popularity of the works of Jonathan Rand and Matt Christopher among boys’ text
selections, a number of clear trends in boys’ vernacular literacy practices can be
illustrated. For one, both are primarily authors of series fiction, Jonathan Rand for his
Michigan Chillers and American Chillers series of supernatural thrillers, and Matt
Christopher for his prolific output of sports fiction novels. While it might be argued that
Christopher is not technically a writer of series fiction to the extent that his novels do not
feature recurring characters or storylines that extend from book to book, he is nonetheless
well known enough in the young adult sports fiction market that his name alone carries
the same connotations as the name of a series. Students in this study looked for “Matt
Christopher books” in their library visits in the same way that they looked for “Lemony
Snicket books” or “Chillers books.” The particular title that they ultimately sought was
less important than the text’s affiliation with other closely related texts. In the case of
Matt Christopher’s novels, the lack of an overarching series title, such as Goosebumps or
American Chillers did not prevent students from regarding his individual books as
elements of a larger corpus, effectively branding these books as a series under the banner
of Matt Christopher.

A preference for serial works among boys’ text selections extends beyond these
two authors to become a defining characteristic of the boys’ vernacular literacy practices.

All of the authors named by boys in one-on-one interviews as their favorites are primarily

78

writers of series fiction, and nearly all of the authors listed on Table A5 are represented in
the database of text selections for their serial works, rather than for their stand-alone
creations. In the overall set of 672 documented text selections, 391 (or approximately
58%) were coded as being part of a series, and all of the texts listed on Table A4 are
serial publications.5 Among the 160 text selections made by boys for vernacular
purposes, 102 (or nearly 64%) were serial in nature, and boys’ preference for series texts
cut across all media documented in this study to include movie, television and video
game series in addition to books. While fiction outnumbered non-fiction in the database
of text selections by a factor of 3 to 1, a preference for series works was also prevalent in
the non—fiction text selections made by boys for vernacular purposes, manifest in such
series as the Eyewitness and Dorling-Kindersley information books, The Encyclopedia of
Danger, and even “reality television” series such as American Chopper and The
Apprentice.

The works of Jonathan Rand and Matt Christopher continue to serve as useful
lenses for understanding the vernacular literacy practices of the boys in this study when
we consider additional trends in boys’ text selections such as audience and genre. Both
Rand and Christopher write exclusively for children and young adult readers, and the vast
majority of text selections made by students in this study across all media and across all

contexts were created and marketed specifically for young adults and teens, with

 

5 The only possible exception to this claim among the texts listed in Table A4 is The Hobbit, as it was
originally written by JRR Tolkien as a stand-alone volume that would serve as a prequel to his previously
published epic, The Lord of the Rings, but it has since come to be regarded by many readers - including
this author — as an introductory text more appropriately read prior to the three volumes of The Lord of the
Rings than afterward. This was also how focal students interviewed in this study regarded The Hobbit,
more like the first volume of a tetraology than like a separate volume to be read after working through the
original trilogy. Nonetheless, wherever one regards the proper place of The Hobbit within Tolkien’s Middle
Earth writings, there is no argument that it belongs within the corpus of said writings, and the centrality of
the events, characters and setting of The Hobbit within the larger story of Middle Earth demonstrates that
the novel is rightfully regarded as an exemplar of series fiction.

79

comparatively few selections made from texts intended for older audiences. Of the 648
text selections that were classifiable by Audience, 527 (over 78% of the total set of text
selections) were coded as YA, or Young Adult, while another 64 text selections were
coded as General Readers. None were Written for an exclusively adult audience.
Movies/Videos were categorized using the MPAA rating system, which yielded 11 PG-
rated MoviesNideos, 12 rated PG-l3, and 3 straight-to-video DVDs that did not carry
official MPAA ratings but were marketed for General Viewers. Games were categorized
using the ESRB rating system, which yielded 11 Games rated T-Teen, 7 rated E-
Everyone, 2 rated M-Mature, and one (RuneQuest) for which an official rating was
unavailable as it was developed prior to the advent of the ESRB rating system. As
discussed in the previous chapter, all TV Shows were coded by Genre-Audience as
General Viewers. While these numbers represent the distribution of texts by intended
audience for the whole dataset, young adult oriented texts carry as high a profile among
the texts selected by boys for vernacular purposes as they do among the texts selected by
the whole group.

This finding is supported by the lists of most popular books and authors given in
Tables A4 and A5. Only one item on Table A4 — Sports Illustrated — was not published
explicitly with the young adult market in mind, although it is by no means an
inappropriate text for this age group. Similarly, among the authors and publishers listed
on Table A5, only Time Inc. (publisher of Sports Illustrated) and Electronic Arts
(producer of video games) produced texts that were selected by students in this study that
fell outside of the young adult niche market, yet the texts they produced were created for

mass appeal to include that market as well as older consumers. For example, all of the

80

 

Electronic Arts games selected by students in this study were rated either T-Teen or E-
Everyone.

This finding is further corroborated by analyzing the readability levels of boys’
text selections for vernacular purposes, Where such data was available. Both Fog and
Flesch-Kincaid readability scores were obtained for 60 text selections (all Books), while
only F lesch-Kincaid scores were obtained for an additional 20 selections (again, all
Books). The mean Fog readability level was 8.29 grade equivalents, with a range of 4 to
14.8, and a standard deviation of 1.98. The mean Flesch-Kincaid readability level was
6.11 grade equivalents, with a range of 2.9 to 12.9, and a standard deviation of 1.78. This
discrepancy between readability levels as measured by different methods is to be
expected because, as described in the previous chapter, each method focuses on a
different aspect of a given text’s linguistic complexity. When considered together
however, these figures indicate that the readability of the average text selection made by
boys for vernacular purposes was closely equivalent to, if not considerably higher than,
the students’ grade level.

In terms of genre, boys expressed a strong preference in their vernacular literacy
practices for works of imaginative fiction (an umbrella genre category that includes
fantasy, science fiction and horror) and sports-themed fiction and non-fiction, the two
genre categories with which the works of Jonathan Rand and Matt Christopher
(respectively) are most closely identified. This is clearly demonstrated on Table A6,
which presents the distribution of text selections made by focal students (the only
students from whom text selections for vernacular purposes were documented) by gender,

genre and academic or vernacular context. The first column on this table presents the

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generic distribution of boys’ text selections for vernacular purposes, demonstrating a
strong preference for fantasy above all other categories, followed by a cluster of five
genres (action, mystery/thriller, realistic fiction, science fiction and sports) with nearly
equal representation. Grouping to gether'the genres of mystery/thriller, fantasy and
science fiction under the heading of imaginative fiction captures all of the most popular
series from which boys selected texts for vernacular purposes, including Rand’s
Michigan and American Chillers, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, RL
Stine’s Goosebumps and Fear Street, and a host of Star Wars-themed texts. Sports-
themed texts, on the other hand, are not exclusively fiction. Not only does this category
include a Matt Christopher novel, it also includes magazines such as Sports Illustrated
and Slam, biographies of famous athletes, sports record books, sports video games, and
video game reference guides. Further, the high profile of imaginative fiction and sports-
themed texts among boys’ text selections for vernacular purposes is not due to the
overrepresentation of a few focal boys’ voracious text consumption; rather, examples of
both kinds of texts are spread throughout the vernacular text selections of nearly all of the
focal boys.

Finally, boys’ vemacular practices were generally marked by texts of quite recent
vintage, and the works of Jonathan Rand and Matt Christopher represent convenient
points on a continuum of text age that bracket nearly all of the texts selected by boys for
vernacular purposes. The range of ages for texts selected by boys for vernacular purposes
was 0 (indicating the text was published in 2005) to 68 years. The median age of a text
selection was 5 years, and all of the Jonathan Rand titles that appear among boys’ text

selections were published within five years of the period in which data was gathered. On

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the other side of the median, text ages are more sparsely distributed between 6 and 68
years old (Tolkein’s The Hobbit being the oldest outlier), with a cluster of texts written
between the late-19603 and mid-19803, a span of years that coincides with Matt
Christopher’s most productive period. Figure B11 displays a frequency distribution graph
of the number of text selections by age of text for all the text selections documented in
this study across academic and vernacular purposes. Comparable to the subset of text
selections made by boys for vernacular purposes, the mean age of a text selection in the
whole dataset was 10.8 years, while the median was 5 years, the mode was 4 years, and
the standard deviation was just under 15 years. As can be seen from a Figure B11, the
distribution of text ages is extremely positively skewed, indicating a strong overall
preference for texts published within the past five to ten years.

Thus, the works of Jonathan Rand and Matt Christopher provide convenient
rallying points for summarizing the findings with regard to the texts that comprise the
physical landscape of the vernacular literacy practices of the boys who participated in this
study. In their vernacular literacy lives, these boys gravitated toward works of
imaginative fiction and sports-themed texts, in particular selecting materials created for
and marketed toward a young adult audience. In general, the boys selected texts with
reading levels closely approximating their grade level, and often slightly higher, and they
were more apt to select texts written within the past half decade (with a few notable
exceptions for 20th century classics). Lastly, the boys preferred texts that were part of a
series, whether the series involved books, movies, video games or, as will be
demonstrated in the next section, a combination of multiple media.

Contexts. More critical to understanding boys’ vernacular literacy practices than

83

the particular texts with which boys engaged are the ways in which boys went about
reading those texts, the stances they adopted toward them and the contexts within which
their engagement with those texts occurred. Few individual texts were inherently
interesting in and of themselves, and boys did not “just read,” selecting single texts one at
a time and reading them in isolation. More compelling to the boys in this study were the
connections that they could draw between diverse constellations of texts. As noted above,
the boys were particularly drawn to serial works, but those serial interests were not
constrained by medium. The boys displayed the strongest interest in books, magazines,
movies, DVDs and games that could be connected not just to other texts, but to other
texts from different media. They not only took great pleasure in following characters,
plots and entire narrative worlds across multiple media outlets and delivery systems, their
interactions with these multimedia textual constellations formed important building
blocks of boys’ personal and social identity.

More than intertextual, the vernacular literacy practices engaged in by the boys in
this study can best be characterized as transmedial (Semali, 2002; Semali & Fueyo,
2001). When readers make intertextual connections between books, magazines, films, TV
shows and other media texts, they typically note similarities and differences between
characters, themes and plot points shared by two or more texts. In other words, they
recognize points of comparison and contrast between texts. What transmediation
represents, as distinct from an exercise in recognizing intertextual connections, is a
synthesis of a new understanding — or “poem,” to borrow a term from Rosenblatt (1978)
— that is not confined to a reader’s interaction with a single text. A transmedial

understanding is a bricolage of ideas drawn from a set of narrative and informational

84

texts. Transmediating readers (or consumers, to better capture the breadth of print and
non-print texts with which boys in this study engaged) adopt a stance toward texts that is
neither exclusively aesthetic, imaginatively entering into and experiencing narrative
worlds, nor exclusively efferent, extracting discrete bits of information from expository
text. Rather, such readers iterate along a continuum between these stances, synthesizing
the experiences of entering the visualized narrative worlds of some texts and digesting
information gleaned from other texts to create an engaging personal, multitextual (and
multimodal) diegesis. The ways in which Gatorade and Link, two focal boys who
described themselves as “major Star Wars fans,” oriented themselves toward the texts
that they consumed for vernacular purposes are illustrative of the transmedial literacy
practices demonstrated by many of the boys in this study.

For Gatorade and Link, the climax of the 2004-2005 school year came in mid-
May with the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. In the
months leading up to the film’s premiere, Gatorade and Link read books from the Jedi
Apprentice and Boba F ett series that extend upon narrative threads suggested in the first
two films of the trilogy, played the PlayStation 2 game Star Wars: Battlefront, which
allows players to fight through battles both depicted and merely referred to in the Star
Wars films, and watched Clone Wars on DVD, an animated series that covers events
leading directly into the opening action of Episode 111. While each of these works could
stand alone as a unique narrative experience, when taken together, these texts create a
comprehensive portrait of the Star Wars universe that no single text provides on its own.
Furthermore, while all of these texts derive from common source material, no two of

these Star Wars-themed texts are straightforward adaptations of each other in the way

85

that a typical movie novelization is a transposition of a film’s screenplay into prose. What
Gatorade and Link understand about the Star Wars universe is a synthesis of narrative
information gleaned from a constellation of texts spanning multiple media, with each text
contributing uniquely to their Star Wars knowledge base and worldview rather than
recapitulating diegetic material consumed elsewhere.

Even in the case of adaptations, the current fashion in transmedia storytelling is
that each media incarnation of a core storyline offer a unique narrative experience, with
various elements of plot and character development distributed exclusively among
particular versions of the story such that a full understanding of the diegesis resides in a
synthesis of transmedia narrative experiences (Jenkins, 2006). Link played the Episode
III video game to its conclusion and read two different Episode III novelizations a week
before the film’s release. While the game, novel and film share a core narrative arc and
cast of characters, each contains certain plot points, action sequences and details on
character relationships that the other versions do not offer, and as Jenkins (2006) notes in
his analysis of The Matrix, these distinctions are not merely artifacts of the affordances
and limitations of the particular media mustered into service in the transmedia enterprise,
but reflect deliberate creative decisions on the part of the producers. While “each medium
does what it does best,” a successful transmedia franchise survives by “pitching the
content somewhat differently in the different media” such that “each work offers fresh
experiences” (p. 148). Redundancy derails the transmedia experience, as both the broad
and nuanced distinctions between transmedia texts become the substance of natural
conversations. As Link engaged with each successive incarnation of the Episode [11 story,

he would take advantage of transition points in the school day to breathlessly report

86

points of comparison and contrast between the texts to me (a confessed Star Wars fanatic
and fellow consumer of these same texts), as well as offer his opinion on how certain
aspects of the game or book should have been included in the movie and vice versa.

Further examples of transmediation abound in the vernacular literacy practices of
the boys in this study. After watching nightly episodes of The Simpsons with his father,
B-Rad would often play a few missions in Simpsons Hit ‘n Run on the PlayStation,
extending his enjoyment of the characters’ antics from a primarily receptive medium
(television) to an interactive one (video gaming). Axel read the Amazing Spiderman
comic book each month, then followed Spidennan’s adventures through the first two
motion pictures directed by Sam Raimi, which are not wholesale adaptations of material
from the comic books, but rather fresh takes on the Spiderman mythos that frequently
play upon viewers’ familiarity with a large canon of pop cultural texts. Axel enjoyed each
individual text in this converging array of media texts on its own terms, but making a
commitment to follow the series within and across multiple media platforms provided
Axel with an engaging narrative experience that no single text or medium could provide.

One might be tempted to argue that what I am labeling transmediation here is less
an authentic literacy practice than it is a case of adolescents performing a role of good
consumer, at least from the perspective of the corporate producers of such media texts.
Indeed, the stereotypes of the mindless consumer and the obsessed fan often merge in the
popular imagination, especially in the case of fans of science fiction franchises (Jenkins,
1992). As fashion-conscious teenagers spend large amounts of money to pursue “a look”
that is often more about displaying particular brand names than about comfort or

practicality (Quart, 2004), science fiction and fantasy fans are ofien stereotyped as

87

uncritically omnivorous consumers of texts that bear the imprimatur of their favorite
narrative fi'anchises, no matter how well or poorly crafted those texts may be (Alvermann
& Hagood, 2000; Jenkins, 1992).

However, such an interpretation denies a high degree of agency that readers,
viewers and game players regularly bring to their text selections within such transmedial
enterprises, an agency that was indeed seen among the boys in this study. While both
Link and Gatorade were avid fans of Star Wars, neither was an uncritical consumer of all
things Star Wars, nor was each boy’s constellation of transmedial text selections within
the Star Wars realm identical. Link noted that while he enjoyed the games and the
movies, the novels were his favorite medium, as he preferred “to make pictures in my
head.” Link even pursued his Star Wars interests into non-fiction reading, selecting a
George Lucas biography for the Genre Project, which he noted he would have gladly read
“for fun” without the assignment. Gatorade, on the other hand, liked the novels the least,
not because he disliked reading, but because in the books, “there’s not as much light
saber fighting,” a key feature in his favorite Star Wars movies and games. Each boy thus
carved out his own unique textual niche within the larger Star Wars mediascape (King &
O’Brien, 2002), and while Link and Gatorade’s patterns of text selections were no doubt
shared with millions of other young adolescent (and adult) Star Wars fans, it is important
to note that each boy felt his fandom as an “individual, or special taste,” an “experience
of identity” (Alvermann & Hagood, 2000, pp 444-445; also, Alverrnann, Huddleston &
Hagood, 2004). That is, no matter how widely their interests in Star Wars were shared by
other people, both Link and Gatorade referenced Star Wars texts as unique markers of

their identity, not simply as texts they read, watched or played with, but rather as part of

88

who they are.

Further evidence against the premise that these students’ transmedial allegiances
were more artifacts of orchestrated corporate media campaigns than cases of authentic
literacy practices comes from students’ relatively narrow allegiances within the Series of
Unfortunate Events fi'anchise, indicating that not all transmedia enterprises are created (or
received) equally. While Lemony Snicket’s novels were popular with many boys and
girls in Connors’ classroom, the much-publicized movie version, starring Jim Carrey, was
not. On a number of occasions during his read-alouds of The Bad Beginning, the first
book in the series, Connors talked up the movie, which was released along with tie-in
video games, fast food promotions and new book publications during the winter holiday
break of the 2004-05 school year. However, among Connors’ students, there was no buzz
about the movie once it was released, no discussion (formal or informal) that would
indicate that anyone had even seen the movie, tried the videogame or otherwise
consumed any tie-in product other than the original novels. Given that the movie grossed
over $30 million its opening weekend, and would ultimately gross close to $120 million
domestically, it is likely that at least a few of Connors’ students saw it in the theater
during its original release, but while the books continued to be popular selections
throughout the remainder of the school year, A Series of Unfortunate Events as an
exercise in transmedia narrative did not capture these students’ imaginations. In his Book
Project presentation on The Hostile Hospital (the eighth book in the series), Gatorade
articulated a strong personal connection to Klaus, one of the series’ protagonists: “Klaus
loves to read books and everything he reads he remembers. Klaus is like me because

sometimes I get into a series of books and I remember what it’s about like Klaus, when

89

he remembers what’s in the books he reads once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop.”
However, in an informal conversation after the study concluded, Gatorade admitted that
while he had seen the film, he did not enjoy it very much, primarily because he did not
feel the same personal connection with the cinematic depiction of Klaus as he did with
his literary incarnation and because he felt the filmmakers took too many liberties with
the books’ storyline in their attempt to make a single movie that covered the material of
the first three books. In contrast to his transmedial experience with Star Wars, Gatorade
preferred Lemony Snicket’s books over their movie adaptations, indicating at the very
least a nascent critical perspective on his transmedial consumption, which provides some
evidence against the argument that transmediation is simply a capitulation of “authentic”
personal taste to a corporate-driven consumerist imperative. This is not to argue naively
that adolescents’ tastes are immune to advertising and media hype; Gatorade, and
thousands (if not millions) of adolescents did go see the film, after all. The point I wish to
reinforce here is that through the transmedial text selections that many adolescents (in
this study, almost exclusively boys) make in their vernacular literacy practices,
adolescents experience and express a sense of personal identity, and that while that
experience might be generally shared with masses of other adolescents, individuals act as
agents of their own textual identity construction, purposefully aligning with particular
texts and rejecting others within particular mediascapes.

Given the overwhelming popularity of imaginative fiction among the focal boys’
text selections for vernacular purposes, it should not be surprising that the richest
examples of these boys’ transmedial allegiances come from this realm. However, the role

of transmediation at the intersection of these boys’ vernacular literacy practices and

90

social identity construction is most clearly seen among the boys in this study in a
different mediascape: sports. For as much as Link and Gatorade situated their identities as
readers in their consumption of imaginative fiction texts, these interests remained largely
isolated to individual transmediation. A' number of other boys, focal and non-focal, were
documented in literacy events with Star Wars texts, but on only one occasion was any
sharing of these interests observed between boys.6 Indeed, during one DEAR session two
non-focal boys sitting near each other were observed reading multiple books from the
Jedi Apprentice series, yet at no point before, during or after the DEAR time did either
boy acknowledge the other’s similar reading habits, and when not being read for DEAR,
the books were kept hidden fi'om view, zipped up in their respective binders. Whether
any of the non-focal boys aligned their textual identities with Star Wars to the extent that
Link and Gatorade did, as well as whether any sharing of these interests took place in
non-academic contexts, is unknown, but the fact remains that within the academic
contexts documented in this study, transmediation in the Star Wars universe was visible
almost exclusively as a private literacy practice.

This is not the case with boys’ consumption of sports-related texts, particularly
those dealing with basketball. Montel and Tiger, both focal boys, engaged with a variety
of basketball-themed print and non-print texts across vernacular and academic literacy
contexts. Moreover, these literacy events were frequently shared experiences, as Montel
and Tiger would together pore over an issue of Slam! magazine, an informational book

on the history of the Philadelphia ‘76ers, or Michael Jordan’s autobiography For the Love

 

“The day afier the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the following exchange
was documented in the field notes: Connors asks the class if anyone has seen Star Wars. Non-focal boy:
“Yeah, Star Wars was stupid.” Link throws down reading, “What!? People who say Star Wars is stupid are
stupid!”

91

of the Game during DEAR time. On multiple occasions, other boys would join them for
sometimes brief, sometimes extended periods. During the Genre Project, biographies
about sports stars, including Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, were circulated among
multiple boys, and during the culminating activity on visualization skills, some boys
brought multiple sports texts to share with other boys who had forgotten to bring their
own sports texts from home. When Connors’ students made a class trip to the library to
select books for the Book Project, some boys (such as PB, Gatorade and Chipmunk)
selected works of imaginative fiction, which they either immediately began reading by
themselves in a quiet part of the library or set aside to read later, using the remainder of
the library time to chat with friends. Tiger, Montel, Axel, B-Rad and two non-focal boys,
on the other hand, all selected Matt Christopher sports fiction novels, then sat together at
a table and passed the books around, commenting on which ones they preferred to read
for the project. During the oral presentations of Book Project posters, Connors allowed
time after each student’s presentation for discussion, time that was usually taken up by
brief comments (e. g., “Good”) or stock questions (e. g., “Did you like it?”) from students,
or brief discourses on the selected books by Connors himself (e.g., after a presentation on
Walter Dean Myers’ Scorpions, Connors offered recommendations for other novels by
Myers). However, after presentations on works of sports fiction, student-generated
discussion (led by boys) was much more animated, with references to shared athletic
experiences that connected with the book being discussed. For example, afier Montel’s
presentation on Johnny Long Legs, a Matt Christopher novel in which the protagonist
carries the eponymous nickname, multiple boys recalled similar nicknames given to

Monte], an unusually tall and slender boy, by his teammates. After a non-focal student’s

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presentation on a football-themed novel, a number of boys made lighthearted comments
about the on-field performance of the presenter during the previous football season, in
contrast to the heroics ascribed to the novel’s protagonist.

These observations illustrate ways in which literacy events with particular sports
texts constituted social practices among the boys in Connors’ classroom, but the
mediascape in which those practices were situated encompassed a much broader array of
text forms than these print media examples. The dataset on which this study is based
almost certainly underrepresents the number of non-print texts with which focal students
engaged in their vernacular literacy practices. This is especially true in the realm of
sports, where live and broadcast sporting events were excluded from analysis as were
televised sports information programs such as ESPN SportsCenter. Field notes document
several informal conversations between boys about professional sports games, especially
during the NCAA and NBA basketball tournaments (which took place during the final
trimester of the school year), clearly indicating that boys not only engaged with more
non-print sports texts than the dataset would indicate, but that these texts also played a
central role in forging and maintaining boys’ social identities. Despite the exclusion of an
incalculable number of such texts, several non-print sports texts did nevertheless make it
into the dataset, including DVDs (e.g., Friday Night Lights, Remember the Titans, Rocky)
and videogarnes (e.g., NBA Street 3, ESPN 2K5) either brought to class for the
culminating activity on visualization skills or self-reported by focal students as part of
their recreational media consumption.

Expanding the definition of media text even further to embrace all of the

“extensions of man” (McLuhan, 1966) by which students conveyed information about

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their professional and collegiate team allegiances, boys in particular were likely not only
to wear clothing bearing the colors and logos of both of Michigan’s Big 10 schools, but
also to comment on each other’s fashion choices in this regard, especially when pairs of
students would wear the apparel of rival teams. Also popular among the boys in Connors’
classroom were “baller bands,” rubber wristbands bearing inspirational messages and/or
team colors and logos. Boys would wear these bands prominently, collect them, swap
them and frequently share stories about where new and unique bands could be purchased.
While some boys, particularly Link, would also express interests in the Star Wars and
Nintendo mediascapes through t-shirts and other apparel, these fashion choices did not
inspire conversation among boys in the way that sports-themed apparel did.

What these boys’ use of a broad range of sports-themed texts illustrates is a strong
nexus of literacy practices and identity construction. Crawford (2004) notes that “material
objects need to be understood as social agents” (p. 120), and it is through this semiotic
process of “perforrnative consumption” that individuals appropriate, interpret and
manipulate a variety of verbal and non-verbal sign systems to align their social identities
with those of groups or other individuals with whom they would like to be affiliated. Gee
(2005) labels mediascapes that afford such purposes “affinity spaces” (p. 214),
multitextual (and multimodal) environments through which individuals forge social
alliances based on common interests and a shared grammar of signs, symbols and
Discourses. Fan communities that build up around such transmedial enterprises as Star
Wars, Japanese anime and manga, ABC’s Lost and the Harry Potter novels and films are
all prototypical examples of affinity spaces (see Carey, 2005; Jenkins, 1992, 2006), but

so too are those that arise around sports leagues like the NBA and particular teams like

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the Boston Red Sox (see O’Nan & King, 2005). Fine (1987) notes that for middle school
age children, a key “imperative of development” (p. 105) is the grth and expansion of
social competence across multiple social worlds, which is essential to achieving a sense
of industry, the critical psychosocial milestone for young adolescents according to
Erikson. Fine concludes from his ethnography of boys’ Little League teams that sports
participation at this age serves as a convenient (although not always positive) crucible for
such peer alignment and socialization, an idea echoed widely in the popular literature on
boys’ and young men’s athletics (Griffin, 1998; Messner, 1992; Whitson, 1990). Less
discussed in the literature is how sports fandom — or in Gee’s terms, participation within a
sports-based affinity space — at this age might serve similar purposes. One conclusion that
might be drawn from this study is that it may very well, as the most socially vibrant
literacy events in which some focal boys engaged revolved around transmediation in a
sports mediascape. It should be noted that sports mediascapes did not constitute the only
affinity spaces in which boys engaged in identity construction through transmediation, as
the examples of Link and Gatorade with their Star Wars passions illustrate. However, the
affinity spaces that arose around basketball and other sports were the most socially active
ones to become visible within Connors’ permeable classroom.
Question Two

How and to what extent do these boys' vernacular literacies become visible within a
language arts program structured around students' self-selected texts?

The second research question was included to assess whether the preferences
expressed among students’ text selections across the contexts documented in this study

authentically reflect their abiding personal interests. That is, when given the opportunity

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to select personally interesting reading materials for academic literacy tasks, do students
bring texts that indeed reflect their personal interests or do they in some sense “play
school,” making text selections and engaging in literacy practices that conform to prior
expectations for what counts as appropriate reading for school or that achieve some other
aim apart from exploring personal interests? As the discussion on the previous question
suggests, many aspects of the boys’ vernacular literacy practices did become visible in Ed
Connors’ language arts program. While many of the interactions over sports-themed texts
described above were documented during transition periods in the school day, and thus
outside of the curricular space managed by Connors, text selections that boys made for
various Language Arts activities nonetheless did resemble the kinds of text selections that
boys made for recreational literacy pursuits. As with the first question, comparisons
between the boys’ vernacular and academic literacy practices can be usefully made by
considering both the kinds of texts that boys selected for academic literacy tasks and the
extent to which the permeable curriculum set up by Connors afforded the social and
psychological contexts that defined boys’ engagement with those texts in their vernacular
literacy lives.

Texts. In terms of genre, boys in this study did for the most part take advantage of
Connors’ permeable classroom structure to make visible the texts that constitute the
physical landscape of their vernacular literacy practices. As the first two columns of
Table A6 demonstrate, while boys selected texts from a wider range of genres for
vernacular purposes than for academic purposes, the most popular genres among the text
selections made for vernacular purposes closely correspond to the most popular genres

among text selections made for academic purposes. Fantasy and the other imaginative

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fiction genres were popular in both academic and vernacular text selections, as were
sports themed texts (some of which are included under the realistic fiction heading).
There are three notable exceptions to this general conclusion: biographies and
historical fiction were represented more strongly among boys’ text selections for
academic purposes relative to those made for vernacular purposes; the action genre was
totally absent among boys’ text selections for academic purposes; and fantasy had a
considerably stronger presence among boys’ vernacular text selections. The first
exception is attributable to the fact that biographies and hiStorical fiction were two of the
five genres in the Genre Project. We would expect boys to make selections fi'om these
genres for academic purposes because they were assigned to do so. Had these genres not
been included in the Genre Project, we might expect that biographies and historical
fiction would appear in lower numbers, comparable to their presence among boys’ text
selections for vernacular purposes. The second exception is attributable to the fact that all
of the text selections from the action genre were movies or DVDs, a medium with
extremely limited representation among text selections for academic purposes. The only
occasion on which boys brought DVDs to school for academic literacy tasks was during
the culminating activity on visualization skills, for which Connors explicitly encouraged
students to bring in “something that you enjoy reading that you can make a picture in
your head as you read.” No additional restrictions were put on the kind of text that
students could bring in; indeed, when a student asked if a shampoo bottle would be
appropriate, Connors said it would be fine, provided it contained text with enough
“picture words” to conjure a vivid image in the student’s mind as she read. Nevertheless,

only two boys brought in favorite DVDs for that activity, and action movies constitute

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the rare text genre that remained an exclusive feature of boys’ vernacular literacy lives.
The third exception is partially attributable to the fact that the number of fantasy titles
among boys’ text selections for vernacular purposes is inflated by certain focal boys’
heavy self-reporting of fantasy books arnong their extracurricular reading. Despite this,
works of fantasy (and imaginative fiction in general) did nevertheless appear in
appreciable numbers in the academic and vernacular text selections of all of the focal
boys whose text selections are represented on this chart. The finding that the most
frequently selected genre for boys’ academic text selections is represented even more
strongly among boys’ vernacular text selections should not affect the above
interpretation, but rather reinforce the conclusion that the chief difference between boys’
text selections for vernacular and academic purposes in terms of genre is more
quantitative (i.e. more texts from more genres) than qualitative.

A more substantial divergence between the text selections made for academic and
vernacular purposes by the boys in this study is in the realm of readability. Although
boys’ text selections across contexts were overwhelmingly aimed at young adult
audiences, boys’ text selections for academic purposes scored significantly lower on
scales of readability than did their text selections for vernacular purposes. Tables A7 and
A8 display t-test comparisons between the mean readability levels of focal boys’ and
girls’ text selections for different purposes, using Fog and F lesch-Kincaid readability
measures, respectively. On both scales, boys’ vernacular text selections scored more than
one full grade level equivalent higher than those made for academic purposes, suggesting
that boys selected more linguistically challenging texts for their vernacular literacy

practices than for academic reading. This suggests that while boys were selecting texts

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for school reading activities that corresponded with their personal interests in terms of
subject matter, the boys were nonetheless opting to read easier texts for school than they
might select for leisure reading. One could interpret this as the boys playing the “game of
school” (Fried, 2005), choosing to minimize the effort put into academic tasks in order to
get by without appearing to be an overachiever or a “loser,” while saving more
challenging texts for engagement at their own pace, on their own leisure time. There is
some evidence to support such a conclusion. Tiger, whose previous year’s Gates-
MacGinitie score was among the highest of Connors’ students, indicating a twelfth grade
equivalency, opted to read a Matt Christopher novel with a fifth grade readability level
for the Book Project. Axel, reading at a seventh grade equivalent, did the same, as did
every boy reading at or above grade level who selected 3 Jonathan Rand title for the Book
or Genre Project (the average readability for books in Rand’s series is between third and
fourth grade equivalent). However, the lower readability levels of texts selected for
academic contexts does not negate the fact that these books frequently did have strong
connections to the students’ personal interests. The Book Project selection made by
Tiger, an avid basketball fan and player, was a basketball themed Matt Christopher novel,
and Axel, an avid football fan and player, selected for his Book Project a football themed
Matt Christopher novel. While Jonathan Rand’s books were popular among boys for
Book and Genre Project selections, they were equally popular among boys’ vernacular
text selections. Thus, despite this difference between contexts in text selections’
readability levels, it could be concluded that the high visibility within academic contexts
of the most popular genres of reading material from boys’ vernacular literacy practices is

a good indication that boys’ reading choices in Connors’ class were reflective of

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authentic personal interests.

In terms of medium, boys’ text selections for vernacular purposes came from a
wider range of media than did their selections for academic purposes. This should not be
a surprising finding, considering the fact that in three of the five academic contexts in
which participants’ text selections were documented, students did not have the option to
select texts other than books (see Chapter Three). While Connors did allow students to
self-select personally interesting reading materials for Independent Reading and the Book
and Genre Projects, students nevertheless had to choose books. While no such parameters
were established for DEAR time, and students were explicitly encouraged to bring in
non-book texts for culminating activity on visualization skills, few boys took advantage
of that openness to explore non-book media in their academic reading choices. This can
be clearly seen in Table A9, which presents the distribution by gender, medium and
academic/vemacular context of all of the text selections made by focal students in this
study. The only non-book medium that appeared among focal boys’ text selections for
academic contexts in any appreciable number was magazines.

Thus, while print media elements of boys’ vernacular transmedial interests were
well represented across academic contexts, the curriculum was less amenable to non-print
texts. As permeable as Connor made his curriculum to afford the appearance of texts
from many boys’ most cherished vernacular literacy practices, such as Link and
Gatorade’s Star Wars interests or Tiger and Montel’s basketball interests, those
transmedial allegiances manifested themselves in academic contexts entirely as print
media texts. While each of these boys participated in their respective affinity spaces

through engagement with a wide range of non-print texts, such texts remained

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exclusively a part of the boys’ extracurricular literacy lives. This certainly reflects a
structural limitation on the classroom’s permeability; as discussed in Chapter Three,
neither the Book Project nor the Genre Project made allowances for non-book texts, let
alone non-print ones. It may also refleCt a sense on the part of students that such texts
were not welcome within academic contexts, despite Connors’ encouragement of
multimodal texts during the culminating activity on visualization skills, which is where
the majority of the non-print and non-book texts that became visible in Connors’
classroom made their appearance. For DEAR time, Connors did not dissuade students
from reading non-print or non-book texts, but he did not actively encourage such reading
either. The almost total invisibility of any such texts during DEAR time among both boys
and girls suggests that despite Connors’ creation of a permeable classroom structure,
students’ sense of appropriate DEAR reading may have been conditioned by prior book-
centric language arts experiences, a notion that Connors’ approach did not disrupt. The
key here is not so much that multimodal or non-book texts were allowed to become
visible, but that their visibility went largely unrecognized and unrernarked upon by
Connors over the course of the school year. As permeable as Connors attempted to make
his curriculum to the vernacular literacy practices of his students, that curriculum
remained a solidly print-centric literacy environment, even in the face of evidence that
other semiotic systems were implicated in the most engaging of students’ (particularly
boys’) vernacular literacy practices.

Contexts. The relative invisibility of non-print and non-book texts within the text
selections that boys made for academic purposes necessarily limits the extent to which

transmediation, a hallmark of the boys’ vernacular literacy practices, could become

10]

visible in Connors’ classroom. Nevertheless, Connors did include two activities over the
course of the year that had potential to capitalize on boys’ ability to negotiate narrative
meaning across media and semiotic systems. In one activity, Connors read aloud Rudyard
Kipling’s “Rikki Tikki Tavi,” then asked students to identify the main and supporting
details of the story. He then showed the Chuck Jones animated movie version of “Rikki
Tikki Tavi.” Discussion after the film focused on the extent to which the film covered the
main and supporting details of the original. In the other activity, Connors read aloud a
chapter from Maniac Magee that contained a good deal of physical action. Students were
then challenged, in groups, to create a storyboard of the main events of the chapter and
act them out. Subsequent discussion focused on the extent to which students were able to
identify the key events of the chapter and visualize them to make sense of the narrative.

In both of these activities, Connors focused on core skills that he had stressed
throughout the year: the ability to identify main and supporting details in a text and the
ability to visualize story information from the printed word. The Book Project was set up
to be a culmination of this skill building, as two of the tasks students had to complete in
their poster presentations were to summarize the main events of the story and sketch out
two moments from the book (see Figure B9). Both activities involved a certain degree of
intertextuality; in the first, students made comparisons and contrasts between story and
film versions of “Rikki Tikki Tavi,” and in the second, students compared perfomative
texts that they had created with the original version.

This attention to intertextual connections is as close as any activity in Connors’
curriculum came to engaging students in transmediation. However, neither activity

involved true transmediation in the sense that students were not challenged to synthesize

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new understandings of the characters or narrative worlds from the available texts.
Further, none of the activities that incorporated students’ self—selected texts afforded
transmedial readings. Whether the projects involved book reports, poster presentations,
keeping a log of pages read, or generating lists of “picture words” and sketching out key
moments, students were encouraged to focus on one book or text at a time. While
Connors did spend some time talking with students about how good readers make
inferences, raising their metacognitive awareness about how writers can imply ideas
without directly stating them, these discussions dealt solely with how good readers
synthesize information within individual texts, not across multiple texts as takes place in
transmediation. Aside fiom the two activities described above, Connors did not
encourage students to make intertextual connections with any of their readings, self-
selected or teacher-selected, preferring instead to build students’ skills in making text-to-
self connections (see Figures B7, B8 and B9 for examples of this emphasis).

Focusing on text-to-self connections is not bad practice. It is, after all, one of the
core “strategies that wor ” (Harvey & Goudvis, 2000) promoted by literacy researchers
as a hallmark of what good readers do, and can play an important role in supporting
young adult’s identity formation. However, giving official curricular recognition only to
the print media at the textual core of students’ vernacular literacy practices may
undermine the efforts toward permeability that Connors made in opening his language
arts classroom to children’s self-selected texts. An impenneability to the non-print media
that students engage with in their vernacular literacy practices as well as the transmedial
ways in which students engage with those texts limits the extent to which academic

literacy tasks could truly be scaffolded on students’ vernacular literacies. Thus, while a

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great number of books that accurately represent the textual core of boys’ vernacular
literacy practices did become visible in Connors’ permeable classroom, many other kinds
of texts that play equally important roles in those practices as well as critical aspects of
the literacy practices themselves remained invisible. This is an ironic missed opportunity,
as transmediation involves a sophisticated synthesis of the very strategies that Connors
emphasized in his language arts curriculum — visualization, drawing personal and
intertextual connections, making inferences, and summarizing main and supporting
details — only applied across a broader, multimodal mediascape than Connors’ classroom
practices afforded.

Question Three
How and to what extent do the vernacular and academic literacy practices of these boys
difler from those of the girls within the same class?

Girls and boys: Texts. Quantitatively, boys as a group made more documented
text selections, and they made those selections fiom a wider range of genres and media
than did girls. Of the 672 text selections documented across all contexts in this study, 379
(56.4%) were made by boys and 293 (43.6%) by girls. This overall difference is likely
attributable to the large discrepancy between the number of recreational reading texts
self-reported by focal boys and girls (see Table A3). Boys also made more text selections
per capita than girls (15.75 to 12.208, respectively), although this difference is not
statistically significant (t=l .1 l6, df-——46, p>0.1). As can be seen on Table A6, of the 21
genres from which focal students made text selections over the course of the school year,
boys’ selections for vernacular purposes represented 17 genres compared to 12 for girls.

For academic purposes, boys made selections from 14 genres, while girls’ selections

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came from 13. Similar trends are found when comparing the different media represented
by boys’ and girls’ text selections, as depicted on Table A9, with boys’ vernacular text
selections representing five different media compared to three for girls. Boys’ tendency
to select reading materials from a wider range of genres than girls held across all
academic and vernacular contexts in which text selections were documented in this study,
as did the tendency for their selections to represent a wider variety of media.

In terms of authors and titles represented, the full dataset of girls’ text selections
across all contexts was as diverse as the boys’, with no single title or author dominating
girls’ choices for any purpose. While four of the authors listed on Table A5 were selected
exclusively by boys, only one author was selected exclusively by girls: Heinrich Bauer
North America, publisher of J-I 4 magazine, which is also the only title listed on Table
A4 that was selected exclusively by girls.

Like boys, girls overwhelmingly selected works created for the young adult
audience, although in contrast to boys, readability levels were more stable across their
selections for academic and vernacular contexts than they were for boys. As shown in
Tables A7 and A8, less than one third of one grade level equivalent separates the mean
readability levels of girls’ selections for vernacular and academic purposes on both the
Fog and Flesch-Kincaid scales. Although the trend runs in the opposite direction than for
boys, with girls’ academic text selections scoring slightly higher than their vernacular
text selections, the difference is not statistically significant on either scale and stands in
stark contrast to the full grade level difference in readability scores between boys’
vernacular and academic text selections.

When asked “what are some things that get you really excited about reading?”

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during their first interview, focal boys were more likely than girls to make explicit
references to defining characteristics of their most favored genres in their responses.
Chipmunk indicated a preference for books that feature “disgusting, interesting and
completely weird things that go beyond your imagination,” while Link prefers books that
encourage him “to make pictures in my head.” Billy Bob, an avid reader of
Michigan/American Chillers titles, responded that what gets him most excited is simply
“reading about stuff that I like if it doesn’t interest me, I won’t want to read it. But if
it’s basketball or (like the one I’m reading) werewolves or mega—monsters, or all that
stuff, I’ll like it because that’s the kind of stuff I like.” Sparty answered succinctly:
“Action unlike a textbook.” According to B-Rad, “if they're starting to like get in a
fight, it's kind of exciting, because you kind of wonder what's coming next. But
sometimes they set up like fighting, fighting, fighting really hard and they get hurt, but
that's exciting because you want to know what happens next.” Both Gatorade and
Montel referred to “unsolved mysteries” and “scary stuff,” while Tiger listed “scary
books, science fiction and sports” as his primary areas of interest. In all of these
comments, boys revealed that what gets them most excited about reading is the chance to
experience many of the hallmarks of what is often popularly known as “genre fiction,”
which encompasses fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery and action/adventure. For
these boys, the genre of a particular text is an important consideration in deciding
whether or not to engage with it, as the text’s generic affiliation provides some guarantee
that favored content may lie within.

When prompted with the same question, focal girls had very different responses.

Ciera S. said that what gets her excited about reading is “what happens in the books, just

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the things that go on, and some of the things that the characters do, and sometimes the
titles are really catching, or my friends recommend them and I want to see what they are
to me.” Alicia indicated a preference for “books that have pictures, not a lot of pictures,
but some pictures so I can see what’s going on.” Monkey noted that what gets her excited
about reading involves a social component: “if someone tells me about a book, I’ll check
it out and read it. If I didn’t like them, I’d still tell people about them, it’s just I’d find a
different type of book that I think I’d be interested in, that might be interesting to them.”
Paris answered, “to see what happens next,” while Vampira pointed to “how much details
[sic] they have in them,” and Spongebob couldn’t think of anything that she felt got her
excited about reading. These responses differ from those given by focal boys to the extent
that the girls tended not to refer to particular genres or textual content, but rather to more
general characteristics of the reading experience or textual elements that are not genre-
specific. In general, genre was much less of a salient characteristic in choosing to engage
with a given text than it was for the focal boys.

Nevertheless, girls’ text selections did demonstrate some clear genre preferences.
While a narrower range of genres was represented among girls’ selections than among
boys’, fantasy and realistic fiction were still the most popular genres for girls as well as
for boys across academic and vernacular contexts, a pattern clearly demonstrated on
Table A6. However, in contrast to boys, girls’ realistic fiction text selections were
exclusively books about family or peer relationships, featuring female protagonists, such
as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or Are You There God? It ’5 Me Margaret, while
boys’ selections in this genre covered a wider variety of themes, including outdoor

adventure stories (e. g., Hatchet), sports-themed dramas (e. g., Ironman), and humorous

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school-based novels (e. g., Dork in Disguise), although boys almost exclusively selected
novels with male protagonists. Further, while boys’ interests in imaginative fiction
stretched beyond fantasy to include science fiction and supernatural thrillers, girls’
interests in this area were strictly limited to fantasy novels. The only academic or
vernacular context in which a genre other than fantasy or realistic fiction was the most
popularly selected text for girls was the culminating activity on visualization skills, where
teen fashion and celebrity magazines like J-I4 were the most popular.

Serial works were as popular among girls as they were among boys, although the
proportions of girls’ series—based text selections were more evenly distributed between
academic and vernacular contexts, while for boys, series-based texts were more strongly
concentrated in vernacular contexts. Among focal students, 117 serial works were
documented in academic contexts (approximately 48% of focal students’ academic text
selections), while 152 serial works were documented in vernacular contexts (just under
62% of focal students’ vernacular text selections). Table A10 is a contingency table
presenting the frequency distribution of series and non-series text selections across
academic and vernacular contexts for focal boys and girls. A 2x4 chi-square analysis
indicates a significant, although low, association between the variables (x2 (3, N = 489) =
12.0405, p < 0.05, (PC: 0.16). One trend we can see from this distribution is that both
focal boys and girls made more overall text selections from serial than from non—serial
works, and that non-serial works were selected in geater numbers for academic purposes
than for vernacular purposes by both focal boys and girls. Additionally, both focal boys
and girls selected more serial than non-serial works for vernacular purposes, although the

ratio of serial-to-non-serial works in vernacular contexts is higher for boys (1.75:1) than

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for girls (1.39:1). However, serial works were selected in greater numbers for vernacular
purposes than for academic purposes by focal boys, while serial works were represented
slightly more in focal girls’ academic selections than among their vernacular selections.
What this distribution pattern suggests is that while serial works play an important role in
both the academic and vernacular literacy practices of focal boys and focal girls, boys
were more likely to pursue their series-based interests outside of school while girls were
likely to pursue their series-based reading in both contexts.

An important contrast between the series-based interests of boys and girls in this
study that might help explain this discrepancy is that, as discussed earlier, boys’ serial
interests tended to range across a variety of media, while girls’ serial interests were
almost exclusively print-based. Indeed, as shown in Table A9, girls made very few text
selections outside of print-based media for either vernacular or academic purposes, and
thus the generally print-centric permeability of Connors’ language arts curriculum more
easily afforded the appearance of girls’ print-based serial commitments than it did the
multimedia commitments of many boys’ serial interests.

Some girls, like Riley and SpongeBob, took advantage of the element of choice in
Connors’ language arts assignments to explore book series that they were interested in,
such as A Series of Unfortunate Events. Connors used the first volume in the series, The
Bad Beginning, as a read-aloud, and some students who had not read from the series
before became eager to read further volumes. SpongeBob devoted as many of her Genre
Project selections as she could, as well as her Book Project selection, to this series,
reading up through volume 7 by the end of the school year. Riley followed a similar path,

making it through volume 6 with her project book selections, as did Ciera 8., who

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devoted much of her early independent reading time to the series, and Paris, who read up
through volume 9. Brittany credits the series for “getting me to love reading,” and used
her project choices to finish as many Series of Unfortunate Events titles as she could get
hold of, as well as to launch into a new b00k series, The Spiderwick Chronicles. Not
every focal girl was interested in the Series of Unfortunate Events, and not every focal
girl chose serial works to fulfill academic reading obligations (e. g., Kalekidan, an English
language learner from Ethiopia, who made no serial selections in any academic context,
or Vampira, who read the first five books of the Harry Potter series over the course of the
school year, but did not claim that reading for any assignment). However, eight of the
eleven focal girls read at least two or more books from different series for academic
purposes over the course of the year and all eleven read at least one series-based book for
vernacular purposes.

To be fair, many boys did pursue print-based series interests, as well as the print
components of transmedial series interests, in academic contexts, too. Thor, for example,
selected volumes from the Dragonslayer ’s Academy and Charlie Bone series for the
Genre and Book Projects, and all of the focal boys except for Monte] read at least two or
more books from various series (the most popular being Michigan/American Chillers) for
academic purposes over the course of the year. Meanwhile, Gatorade read a Jedi
Apprentice novel and Link read a George Lucas biography for the Genre Project, both
books representative of their transmedial interest in Star Wars. However, the main idea
here is that the series-based texts with which boys engaged within academic contexts
scratch the surface of boys’ serial interests, much of which, by their transmedial nature,

could not become visible within an otherwise permeable curriculum.

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Girls and boys: Contexts. In addition to differences in the kinds of texts they
selected for various purposes, girls also demonstrated different reading behaviors than
boys, most notably during DEAR sessions. Girls were more likely than boys to select
texts for DEAR sessions that they had also selected to fulfill other academic
requirements, such as the Genre or Book Projects. Of the 58 text selections made by girls
for DEAR sessions, 23 (or approximately 40%) were texts that they had also selected to
read for the Genre or Book Projects. Of the 94 text selections made by boys for DEAR
sessions, 17 (or approximately 18%) were texts that they had also selected to read for the
Genre or Book Projects. This difference suggests that girls as a whole were in one sense
more strategic in their text selections for DEAR time than were boys, taking advantage of
DEAR time to read texts in fulfillment of other language arts projects rather than to read
wholly for pleasure. This is not to claim that reading a text for pleasure and reading a text
to fulfill an assignment are mutually exclusive purposes, especially in the context of a
permeable curriculum. What it does suggest is that girls were more likely than boys to
make instrumental text selections during DEAR time, choosing texts in the service of
satisfying other academic requirements.

While boys as a group selected more texts to read during DEAR sessions over the
course of the school year, within a given DEAR session, girls were more likely to commit
to a single text than were boys, who in turn were more likely to ”circulate between two or
more texts. The following excerpt from field notes taken during one DEAR session is a
typical description of boys’ reading habits during DEAR time:

“Before DEAR time starts, Link returns 1 book to the classroom library (Dork in

Disguise) and takes another (Ghosts). Later, he returns Ghosts and gets Lawn

lll

Weenies from his locker. One boy [non-focal] reads, then returns his first choice
from the classroom library. Another boy [non-focal] had taken Captain
Underpants #1 , then hung out at the classroom library until [Mr. Connors] asks
him to return to his seat. He then read another book that he had brought. Tiger has
youth bible with him on his desk, but still goes to school library, returning with a
Larry Bird book. Montel reads Everest, from the classroom library. Sparty reads
an American Chillers volume. Axel takes four paperbacks from the classroom
library, all volumes from the Narnia series, and he takes the series box as well. He
spends DEAR time shuffling the books around in the box and farming the pages.
When [Connors] approaches, he selects one of the books, puts the others back (his
desk abuts the classroom library) and reads silently.”
In this excerpt, Sparty and Montel each read one book for the whole DEAR session, but
their behaviors were atypical for the boys in the classroom. The rest of the boys described
in this excerpt circulated between two or more books during the reading time, and the
depth of their reading commitment ranged between Link’s active reading of all three
books he had with him on this occasion to Axel’s flirting with multiple texts before
briefly settling down on one book to read. This tendency of many boy readers to roam
between multiple texts during the course of a single DEAR session was documented
during nearly every regular DEAR session that was observed,7 and stands in strong

contrast to the typical behaviors exhibited by many girl readers, who tended to commit to

 

7As discussed in the previous chapter, 20 to 30 minutes of DEAR time was regularly scheduled at the start
of each day, while impromptu DEAR sessions were frequently added to the classroom routine at transition
points during the day as students completed independent work in one subject and anticipated the advent of
the next activity. These impromptu DEAR sessions rarely lasted more than 10 minutes and did not afford
much time to engage with more than one text. The contrast between some boys’ roaming between multiple
texts and many girls’ tendency to devote their full DEAR session to a single text is more characteristic of
the regularly scheduled DEAR sessions than of the impromptu DEAR sessions.

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single texts not only throughout an individual DEAR session, but often across sessions.
For example, J B, a non-focal female student, spent several weeks of DEAR time reading
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix exclusively. PS, another non-focal female
student, read Are You There God? It ’5 Me Margaret over the course of several DEAR
sessions. Few boys demonstrated such a commitment to a single text from one DEAR
session to the next, frequently starting fresh each DEAR session with a new text selected
that same day from the school or classroom library, as demonstrated in the above
vignette. Montel and Sparty, who read from one book for the entirety of the DEAR
session described above, were not observed reading these same books during another
DEAR session.

During DEAR sessions, girls also tended to be more willing to put their reading
on display than did boys. Figures B11 through 814 are four photographs taken in Mr.
Connors’ classroom one morning after a regular DEAR session, while students were
away for gym class. Near most seats in these images can be seen the large zip-up binders
in which Connors’ students kept their handouts, notes, homework and school supplies.
Because students in Connors’ and Price’s classes switch between their classrooms
multiple times each day and do not have regular desks for storing supplies, these binders
serve as portable carry-alls in lieu of backpacks or frequent trips to student lockers. Note
that books can be seen atop some of the binders, particularly in Figure B15, the lower
right-hand corner of Figure B12 and the lower left-hand corner of Figure B13. In each of
these instances, the binders with books atop them belong to girls, while most of the
binders that are zipped up with no books atop them belong to boys. These images are

typical of what was observed throughout the school year when Connors’ students would

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leave the classroom for a specials class (e. g., gym, music or art) or recess, especially after
a regular or impromptu DEAR session. At the end of DEAR time, girls were more likely
to leave their DEAR texts on display, while boys were more likely to either conceal their
DEAR texts in their binders or return them to the classroom library. With rare exception,
girls were more likely than boys to keep their DEAR texts (which as noted above were
more likely to be texts that fulfilled other assignments) conveniently accessible outside of
DEAR time, and were frequently observed reading from their DEAR texts as the course
of the day afforded brief opportunities for impromptu, unofficial silent reading. For
example, PS, a non-focal girl, was observed on several occasions over the course of a
single morning reading from Are You There God? It ’5 Me Margaret in brief spurts during
daily announcements, teacher-directed mini-lessons, and transitions between activities
within Language Arts instruction. Link was also observed over the course of that same
morning reading from The Wish List whenever an opportunity presented itself, but Link’s
behavior in this regard is atypical for boys observed in this study.

Boys! [and girls]. We might conclude from the foregoing discussion that
Connors’ permeable classroom afforded greater continuity between girls’ vernacular and
academic literacy practices than it did for boys. The most popular genres among girls’
text selections for academic literacy practices were a more accurate reflection of the most
popular genres selected by girls for vernacular purposes than was the case for boys,
whose academic text selections were drawn from fewer genres than those made for
vernacular purposes. Texts selected by girls for academic purposes were also more in line
with those made for vernacular purposes than were boys’ academic selections in terms of

readability and series status, and girls did not demonstrate as much interest as boys did in

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{chitin I. i

media that were generally excluded from Connors’ otherwise permeable classroom.
Finally, most girls usually had books at the ready to engage with whenever a moment
might present itself and were more likely than boys to put their reading materials on
display.

However, while many boys were eager to engage in social identity development
by making aspects of their vernacular literacy practices visible through sanctioned and
unsanctioned literacy events in Connors’ classroom, there is evidence to suggest that at
least some girls were unwilling to take advantage of the permeability afforded by
Connors’ classroom to make visible important aspects of their vernacular literacy
practices. Conversely, there is also some evidence that not every literacy practice that
girls made visible in Connors’ classroom was a clear analogue to an “authentic”
vernacular literacy practice. Despite many surface continuities between girls’ vernacular
and academic literacy practices, it may be that instead of capitalizing on the permeability
of Connors’ classroom as a potential nexus between vernacular literacies and social
identity, some girls “played school,” leaving cherished aspects of their selves at the
schoolhouse door.

Prior scholarship has suggested that middle school boys tend to focus their
reading more on non-book texts, such as magazines, newspapers and even baseball cards,
as a function of an increasingly efferent stance toward print by which boys seek out texts
that will reinforce their knowledge base on favorite activities, such as sports and other
hobbies (Beatty, 2000; Farris, 1995; Sullivan, 2003; Wheeler, 1984; Wicks, 1995). While
not every boy who participated in this study demonstrated a strong interest in sports,

sports-oriented texts were almost exclusively selected by boys, many of whom played a

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variety of sports themselves and who clearly deepened their interest and participation in
their favorite sports through their reading choices. B-Rad and Axel, two focal boys with a
passion for football, made a number of football-oriented text selections, and B-Rad
discussed how he had tried to adapt a play described in a Matt Christopher novel during
one of his games. Tiger and Monte] played tOgether on a basketball team, and their text
selections reflect their abiding interest in the sport, with basketball-themed informational
books, biographies, sports fiction novels, magazines and even an inspirational work (The
Right Way to Win: How Athletes Can Place God First in Their Hearts) appearing among
texts they selected across all contexts. As noted earlier, Tiger and Montel’s DEAR
readings of sports-themed texts frequently turned into shared experiences with other
boys

Sharing a similar passion for basketball, SpongeBob and Ciera S., two focal girls,
also played together on a basketball team and attended every Homestead High School
girls’ basketball game that their schedules allowed together, including tournament games
as Homestead’s girls’ team competed for the state championship in its division during the
period of this study. They also attended several home games of the local university
women’s basketball team, even following the team to Indianapolis to watch it play in the
Final Four of the NCAA tournament. During the bookstore browsing activity, which
these girls participated in together, they each selected non-fiction books on the NBA, the
WNBA and NCAA women’s basketball. It might be argued that these two girls were
even bigger fans of basketball than any of the boys in this study. However, any texts
reflecting such interests were entirely limited to vernacular literacy events, and between

the two girls, only SpongeBob brought a single sports-themed text into any academic

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context: a copy of Sports Illustrated, which she selected for the culminating activity on
visualization skills and in which she focused entirely on an article about an NFL star, not
an article about basketball. Furthermore, neither girl participated in any formal or
informal sports-related classroom converSations, despite ample opportunities to do so. As
visible as boys’ sports interests became in Connors’ classroom, these girls’ vernacular
interests in sports remained virtually invisible within the otherwise permeable academic
context. This is particularly ironic, given that Connors was himself a junior varsity boys’
and girls’ track coach and frequently initiated brief, informal conversations on current
sports topics with the whole class. However, only the boys would respond to Connors’
prompts.

Although no other girls who participated in this study demonstrated as strong an
interest in sports as did SpongeBob and Ciera S., there is no reason to suppose that the
other girls in Connors’ classroom had any less of an interest in sports than boys, given
ample research demonstrating that in the wider population, women are just as likely as
men to identify themselves as sports fans (Costa, 2003; Dietz-Uhler, Harrick &

J acquemotte, 2000). Why even the most passionately dedicated girls’ interests in sports
did not become visible within Connors’ permeable classroom while boys’ sporting
interests flourished can only be speculated. While neither Mr. Connors nor any of the
boys in this study appeared to actively discourage the girls from sharing or engaging with
their sports interests within the academic contexts documented here, the invisibility of
girls’ sports interests in Connors’ otherwise permeable classroom indicates that at some
level for these students, sports as a visible social practice was a male preserve, regardless

of the prominence of sports within some girls’ extracurricular lives and vernacular

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literacy practices. The causes of this phenomenon are beyond the scope of this study; it
could be that SpongeBob and Ciera S. simply didn’t feel like reading about sports at
school or it could be the result of a complex constellation of social forces operating
across the students’ lifespan. Nevertheless, the virtual absence of sports texts among the
text selections made by girls for academic purposes, despite evidence that sports formed
an important element of these girls’ social identities outside of school, suggests that as
amenable as Connors’ classroom was to many aspects of girls’ vernacular literacy
practices, it did not serve as a nexus of literacy and identity for some girls as it did for
many boys.

Question Four
What attitudes toward vernacular and academic literacy practices do these boys hold,
how do they compare with the attitudes of other students, and how do those attitudes
change over the course of an academic year in a book club based classroom?

As described in Chapter 3, students in Mr. Connors’ Language Arts classes were
administered the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (ERAS) at the start of the 2004-05
school year and again at the end to assess the extent to which students’ attitudes toward
reading for academic and recreational purposes might change in the context of the
permeable curriculum implemented by Connors. While 41 students were present for the
first ERAS administration in the fall, and 42 were present for the spring administration,
only 36 students were present for both administrations. Within this group were 19 boys
and 17 girls (including 10 focal boys and 8 focal girls), and it is the scores from these
students that were used for the analyses that are reported here.

At the start of the school year, boys’ attitudes toward academic and recreational

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reading were almost identical, and group means were comparable to national norms for
sixth graders in the fall as published by McKenna and Kear (1990). Table A1 1 presents
the mean scores for these subscales for the fall administration by gender. As can be seen
in the table, the mean scores for girls on both subscales were higher than those for boys,
and simple t-test comparisons of these means reveal that the difference on the
recreational subscale was significant while the difference on the academic subscale was
not. When comparing subscale scores within groups, McKenna and Kear indicate that a
difference of 3 points or more between subscales should be regarded as a significant
discrepancy in attitude toward reading for different purposes. For neither boys nor girls
does the difference between mean scores on the academic and recreational subscales
exceed this threshold.

By the spring administration, mean scores for both boys and girls on both
subscales of the ERAS had dropped. While the drop in boys’ attitudes toward academic
reading was statistically significant, the drop in boys’ attitudes toward recreational
reading was not. Drops on both subscales for girls were significant, however. Table A12
shows t-test results indicating that at the end of the year, the gaps between boys’ and
girls’ scores were relatively unchanged from the fall administration, with the difference
between boys’ and girls’ attitudes toward recreational reading remaining significant.
Paired sample t-test comparisons of boys’ and girls’ recreational subscale scores from fall
to spring administrations of the ERAS (Table A13) demonstrate that while scores for
both boys and girls dropped, only the drop for girls was statistically significant, and both
groups’ mean scores for the recreational subscale are within one standard deviation of

national norms for sixth graders. Comparing boys’ and girls’ academic subscale scores

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from fall to spring administration (Table A14, paired sample t-test comparisons), we can
see that scores for both boys and girls dropped, and in contrast to the recreational
subscale, both drops are statistically significant, yet still within one standard deviation of
national norms. Finally, while the difference between the mean scores for boys on the
academic and recreational subscales (24.37 and 24.95, respectively) at the spring
administration does not exceed the 3 point threshold specified by McKenna and Kear, the
difference in girls’ mean scores on the two subscales does (26.15 and 29.77 respectively).
This indicates that girls held more positive attitudes toward reading for recreational than
for academic purposes at the end of the year, while boys’ attitudes were comparable
across contexts.

To summarize the findings regarding reading attitude, both boys’ and girls’
attitudes toward academic reading as measured by the ERAS dropped significantly over
the course of the 2004-05 school year, and while both groups’ attitudes toward
recreational reading dropped, only the drop in girls’ scores was statistically significant.
The difference between boys’ recreational and academic subscale scores remained stable
between fall and spring administrations, and stayed within the 3 point threshold specified
by McKenna and Kear for judging a significant discrepancy between attitudes for
recreational and academic reading. However, the difference between girls’ recreational
and academic subscale scores widened between the fall and spring administrations to
exceed the 3 point threshold, indicating that girls as a group held more positive attitudes
toward recreational reading than toward academic reading at the end of the school year.
A comparison of boys’ and girls’ mean subscale scores on the spring administration with

national norms reveals that both means for both groups fall within one standard deviation

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of the national norms for sixth graders. Possible explanations for this overall decline in
reading attitude among Mr. Connors’ language arts students will be offered in the

following chapter.

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CHAPTER 5
Discussion
Introduction
Over the past decade, one of the overriding concerns of adolescent literacy
research has been to better understand the extracunicular literacy practices in which
middle and high school students engage, on the premise that more detailed knowledge of
these “real world” literacies could provide educators a scaffold upon which to construct
more effective academic literacy learning environments. However, as Alvermann et al.
(2007) argue, this is an area that remains “largely unstudied and/or underreported ...
despite continued calls for exploring the potential of such literacies to serve as
springboards for actively engaging youth in academic reading tasks” (p. 34). Our
contemporary understanding of the literacy practices that adolescents engage in for
personal (or what in this study are termed vernacular) purposes emerges from a body of
scholarship based on large-scale surveys of recreational reading and leisure time
activities (e. g., Hall & Coles, 1999; Nippold, Duthie & Larsen, 2005), in-depth
interviews with individual or small groups of students (e.g., Cavazos-Kottke, 2006;
Reeves, 2004), best practice reports of classroom contexts and activities that promote
active engagement with core teacher-selected texts (e.g., Brozo, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm,
2006), and ethnographic accounts of adolescents participating in extracurricular media
clubs (e. g., Alvermann, Hagood, Heron-Hmby, Hughes, Williams & Yoon, 2007;
Alvermann, Huddleston & Hagood, 2004). Absent from the literature is an exploration of
what a permeable classroom structure that attempts to embrace the texts of students’

vernacular literacy practices — not as on-ramps to engagement with core teacher-selected

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texts but as the core texts themselves — might reveal about adolescents’ literacy practices
as well as how adolescents’ attitudes toward reading might fluctuate in the context of
such a classroom.

This study was designed to enrich our understanding of adolescents’ vernacular
literacy practices, particularly those of boys, through an analysis of the text selections
made by a group of sixth grade students in just such a permeable classroom structure and
through a comparison of the text selections made by a subset of those students for
vernacular purposes outside of that classroom context. Specifically, this study sought
answers to four main questions:

1. What are the vernacular literacy practices of a class of middle school boys and

what kinds of texts do these boys engage with in those practices?

2. How and to what extent do these boys' vernacular literacies become visible

within a language arts program structured around students' self-selected texts?

3. How and to what extent do the vernacular and academic literacy practices of

these boys differ from those of the girls within the same class? and

4. What attitudes toward vernacular and academic literacy practices do these

boys hold, how do they compare with the attitudes of other students, and how
do those attitudes change over the course of an academic year in a book club
based classroom?
As the previous two chapters have detailed, Ed Connors’ sixth grade Language Arts
classroom at Harwell Middle School was the site for a year long investigation into these
questions. Text selections made by all students in Connors’ two Language Arts classes

for a variety of academic purposes were documented and analyzed. Text selections made

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by a focal group of students from Connors’ classes for vernacular purposes were also
documented and were compared with the text selections that those focal students made
for academic purposes. Comparisons were also made between the text selections made by
boys and girls for academic and vernacular purposes, both at the whole group level and
within the subgroup of focal students. Results of these analyses were detailed in Chapter
Four.

In this chapter, the significance of these findings for better understanding the
literacy practices of adolescents, especially boys, as well as implications for instruction
and for teacher education will be discussed. To situate this study’s findings within the
current scholarship on boys and literacy, the discussion in this chapter is organized
around three main focal points: the texts that defined the physical landscape of the
participants’ literacy practices; the curricular and extracurricular contexts that defined the
social and psychological landscape of those practices; and lastly, the role of the
classroom teacher as a facilitator of literacy practices across and within those contexts.
Limitations of the current study and possible directions for firture research will be
addressed throughout.

The Texts —- Currents of Diversity
The Long Tail

The first big idea that emerges from a consideration of the texts selected by the
boys and girls in Mr. Connors’ Language Arts classes for vernacular and academic
purposes is the high degree of diversity in the overall set of text selections. A teacher or
librarian looking to this study for guidance as to particular authors or titles to keep in

stock to meet the demands of students’ reading appetites would not get very far with this

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dataset beyond a recommendation to offer an ample array of Michigan/American Chillers
books and some Matt Christopher classics to appeal to boys, and perhaps to keep a few
sets of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events handy. Ultimately, there were
no big “hits” with the whole group of students, a microcosmic illustration of the “Long
Tail” phenomenon (Anderson, 2006). According to Anderson, when consumers are free
to select from a virtually limitless array of different texts (such as when shopping for
songs on iTunes or for books at Amazon.com, for example), very few individual titles
emerge as big hits. Instead, the vast majority of songs downloaded on iTunes or books
purchased at Amazon.com are selected in relatively small numbers by relatively few
consumers. If a frequency distribution of the number of downloads of the top 1,000,000
best selling songs on iTunes were plotted, the result would be a curve with a very steep,
sudden decline, followed by a long steady plateau that never reaches zero (see Figure
816 for a prototypical Long Tail curve). The narrow head of the curve is where we find a
few big hits, appealing to a broad spectrum of listeners; the Long Tail of the curve is
where we find not only the vast majority of the iTunes inventory, but also the vast
majority of downloads, period. In other words, the market is not driven by hits that appeal
to large agglomerations of consumers, but rather by songs that have niche appeal to
relatively small groups of people. Anderson (2006) finds this phenomenon not just in
online marketplaces such as iTunes and Amazon.com, but also in television ratings,
movie attendance, and web searching behaviors. The most recent statistics released by
Nielsen BookScan, which tracks approximately 70% of book sales across 6,500 retail
locations, provide additional confirmation of the Long Tail phenomenon: of the

approximately 1,466,000 unique titles sold in the United States in 2006, 1,123,000 (or

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just under 78%) sold fewer than 99 copies, while only 483 (or less than a tenth of one
percent) sold more than 100,000 copies. (Nielsen Bookscan, in Harper’s Index, 2007).

While a marketplace of reading materials with a virtually infinite inventory was
not literally available to Connors’ students, they did nonetheless have access to two large
classroom libraries (Connors’ and his team-teacher, Ms. Price’s), a well-stocked and
constantly updated school library in a network with hundreds of other school and public
libraries statewide, two large public libraries within five miles of the school, and one
major chain bookstore in the Homestead district. Whether available on the shelf of a local
library, by interlibrary loan from a networked library, or for purchase at a brick-and-
mortar or online bookstore, Connors’ students did not lack for access to texts, and the
focal students interviewed in this study indicated that they utilized all of these sources to
find texts that they were interested in reading. Given that over half of the text selections
documented in this study were only selected once by a single student and that the most
popular texts appeared among the text selections of fewer than 20% of the students, we
can see the Long Tail phenomenon in small-scale. A previous investigation into the
reading preferences of a small group of talented middle school boys found little to no
overlap in the particular authors and titles selected by that study’s five participants, and
the question of whether a similar pattern might be seen with a larger, mixed gender group
of general readers was raised (Cavazos-Kottke, 2006). The results of this study suggest
that rather than congregating around a canon of popular texts, the crop of text selections
yielded by a larger and more diverse group of readers becomes spread over an even larger
array of authors and titles.

How might teachers interested in supporting students’ academic literacy skills by

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creating opportunities for aspects of their vernacular literacy practices to enter into the
classroom context deal with such potentially unruly diversity? Acknowledging that
students’ vernacular literacy lives are characterized by a much wider range of print and
non-print texts than the traditional language arts curriculum (or for that matter the
average pre-service teacher whose apprenticeship of observation likely took place in the
context of such a curriculum) may be prepared to deal with, Anstey and Bull (2006) offer
the following perspective:
There are two possible responses to these ideas when selecting texts for use in the
classroom. One is for the teacher to limit the texts and review their content
carefully, using only texts that meet an agreed-on set of criteria regarding the
topics, values, and attitudes of the content. This approach would ensure that
students met only appropriate texts in school, but it would not equip them to deal
with texts outside of school that presented contrasting ideas, values and attitudes,
often very carefully disguised. A second response, which more appropriately
supports multiliteracies’ goals, is for teachers to ensure that a broad range of texts
are available and help students develop the skills to analyse these texts. In this
way, students will become more discriminatory and have skills to deal with texts
they encounter in many contexts. (p. 37)
It is important to note that Anstey and Bull do not claim that taking the second stance
toward students’ vernacular literacy practices will necessarily improve students’ attitudes
toward reading, raise achievement or foster life-long reading habits. Rather, they
modestly argue that helping students develop critical reading skills with the texts that

characterize their vernacular literacy lives will simply empower them to more effectively

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“deal with” the various texts they encounter there.

As Alvermann et al. (2007) note (and I discuss in Chapter Two of this
dissertation), the literature lacks conclusive data on the extent to which reading habits,
attitudes or achievement may be affected by scaffolding students’ development in
academic literacy practices upon self-selected texts that represent students’ vernacular
literacy practices. Setting aside the fact that the non-experimental design of this study
does not allow for causal claims, the drops in reading attitudes documented among
students in this study certainly do not lend empirical support to an argument that reading
attitudes may improve in the context of student choice, particularly given the structural
impermeability of certain elements of Connors’ curriculum to the non-book and non-print
texts that played a part in many boys’ vernacular literacy lives. Nevertheless, it should be
noted that none of the drops in reading attitude documented here represent serious
declines beyond those which might be expected among sixth graders, and thus while the
results of this study do not make an unequivocal statement on the power of choice to
positively affect young adolescents’ attitudes toward reading, they by no means suggest
that choice is demotivating. Rather, the comments of Billy Bob, a focal boy, lend some
support to those arguing for greater choice as a positive in adolescent literacy instruction,
no matter how elusive causal data may be:

I recently had a change in attitude toward reading. The books I was trying to get

into before, I didn’t like them, so I found a book from the Chillers. I started

reading them and really liked them. Reading about stuff that I like if it
doesn’t interest me, I won’t want to read it. But if it’s basketball or -— like the one

I’m reading - werewolves or mega-monsters, or all that stuff, I’ll like it because

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that’s the kind of stuffI like.

What Billy Bob describes here is a kind of self-discovery that we might hope to see in all
reluctant readers, given a space to explore personal interests and become captivated by a
book. In contrast to the general trend of attitude scores among Connors’ students, Billy
Bob’s attitudes toward both academic and recreational reading improved over the course
of the 2004-05 school year. While a causal link cannot be made between Billy Bob’s
attitude and the opportunities for choice provided by Mr. Connors, it is clear that Billy
Bob saw the chance to experiment with different reading materials on his own
recognizance as a positive force in his literacy development. Billy Bob’s experience
resonates with me because it echoes testimonials I heard from boys in my own teaching
practice who discovered (or rediscovered) a love of reading upon experiencing the right
book. Unfortunately, as the results of this study demonstrate, the right book may be
different for every student, making a commitment to offering a high degree of student
choice across the cuniculum an especially challenging proposition.

When given ample opportunities to self—select reading materials for a variety of
academic and vernacular contexts, the fact that there was relatively little repetition of
authors and titles across students’ text selections suggests that educators hoping to offer
young adolescent readers an attractive selection of interesting texts in a classroom or
school library would be advised to stock their shelves with a wide assortment of different
authors and titles, rather than investing in class sets of a limited selection of notable texts.

Given a strong preference for texts published within the last five to ten years,
another implication for practice from this wide diversity of authors and titles is that

teachers would also be well advised to maintain an active interest in current publications

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and to continually refresh their awareness of new titles and authors that might appeal to
their students. While the annual lists of children’s, young adults’ and teachers’ book
choices published by the International Reading Association (IRA) provide a convenient
snapshot of titles and authors popular with large groups of readers, it is important to note
that the process by which the IRA compiles these lists renders that snapshot two years old
by the time it reaches press. The 2007 lists, for example, are based solely on books
published in 2005, and it should be noted that of the 300 titles presented on the ten most
recent young adults’ book choices lists (representing books published between 1996 and
2005, the period from which the vast majority of texts selected by students in this study
were published), only 13 of those titles appear in the database of this study, and only four
of the authors whose works appear on these lists (J K Rowling, Gordon Korman, Phyllis
Reynolds Naylor and Louis Sachar) are among the most frequently selected authors in
this study. Neither Lemony Snicket nor Jonathan Rand, who did publish books during
this period and who were the two most frequently selected authors in this study, appear
on any of the IRA’s young adults’ choices lists.

If we want to open our classrooms to the texts of students’ vernacular literacy
practices in order to scaffold academic learning on students’ existing funds of knowledge
and perhaps increase motivation for engaging in academic literacy tasks (an ideal that
Alvermann et al. (2007) remind us remains elusive in adolescent literacy research and
practice), we have to accept that students are not likely to congregate around a single
messianic text or even a small group of texts. Rather, we need to be able to cope with a
potentially unruly collection of texts, many of which we may not particularly enjoy

ourselves. We might hope that lots of students will pick up Harry Potter and the

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Sorcerer ’s Stone so that we can teach about mythic archetypes, explore connections to
other classics of fantasy literature and marvel at the linguistic cleverness of the names
that J K Rowling gives her characters. Certainly, some students will go in that direction,
but we will also spend our time pointing out misuses of “its” and “it’s” in the first chapter
of Kreepy Klowns of Kalamazoo or explaining why students have to use complete
sentences in their writing while Jonathan Rand gets to sell a million novels composed
largely with sentence fragments.

My point here is not to discourage the practice of self-selection in language arts
instruction, but rather to point out that when we encourage students to bring themselves
and their tastes into the classroom, we potentially invite in a degree of diversity
unprecedented by any of our prior experiences learning about literature. The
apprenticeship of observation through which most language arts teachers passed as
students likely involved a systematic study of a canon of texts that, no matter how
progressively calculated to include diverse voices, was defined in advance by a content
area expert and rarely open to student-defined interests. If we offer our students the
challenge to select reading materials in accordance with their own tastes, abilities and
interests — and they take us up on it — we will then be faced with the daunting task of
recognizing each student’s unique selections, because as Alvermann and her colleagues
remind us, adolescents will regard such choices as an “experience of identity”
(Alvermann & Hagood, 2000, p. 445; also, Alvermann, Huddleston & Hagood, 2004).
The demotivational consequences of failing to recognize the “repertoires of practice” that
children might choose to make visible in such a permeable environment can be knotty,

especially if students interpret a teacher’s reluctance to embrace the texts of their

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vernacular literacies as a referendum on their identity (Nixon & Comber, 2006, p. 128;
see also Reeves, 2004).
Underlying Patterns

Diversity should not be mistaken for chaos, however. While boys may appear to
be “all over the place” in their reading habits (J. Rothschild, personal communication,
July 7, 2007), the results of this study fortunately demonstrate that there are some
predictable trends in boys’ and girls’ text selections that may better assist educators
looking for guidance in stocking a class library or preparing to engage with a permeable
classroom. As detailed in the previous chapter, books constituted the majority of the text
selections made by the whole group of students across all contexts as well as those made
by boys for vernacular purposes, although boys were more likely than girls to select texts
from across a range of print and non-print media. Compared to their text selections for
academic purposes, boys’ text selections for vernacular purposes were more likely to
come from a series, were spread across a wider range of genres, and were on average
more advanced in terms of readability, even though their selections were predominantly
texts marketed to a young adult audience. By far the most popular genre among boys’
text selections for vernacular purposes was fantasy, followed by action, realistic fiction,
mystery/thriller, sports and science fiction, which were represented in roughly equal
numbers of text selections. Girls’ text selections for vernacular purposes were more
narrowly limited to works of fantasy and realistic fiction. It should be noted that these
trends do not exist independently of each other in the dataset. The finding that boys
favored series works in their text selections for vernacular purposes cut across the

different media from which their text selections were made, and multiple media texts

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were found within each of the most popular genre categories. For example, a popular
science fiction franchise like Star Wars manifests itself in the full dataset of vernacular
text selections as well as within individual focal students’ sets of text selections as series
of books, video games and movies. Series interests were not confined to a particular
medium, but frequently crossed over into multiple media.

These trends in boys’ text selections are in line with much contemporary
scholarship on young adults’ reading preferences. The popularity of imaginative fiction
(including fantasy, science fiction, and most of the texts classified in this study as
mystery/thriller, such as books from the Michigan/American Chillers and Goosebumps
series) among young adolescent boys has been well established in prior studies, as has the
popularity of series fiction (Cavazos-Kottke, 2006; Coles & Hall, 2002; Hall & Coles,
1999; Knowles & Smith, 2005; Nell, 1988; Newkirk, 2002; Sullivan, 2003, 2004; Wicks,
1995; Worthy, Moorman, Turner, 1999). The results of this study indicate that this is also
true for girls, but what makes boys’ preferences unique in this regard is that they are
spread across a wider range of genres within this category, whereas girls’ selections are
more narrowly focused around fantasy. A preference among boys for texts that have
strong visual appeal, both in terms of vivid language and graphic accompaniment, has
also been documented in prior scholarship (Kajder, 2006; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002, 2006;
Sullivan, 2003).

The finding that the boys in this study made more overall text selections than girls
does not have a precedent in the literature. Indeed, in the few studies that directly
compare the leisure reading habits of boys and girls, the opposite trend is found (Coles &

Hall, 2002). That boys’ preferred reading materials come from a wider array of genres

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than do girls’ preferred materials is also a new finding. Prior scholarship on boys’ genre
preferences either has found very little difference from girls’ preferences (e. g., Worthy,
Moorman & Turner, 1999) or has focused on a narrow range of “boy-friendly” genres
without comparison to girls’ genre preferences, including non-fiction, humor,
sports/outdoors and fantasy/science fiction (e. g., Sullivan, 2003, 2004). While sports and
science fiction texts were found almost exclusively among boys’ text selections, a
preference for non-fiction and humor was not expressed any more strongly among boys
in this study than among girls. The majority of non—fiction texts in this dataset were
biographies and magazines, selected in roughly equal numbers by boys and girls for the
Genre Project and the culminating activity on visualization skills, respectively.

One limitation of this study is that despite the clear variety of texts with which
students engaged in their vernacular literacy practices, this variety is underreported to the
extent that certain types of texts that focal students did mention in the course of
interviews and informal conversations were not added into the text selection database.
These kinds of texts were excluded from data analysis chiefly due to the logistical
difficulties in isolating a discrete student-with-specific-text unit of analysis to assess
students’ selections of these kinds of texts. For example, most of the focal students
mentioned in interviews that they frequently sought information about topics of personal
interest on the Internet, but particular sites were neither solicited nor documented in the
course of the interviews. Several focal students also made references to reading “the
paper,” without further elaborating on which papers they read, which sections of those
papers they read, or the frequency with which they read them. Wicks (1995) found that

newspapers were the most frequently read texts among the boys he surveyed, suggesting

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that this text form might have had more prominence among the vernacular literacy
practices of the students in this study had newspaper text selections been included in the
dataset. Televised sporting events (with the exception of WWE Smackdown.’, which is a
weekly series with ongoing narrative arcs, more similar to a television serial drama than a
“traditional” sports broadcast; see Alvermann, Huddleston & Hagood, 2004) and sports
news programs were not documented, despite clear references to consumption of such
texts and despite the fact that since the 1960s, the prevailing aesthetic of American sports
broadcasting has been to cast the televised athletic competition into a rudimentary
narrative framework, such that as a text, it has more in common with the average
television drama than with the experience of a live sporting event (see Crawford, 2004,
and Jay, 2004). Finally, participants’ engagement with popular music texts was not
documented. In the case of music, only one focal student, Gatorade, made a reference to
the Gwen Stefarri song “Hollaback Girl” during his bookstore browsing interview, and
this was the sole occasion on which contemporary popular music was directly mentioned
by any participant in the entire study. Given that other scholarship has found listening to
popular music to be the leisure activity in which adolescents most frequently engage
(e. g., Nippold, Duthie & Larsen, 2005; Perlstein, 2003), this omission is perhaps the most
glaring, and future research should seek ways to document participants’ text selections in
this as well as the preceding areas such that these kinds of texts can be factored into the
overall portrait of adolescent literacy practices and that their representation therein can be
reliably compared with that of the other kinds of text documented in this study.

The Contexts — (Im)Permeable Semiotic Social Spaces

T ransmediation

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A major feature of boys’ vernacular literacy practices that was documented in this
study, but not fully capitalized upon by Ed Connors’ otherwise permeable curriculum, is
a tendency to engage in transmediation, or the synthesis of a complex meta-narrative
across a range of media and delivery systems that each offer unique perspectives or bits
of diegetic information on characters, stories or entire narrative worlds. The most obvious
examples of transmediation come from the world of imaginative fiction (e.g., the Star
Wars universe unfolding across films, novels and video games), but as this study has
argued, sports fandom as enacted by many boys in this study offers an additional example
of transmedial reading, with the added bonus that boys’ transmediation across sports texts
frequently involved an observable social component. The process by which boys in this
study engaged in the work of social identity construction through transmedial allegiances
became visible in Connors’ classroom, although much of the social activity took place
outside of sanctioned curricular space and Connors’ language arts activities were largely
impermeable to non-print media.

Writers on transmediation fi'equently describe it as a “natural” feature of everyday
literacy practices, especially among contemporary adolescents, but rarely offer empirical
evidence that adolescents actually engage in such practices. This assumption of
naturalness is conveyed through rhetorical appeals to the reader to consider how one
negotiates meaning by synthesizing information and ideas fiom a range of print and non-
print media texts in one’s daily life, and descriptions of teens simultaneously listening to
digital music, surfing the Internet, watching videos and chatting with fiiends via instant
messaging programs (e. g., Anstey & Bull, 2006; King & O’Brien, 2002; Semali, 2000,

2002). What evidence these authors do offer is usually more indicative of multitasking —

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simultaneous engagement with multiple semiotic systems — than true transmediation.
Frequently cited is the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Generation M report (Roberts, Fueho
& Rideout, 2005), which found that on the average day, young people are exposed to
approximately 8 1/2 hours of media content in just 6 V2 hours of real time, indicating that at
least a quarter of that time involves simultaneous exposure to multiple media. However,
Generation M only reports media use; it does not investigate the meaning-making
strategies employed by media consumers. Flores-Koulish (2005) found a similar level of
saturation in her study of the media habits of pre-service teachers, providing some
description of the ways in which her participants synthesize meaning in a multimodal,
multitextual mediascape. Bruce (2002) provides anecdotes of teenagers engaging with a
variety of media texts, using such texts as “boundary objects” that allow adolescents “to
connect with each other by means of and through shared artifacts ... [and] are integral to
the ways that these young people make meaning, communicate, and construct their social
lives” (p. 3). These authors all agree that it is incumbent upon teachers to facilitate the
development of students’ critical faculties as they transmediate in order to nurture what
Gardner (2006) calls “the synthesizing mind,” one which is able to construct new
knowledge from a variety of disciplines and information sources and one which Gardner
and all of the above cited authors celebrate as essential for effective citizenship,
leadership and occupational success in the modern age. However, while all of these
authors provide convincing arguments for the importance of developing such
competencies, for expanding schooled notions of literacy to embrace transmedial
practices, and for the centrality of transmediation in everyday literacies, none aside from

Flores-Koulish (2005) and Bruce (2002) offer empirical support for their assumptions of

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the naturalness of transmediation. The talented boy readers studied in a previous
investigation (Cavazos-Kottke, 2006) did demonstrate transmedial literacy practices, in
one exemplary case constructing a detailed understanding of the Marvel Comics universe
by transmediating between novel, comic book and film versions of The Incredible Hulk
and X-Men as well as Discovery Channel documentary programs and tie-in books on
evolution and even Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This study fills a gap in the
literature by providing empirically gathered support for claims that transmediation plays
a significant role in the vernacular literacy lives of adolescents, and that the affinity
spaces in which those transmedial literacy practices are carried out provide stages on
which young adolescents construct social identities.

Extending on a limitation suggested earlier in this chapter, the extent to which
multiple media play a role in boys’ vernacular literacy practices is likely
underrepresented in this study. Text selections for vernacular purposes were added to the
database conservatively; focal students had to make reference to a specific text or series
by title in one of the interviews for it to be entered into the database, and no text
selections were added to the database by inference. For example, Link brought a strategy
book for the Ruby and Sapphire versions of the GarneBoy Advance game Pokemon for
analysis in the culminating activity on visualization skills, and this book was entered into
the database as an academic selection for the visualization activity. In his journal, Link
wrote seven reasons for why he found this book interesting, including “It has been my
specialty since I was like 5, 6 or 7 I'm a mastermind at it.” On another occasion, Link
brought a copy of Nintendo Power magazine to read during DEAR time, and he spent the

period reading a series of articles on the upcoming Emerald version of Pokemon. It

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would be reasonable to infer from the evidence that Link plays Pokemon and that the
Pokemon series of games plays a significant role in his vernacular literacy practices.
However, Link never discussed his video gaming interests in any of the interviews, even
though he spoke in great detail about other texts he enjoyed outside of academic contexts,
including movies and magazines as well as books. Another example is Chipmunk, who
read an issue of Game Informer for his visualization activity text, yet did not discuss any
particular video game titles during his interviews. It is likely that Chipmunk enjoys video
gaming as part of his vernacular literacies, but no game text selections are attributed to
him in the database. Thus, despite the stronger representation of a variety of media texts
within the dataset of text selections documented for boys’ vernacular literacy practices
than those for girls, the true extent to which multiple media texts play a role in the
vernacular literacy lives of focal boys is likely underestimated in the dataset.
Girls, Sports and Silence

Although Ed Connors’ perrneably structured language arts cuniculum provided a
portal for certain limited aspects of these transmedial vernacular literacy practices to
become visible in an academic context (particularly where print-based media could be
involved), it is important to note that while many boys took advantage of the opportunity
to make those practices visible, some girls did not. The example discussed in Chapter 4
involved the appearance of sports—themed transmedial literacies exclusively within the
visible literacy practices of boys, despite evidence that at least two girls in Connors’
language arts class were accomplished athletes and avid sports fans. Sociologists have
long discussed how sports operates as a “male preserve,” a social practice that serves to

reproduce and maintain society’s larger gender inequities by providing women fewer

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opportunities for sports participation, leadership and media coverage than are accorded
men, despite legislative efforts such as Title IX to address such inequities and despite
evidence that women are as interested in sports as men are (Bryson, 1987; Costa, 2003;
Dunning, 1986; Theberge, 1985). Wenner (1998) argues that sports spaces, such as sports
bars and other venues where men gather to view or talk about sports, serve as “segregated
sites of ‘male solidarity’ where men can ‘rehearse’ their identification with other men”
(p. 310). Indeed, Fine (1987) observed in his ethnographic account of middle school age
Little League baseball teams that while boys enjoyed the attention of girl spectators, they
never acknowledged girls’ presence at their games, and that through participation in and
talk about sports with other boys, players simultaneously forged peer and gender
identities. Cross-gender fiiendships were not uncommon among the boys Fine studied,
but they were restricted to relationships marked by either romance or mutual teasing.
Cordial friendships based on common interests, such as sports, were not observed.
Literacy events structured around sports in Connors’ class were indeed a male preserve,
and while neither Connors nor the boys in his classes were ever observed trying to
enforce such a gender regime on the girls in the class, they did nothing to disrupt it. Girls
like SpongeBob and Ciera S. were neither actively discouraged from nor encouraged to
bring their basketball passions into the community of learners that Connors attempted to
nurture through his permeable classroom. Nevertheless, this important aspect of these
girls’ personal identities remained invisible within virtually all academic contexts,
flourishing almost exclusively as an unrecognized extracurricular pursuit.

Despite Connors’ openness to his students’ vernacular literacy practices, it is in

the gendered nature of sports discourse among the visible literacy practices enacted in his

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classroom that the above warning about the need to explicitly recognize the materials that
children and adolescents bring in their “virtual school bags” (Nixon & Comber, p. 129)
must be heeded. It is not enough to simply make the classroom permeable to adolescents’
vernacular literacy practices and then Watch what pours in. The teacher in such a
classroom must be actively engaged with the texts and contexts of each student’s
vernacular literacies. The teacher in a permeable classroom must educate (from the Latin
educare, meaning “to draw out”) in the truest sense of the word, taking an active interest
in the students’ vernacular literacies and funds of knowledge and drawing out those
literacies upon which students’ further development can be most compellingly scaffolded
(Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992). A truly educative experience is one that
thoughtfully recognizes where individual learners stand, then transforms them in such a
way that broadens their minds and spirits to new experiences and knowledge and enables
future learning. This is an ideal to which Ed Connors aspired in creating his permeable
classroom. However, as the missed opportunities to engage these girls’ sports literacies or
to fully integrate transmediation into the curriculum suggest, this ideal remained
unfulfilled.
The Teacher - Negotiator of Literacy Events and Practices

Social Engagement in Theory

When asked to describe his own reading habits, Ed Connors notes that he had
never been a big reader of fiction. He admits that as an adolescent, he disliked reading for
academic purposes, but that he was a “voracious reader” of informational texts that he
was able to self-select. Even as an adult, Connors says, “I like to read what I like to read.

I don’t really like it when people give me books to read. It’s too schoolish.” While he still

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does not read much fiction, he is an avid collector of “teacher books,” and in those books,
he says that in recent years he has noted “a trend toward a Reader’s Workshop approach
over whole class novel approaches,” a recommendation that conveniently dovetails with
his own feelings about being assigned books to read. His favorite teacher book is Laura
Robb’s Teaching Reading in the Middle School (2000), a book that Franzak (2006)
highlights in her review of current paradigms in adolescent literacy instruction as a
“hybrid” between reader response and strategic reading approaches “that combines a
reading workshop (thereby meeting the need for choice) with focused instruction on
reading strategies” (p. 216). As described in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, Connors’
language arts curriculum clearly bears the imprimatur of Robb’s influence, from his
commitment to maximizing opportunities for student self-selection of personally
interesting texts to his use of the Daybook of Critical Reading and Writing (Claggett,
Reid & Vinz, 1999) as a launch pad for reading comprehension strategy instruction.
Connors’ own “hybrid” approach was to use students’ self-selected texts as vehicles for
scaffolding students’ development in key comprehension strategies such as visualization,
drawing personal and intertextual connections, making inferences, and summarizing main
and supporting details.

Prior to this study during the 2003-2004 school year, I had a number of
opportunities to informally observe Connors’ teaching both firsthand and vicariously
through the experiences of my sixth grade daughter. What I saw were student work tables
arranged into small clusters, daily DEAR sessions that began with mostly quiet
(sometimes shared) reading and culminated in lively conversations among peers and

between Connors and his students, and frequent challenges to students to exercise newly

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learned reading strategies in their reading of their self-selected texts. Not only did this
structure closely match the Reader’s Workshop approach advocated by Robb and other
adolescent literacy advocates, it allowed Connors to execute his teaching in a consultative
manner, simultaneously helping individual students more effectively engage with their
favored reading materials while guiding readers toward engagement with increasingly
difficult text. Connors described his strategy toward guiding his students’ book choices as
one of “webbing” children’s reading interests. For instance, suppose a student enjoyed
reading A Series of Unfortunate Events. Connors would attempt to determine what
aspects of the series captivated the child’s interest, then suggest a different title that might
have a similar appeal to the individual:
This is about children who have to overcome something. Here is another book,
totally unrelated to the Series of Unfortunate Events, that deals with the same
thing. And gradually, like we’re doing with writing, your reading interests
expand. You can’t just stick with horse books or Series of Unfortunate Events in
upper grades, where the reading gets more complex.
Connors took a special interest in the reading habits of his male students and felt that,
based on his understanding of best practices from his own professional reading, this kind
of permeable classroom structure would afford him an excellent opportunity not only to
directly support boys’ development as skilled and engaged readers, but also to nurture a
classroom community of readers. Such was the state of Connors’ approach to teaching
language arts when this study was designed, and Chapter 2 of this dissertation reviews
the literature in support of the permeable classroom structure and pedagogical strategies

that Connors adopted.

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Social Disengagement in Practice

During the 2004-2005 school year, while Connors continued to articulate his
vision of building a community of readers through a pedagogy that privileged student
choice and direct instruction in a constellation of reading comprehension strategies that
he believed were central to engaged reading, Connors modified both the physical layout
and daily routines of his class from what they had been the previous year in order to
address classroom management issues. As can be seen in Figures B12 through B15,
student tables were no longer clustered into small groups, but rather set end-to-end in
rows. Only once were the tables moved into groups, to facilitate a book club-style
discussion over students’ Book Project choices, which took place in the middle of the
final grading period of the school year. Brief discussions between pairs of students seated
at the same table frequently took place during language arts lessons, typically following
the Think-Pair-Share format in response to a Daybook prompt. Instead of beginning and
ending with text-based peer conversations, DEAR sessions during this school year
usually began with a brief announcement that DEAR time was commencing, and ended
with the whole class’ attention directed toward the front of the room, where individual
students would take turns reciting the schedule for the day. During DEAR time, not only
did Connors rarely interact with students, students rarely interacted with each other, Tiger
and Montel’s occasional shared readings proving the exception to the rule. Only twice
during the observation period did DEAR sessions end with volunteers sharing with the
whole class what they had been reading. Ironically, while Connors continued to articulate
the value of creating a community of readers, cooperative book club-type activities and

text-centered social interactions were minimized in the enacted language arts curriculum.

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Connors’ more socially disengaged approach may help explain the overall drop in
reading attitude scores, as detailed at the end of Chapter 4. While attitudes toward reading
for academic purposes dropped significantly among all students over the course of the
school year, a statistically significant decline in attitudes toward recreational reading was
seen only among girls, while the decline observed among boys did not reach statistical
significance. While not reported in the previous chapter, a comparison of the attitude
toward recreational reading subscores between Connors’ and his team-teacher Ms.
Price’s classrooms may provide additional insights into the overall portrait of student
attitudes toward reading. As can be seen in Table A15, while attitudes toward
recreational reading dropped among all students in both classes, only the drop among
Connors’ homeroom students was statistically significant.

What was different in Price’s classroom? Even though she was not the designated
language arts teacher, Price did build more socially engaged literacy practices into her
classroom. While Connors read two novels aloud over the course of the year (The Bad
Beginning and Maniac Magee), Price read six (The Magician 's Nephew, Warriors Don ’t
Cry, Number the Stars, Jaguar, Joey Pigza Loses Control and Joey Pigza Swallowed the
Key). As shown in Figure B3 (see Chapter 3), Price maintained a reading comer, a small
carpeted area with bean bag chairs and special lighting where students could spend
DEAR time and which also included a reading recommendation wall, where students
(and Ms. Price) routinely posted notecards with comments on books they had read.
During the Genre Project, Connors started putting up Post-It notes with the names of
books that students had read, but did not continue this after the first wave of student book

reports were graded. While none of Price’s classroom activities were observed in the

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course of this study, these contrasts between the two teachers nonetheless suggest that
Price implemented more routines to build a community of readers among her students
than did Connors.

What this contrast in routines illustrates is that while Connors’ ostensibly
permeable language arts curriculum afforded visibility of the texts at the heart of many
students’ vernacular literacy practices, it was Price’s class that afforded greater
recognition of those texts. As Franzak (2006), Nixon and Comber (2006), Reeves (2004),
and Alvermann and Hagood (2000) emphasize, creating classroom contexts that afford
the visibility of students’ vernacular literacy practices may help build a bridge between
in- and out-of-school literacies, but only a “cursory acknowledgement” of those practices
within academic contexts “shortchanges students’ literacy knowledge” (Franzak, p. 224).
These authors emphasize the importance of building close relationships with students to
see texts through their eyes, “exploring with students the satisfactions these texts
provide” (Reeves, p. 258). While Connors voiced a similar position in discussing the
value of webbing students’ reading habits, he did not consistently do this with his
students. In fact, the only occasion on which Connors was observed discussing text
selections with individual students was during the library visits to choose books for the
Book Project. Even then, most interactions with students were restricted to the students
telling Connors which book they wanted to read and Connors either approving the choice
or suggesting that the student seek a different title.

This lack of close guidance of students’ text selections as well as the lack of
consistent, explicit recognition of a great number of the texts that students made visible

within his classroom may have served as a counterweight to the permeable framework

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that Connors tried to establish, resulting in an unintended level of impermeability that
may have factored into the drop in reading attitude scores. Self—determination theory
(Ryan & Deci, 2000) provides a framework for understanding how that process might
work. Connors’ emphasis on student choice afforded students a sense of autonomy, and
to the extent that students chose texts within their independent/instructional range,
students’ sense of competence was attended to by the classroom structure. However, the
relative lack of recognition afforded students’ visible text choices by Connors as well as
the de-emphasis of class routines and activities in which students could engage socially
with each other over their text selections may have worked against supporting students’
sense of belonging While in Connors’ classroom. Further, while a permeability to certain
kinds of texts at the core of some students’ vernacular literacy practices may have
supported some students’ sense of belonging, an impermeability (whether intentional or
not) to other kinds of texts may have served to diminish that sense for other students.
Print-centrism and the Pedagogy of Control

As discussed above, this impermeability manifested itself most strongly in the
near total invisibility of the texts of some girls’ vernacular literacy practices within
academic contexts, although boys were not immune, especially in terms of recognition of
their non-print text selections. Noteworthy in this regard is Connors’ response to the text
selections that students made for the culminating activity on visualization skills. While
students were encouraged to bring in any kind of text, all of the exercises in the
culminating activity were focused entirely on the print, with no discussion of the
multimodal aspects of many of the texts that students brought in. While it could be

argued that since the purpose of the activity was to assess students’ abilities to visualize

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from print, the teacher need not have felt obliged to address any other semiotic systems at
play in the texts that students brought, completely ignoring the non-print aspects of the
texts may send the message to students that those aspects are of lesser value. Considering
the fact that these extralinguistic features are the very aspects of the selected texts that
many students noted in their journals as being among their top reasons for favoring these
texts in the first place, an exclusively print-centric approach to studying these texts
undercuts the first purpose of a permeable classroom: to better understand what kinds of
texts students engage with in their vernacular literacy practices and to scaffold academic
literacy learning on those practices.

In their argument for an expanded notion of literacy that embraces multiple
semiotic systems and acknowledges the multimodal and transmedial nature of many
adolescents’ vernacular literacy practices, King and O’Brien (2002) note that “print
represents the essence of control in the classroom” (p. 42). At best, a permeability to just
the print aspects of students’ vernacular literacy practices may provide a limited
perspective on those practices. Students might make strategic choices to explore the print
media texts of their favorite mediascapes within such a classroom and reserve
engagement with affiliated non-print media texts to extracurricular contexts. This is what
Gatorade and Link did with Star Wars texts and what Tiger and Monte] did with
basketball-themed texts. At worst, however, a permeability that is exclusively print-
centric or that fails to adequately recognize the funds of knowledge that students bring
with them may ultimately result in an impermeable classroom, as the texts that students
are most enthusiastic about engaging with are not allowed to become either visible or

recognized. Students in this case might opt to make their entire vernacular literacy lives

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invisible and instead “play school.” This could partially explain why not even the print
media manifestations of Ciera S. and SpongeBob’s basketball fandom became visible in
Connors’ classroom.

Given the importance of non-print texts to a transmedial literacy experience, this
relative impermeability to non-print texts means that the classroom was not just
impermeable to certain kinds of texts at the heart of many students’ vernacular literacy
practices, but that it was to a certain extent impermeable to the practices themselves. In
their provocative argument for considering the power of fashion in constructing
compelling educational scenarios, Wong & Henriksen (in press) draw a distinction
between the objects of fashion and the experience of fashion, noting that while many
approaches to making classroom experiences relevant to the lives of young people
embrace the former, few take the time to consider how the latter might be incorporated
into learning activities to support engagement with academic literacies. That is, while a
teacher might build a lesson around a book, movie, song or television program that is
popular with his or her students, a failure to consider how students engage with such texts
in their non-school lives may prove of limited motivational value in promoting
engagement with academic learning. This is the conclusion drawn by Alvermann,
Hagood and Huddleston (2004) when reflecting on ways to scaffold academic learning
around students’ interests in professional wrestling. Huddleston attempted to discover the
elements of professional wrestling and the experience of watching it that most captivated
a student with whom he was working, and was able to successfully scaffold the student’s
understanding of story grammar and the structure of Shakespearean tragedy by helping

the student engage with canonical texts in a manner similar to the ways in which he

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engaged with wrestling matches. Alvermann and Hagood, on the other hand, attempted to
use students’ knowledge base of professional wrestling as an on-rarnp for a traditional
reading and writing task, and were disappointed by the students’ lack of engagement with
and enthusiasm for the task. The authors conclude that shoehorning the texts of students’
vernacular literacy practices into relatively traditional academic literacy tasks — pouring
new wine into old casks — has less potential for promoting student engagement than an
approach that honors and builds upon the ways in which students relate to those texts in
their vernacular literacy lives. As Smith and Wilhelm (2002, 2006) argue, “it’s not the
text, but the context” that matters (p. 55), and they recommend reframing the study of
classic literature by appealing to the ways that adolescents engage with pop cultural and
vernacular texts in out-of-school contexts, pouring old wine into new casks, in effect.
Connors’ print-centric approach to language arts was permeable to a certain range of
texts that were important to students’ vernacular literacy practices, but by recognizing
few of the multimodal and non-print texts that students engaged with in those practices as
well as few of the ways in which students individually and socially negotiated meaning
between multiple print and non-print texts, Connors’ language arts curriculum was
ultimately impermeable not just to some students’ vernacular texts, but to many students’
vernacular practices. To borrow Wong and Henriksen’s terms, while some objects of
fashion became visible in Connors’ classroom, many students’ experience of fashion did
not, which may help account for the failure to see increases in students’ attitudes toward
reading for either academic or recreational purposes.

It should be emphasized that this impermeability was not a barrier intentionally

placed by Connors to keep out students’ vernacular literacies, although enacting an

150

unintended pedagogy of control may yield similar motivational results as an overt
approach. Rather, the lack of recognition of students’ transmedial literacy practices may
be more the result of a lack of attention to media literacy in Connors’ teacher education
and professional development. Conspicuously absent from Robb’s Teaching Reading in
Middle School, Connors’ “Bible” for language arts instruction, is any mention of teaching
with multimodal texts or helping students develop media literacy skills, which could help
explain why Connors dealt very little with non-print media in his curriculum. Indeed, as
Flores-Koulish (2005) discovered, few teachers emerge from teacher education with an
understanding of media literacy, let alone a conceptual framework for teaching it. Given
the importance of transmediation in the vernacular literacy practices of the boys in this
study, one clear implication for practice is that teacher education must do a better job of
addressing the ways in which children and adults synthesize meaning in a multimodal,
multitextual mediascape. F lores-Koulish’s study provides a basic model curriculum for
media literacy education for pre-service teachers, while the work of Ladislaus Semali
(2000, 2002) has developed a detailed approach to teaching for transmediation in teacher
education based on a critical literacy framework. Anstey and Bull (2006) and Kist (2005)
provide additional models.

However, despite these calls for better media literacy education for teachers (and
these calls are not new; Semali (2000) traces the history of media literacy advocacy back
to the writings of McLuhan and Postman in the early 19605), an informal survey of four
of the most recent and heavily promoted teacher education textbooks for reading and
language arts instruction reveals a continued print-centric emphasis. While Strickland,

Galda and Cullinan (2004) include viewing and visually representing along with reading,

151

writing, listening and speaking among the six language arts, neither of these skills
receives a firll chapter treatment as do the other four, devoting only two pages of a
chapter on content area literacy to advice on pre— and post-viewing discussion strategies
for videos. Unrau’s (2008) new text on content area reading and writing is rooted in a
multiliteracies perspective and acknowledges the importance of non-print literacies, yet
devotes fewer than four full pages (out of 480) to media literacy. Frey and Fisher’s
(2006) only reference to media literacy is in a figure presenting NCA Standards for
Speaking, Listening, and Media Literacy in K-12 Education (p. 216). Like the bulk of
Unrau’s text, Frey and Fisher devote their discussion solely to reading comprehension
strategies with print media. Only Wiseman, Elish-Piper and Wiseman (2005) devote a
full, substantial chapter (50 pages) to “Literacy and Visual Representation, Interpretation,
and Evaluation,” which addresses basic visual literacy (decoding visual symbols), visual
literacy with picture books, computer technology, and multimedia (including television).
While resources devoted exclusively to multiliteracies and media literacy are abundant
(e. g., Anstey & Bull, 2006; Kist, 2005), unless pre-service teachers have an entire class
dedicated to understanding media literacy (as Semali has implemented at Pennsylvania
State University), the media literacy education they receive within the context of a larger
language arts methods course is not likely to be extensive.
Conclusion

This study was designed to enrich our understanding of adolescent boys’
extracurricular literacy practices, through a case study of a language arts classroom that
was structured around providing students with maximum opportunities to self-select

personally interesting texts. A great deal of diversity was found in the set of text

152

selections made by boys and girls across academic and vernacular contexts. While few
individual authors or titles could be singled out as “hits,” some trends in genre were
apparent. Among boys, the metagenres of imaginative fiction, which includes fantasy,
science fiction, horror and supernatural thrillers, and sports, which includes sports fiction,
biography, informational text, and reference works, were the most popular. For
comparison, among girls, fantasy and realistic fiction were the most frequently selected
genres. Boys’ vernacular literacy practices were found to be transmedial in nature and
were strongly implicated for many boys in their construction of a social identity. Boys
were observed participating in affinity spaces, affiliating themselves with other boys
through shared consumption of a variety of print and non-print media texts. While the
classroom that was studied was intended to be permeable to the texts of students’
vernacular literacy practices, it was found to be heavily print-centric, which in some
cases afforded only a limited perspective on the full range of texts with which students
engage in those literacy practices. Ultimately, boys were more likely than girls to take
advantage of the permeability of the classroom to explore texts that strongly reflected
their transmedial interests. Boys also tended to read and consume texts from a wider
range of genres and of print and non-print media than were girls. Despite the openness of
the classroom to students’ vernacular literacy lives, there were significant drops in
attitude toward reading for academic and recreational purposes over the course of the
year. It is suggested that while students did make many of the texts of their vernacular
literacies visible within the permeable classroom, the lack of recognition of those texts by
the teacher as well as a general level of social disengagement in the classroom may be a

factor in the declining attitude scores.

153

A chief limitation of the present study is an underrepresentation in the dataset of
text selections of many non-book and non-print texts that played a role in students’
vernacular literacy practices. It is recommended that future inquiries into students’
multimedia literacy habits find ways to factor in those texts in such a way that children’s
engagement with them can be usefully compared to that of their other text selections.
Another major limitation is the disconnect between the teacher’s stated beliefs about
building a community of readers in his classroom and the overall lack of social
engagement among students and between teacher and students observed in the classroom.
Thus an understanding of what a permeable classroom with a strong social component
might reveal about adolescents’ literacy practices and how it might affect students’
attitudes toward reading for a variety of purposes remains incomplete.

This study enriches the literature of adolescent literacy by providing empirical
support for theories of transmediation as a key feature of adolescent literacy, an
exploration of the nexus between young adolescents’ literacy practices and social identity
construction, and an illustration of the strong diversity that exists across the textual
landscape of young adolescents’ vernacular literacy practices. Future directions for
research include developing better ways to account for the non-print literacies in
adolescents’ lives and exploring explanations for how certain affinity spaces (such as
sports) develop gendered boundaries. Implications for practice include a strong call for
teachers to stay current on publications for young adults, to nurture closer relationships
with students to better understand the nature and functions of their vernacular literacy
practices, and to adopt an expanded understanding of literacy that encompasses both print

and non-print semiotic systems. As Thursday Next, the intrepid hero of Jasper Fforde’s

154

eponymous series of science fiction novels, observes “publishing these days doesn’t
necessarily restrict books to being just books” (2007, p. 181). Neither should literacy

education.

155

APPENDICES

156

APPENDIX A

Tables

Table A1
Median Household Income Distribution by District

Ilium Homestead Birch Creek State Average

Less than $15,000 (%) 24.0 14.5 11.3 18.1
$15,000-$29,999 (%) 21.0 16.2 14.5 18.6
$30,000-$49,999 (%) 19.4 18.1 16.4 18.0
$50,000-$74,999 (%) 13.9 15.1 14.3 14.0
$75,000-$99,999 (%) 9.2 12.9 14.0 11.3

$100,000-$l49,999 (%) 10.8 19.5 24.3 16.2

$150,000 or More (%) 1.6 3.7 5.2 3.0

Source: Standard & Poor's, 2003

157

Table A2
Enrollment Distribution by Race/Ethnicity by District

Ilium Homestead

Asian/Pacific Islander (%) 5.1 5.2
Black (%) 39.4 22.6

Hispanic (%) 14.6 7.1

Native American (%) 1.2 0.7
White (%) 39.6 64.4

Other (%) 0.0 0.0

Source: Standard & Poor's, 2003

158

Birch Creek State Average
0.5
2.9
3.0
0.1
93.5

0.0

Table A3

Text Selections by Gender and Context

A — Independent
Reading

A — DEAR Shared

A —- DEAR Solitary

A — Genre Project

A — Book Project

A — Visualization
Activity

V — Bookstore Browsing
V — Self-report Interest
V -— Self-report
Recreational

Totals

 

Boys Girls Totals
12 23 35
21 7 28
56 28 84
89 104 193
22 24 46
19 21 4O
15 23 38
23 16 39

122 47 169
379 293 672

/(9, N = 672) = 47.13, p < 0.05, <I>C = 0.458434

A =Academic context

V = Vernacular context

159

 

 

 

Table A4

Most Popular Texts Selected By All Students for Any Purpose, Based on Number of Text

Selections Documented for Each Text (in Parentheses)

(7) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the First: The Bad Beginning

(7) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Sixth: The Ersatz Elevator

(7) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Second: The Reptile Room

(7) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Third: The Wide Window

(6) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fifth: The Austere
Academy

(6) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Eighth: The Hostile
Hospital

(6) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fourth: The Miserable
Mill

(6) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Seventh: The Vile Village

(6) JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

(5) J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer ’s Stone

(5) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Ninth: The Carnivorous
Carnival

(5) Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, unspecified volumes

(5) RL Stine, Goosebumps, unspecified volumes

(5) Heinrich Bauer North America, J-I4 Magazine

(5) Time Inc. Magazine Company, Sports Illustrated

160

Table A5

Most Popular Authors Selected By All Students For Any Purpose, Based on Number of
Text Selections Documented for Each Author (in Parentheses)
(72) Lemony Snicket

(33) Jonathan Rand

(20) J K Rowling

(18) RL Stine

(11) Matt Christopher

(10) Roald Dahl

(9) Jack Gantos

(9) Gordon Korman

(9) JRR Tolkien

(7) Dav Pilkey

(7) Time Inc. Magazine Company
(6) Eoin Colfer

(6) CS Lewis

(5) Beverly Cleary

(5) Electronic Arts

(5) Heinrich Bauer North America
(5) Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

(5) Louis Sachar

(5) Jude Watson

161

Table A6

Distribution of Focal Students ' Text Selections by Genre, Gender and Academ ic/ Vernacular Context

 

Boy Boy Girl Girl
Vernacular Academic Vernacular Academic Totals
Action 16 0 0 0 16
Animals 2 3 2 5 12
Automotive 4 0 0 0 4
Bible/Inspirational 0 3 0 l 4
Biography 1 10 3 15 29
Comedy 7 l 0 O 8
Comic Book 4 3 l 0 8
Fantasy 49 24 36 44 153
Gaming 2 3 0 O 5
General Non-Fiction 5 l 2 4 12
Historical Fiction 3 l3 3 1 l 30
History 1 l O 0 2
Multiple Genres 0 0 1 0 1
Mystery/Thriller 15 16 3 5 39
Poetry 0 0 0 l 1
Popular Culture 0 0 2 3 S
Realistic Fiction 16 21 29 22 88
Reality/ Simulation 5 0 0 0 5
Reference 5 O 0 1 6
Science Fiction 12 8 2 3 25
Sports l3 l9 2 2 36
Totals 160 126 86 117 489

[760, N = 489) = 194.2599, p < 0. 05, «DC = 0.36

162

Table A7
Fog Readability Levels of Focal Students’ Text Selections by Gender

Academic/Vernacular Context

and

 

Boy Boy Girl Girl

Vernacular Academic Vernacular Academic

Mean 8.29 6.91 7.63 7.89

Standard Deviation 1.98 1.64 1.80 1.71
N 60 69 60 76

T-test Comparisons (two-sample assuming gual variances)

Boy Vernacular to Boy Academic: t(127) = 4.33, p < 0. 05, d = 0.76

 

Girl Vernacular to Girl Academic: t(134) = -0.87, p >0. 05, d = -0.15

163

Table A8

F lesch-Kincaid Readability Levels of Focal Students’ Text Selections by Gender and

Academic/Vernacular Context
Boy Boy Girl Girl

Vernacular Academic Vernacular Academic

 

Mean 6.11 5.02 5.82 6.00
Standard Deviation 1.78 1.33 1.47 1.40
N 80 72 67 81

T-test Comparisons (two-sample assuming equal variances)
Boy Academic to Boy Vernacular: t(150) = 4.28, p < 0.05, d = 0.69

Girl Academic to Girl Vernacular: t(146) = -0. 76, p > 0.05, d = -0.13

164

Table A9
Distribution of Focal Students’ Text Selections by Medium, Gender and

Academic/ Vernacular Context

 

Boy I Boy Girl Girl
Vernacular Academic Vernacular Academic Totals
Book 103 117 81 111 412
Game 1 9 0 0 1 20
Magazine 6 8 2 4 20
MovieNideo 21 l 3 O 25
Short Story 0 0 0 1 1
TV Show 1 1 0 0 0 11
Totals 160 126 86 1 17 489

{(15, N = 489) = 105.87, p < 0.05, <I>C= 0.27

165

“-Vl'.

Table A10

Distribution of Focal Students ’ Text Selections by Series, Gender and

Academic/ Vernacular Context

 

Boy Boy ‘ Girl Girl
Vernacular Academic Vernacular Academic Totals
Series 102 55 50 62 269
Non-Series 58 71 36 55 220
Totals 160 126 86 1 17 489

12(3, N = 489) = 12.04, p < 0.05, ac: 0.16

166

Table A1 1
ERAS Recreational and Academic Subscale Comparisons by Gender, Fall 2004

ERAS Recreational Subscale, Fall 2004

 

 

Girls Boys
Mean 31.75 27.13
Standard Deviation 5.87 6.64
N l7 l9
t(34) = 2.20, p < 0.05, d = 0.74
ERAS Academic Subscale, Fall 2004
Girls Boys
Mean 29 27.71
Standard Deviation 5.63 6.77
N 17 19

t(34) = 0.62, p > 0. 05, d = 0.21

167

Table A12

ERAS Recreational and Academic Subscale Comparisons by Gender, Spring 2005

ERAS Recreational Subscale, Spring 2005

 

 

Girls Boys
Mean 29.77 24.95
Standard Deviation 6.31 5.77
N 17 19
t(34) = 2.40, p < 0.05, d = 0.80
ERAS Academic Subscale, Spring 2005
Girls Boys
Mean 26.15 24.37
Standard Deviation 5.11 5.62
N 17 19

t(34) = 0.93, p > 0. 05, d = 0.33

168

 

 

Table A13

Fall/Spring ERAS Recreational Subscale Comparisons by Gender

ERAS Recreational Subscale, Girls

 

Mean
Standard Deviation
N

t(16) = 1.77,p < 0.05, d = 0.32

ERAS Recreational Subscale, Boys

 

Mean
Standard Deviation
N

t(18) = 1.32,p > 0.05, d = 0.35

Fall Spring
31.75 29.77
5.87 6.31
17 17
Fall Spring
27.13 24.95
6.64 5.77
l9 19

169

Table A14

Fall/Spring ERAS Academic Subscale Comparisons by Gender

ERAS Academic Subscale, Girls

 

 

Fall Spring
Mean 29 26.15
Standard Deviation 5.63 5.83
N l7 l7
t(16) = 2.73, p < 0.05, d = 0.50
ERAS Academic Subscale, Boys
Fall Spring
Mean 27.71 24.37
Standard Deviation 6.77 5.62
N 19 19

t(18) = 2.26, p < 0.05, d = 0.54

170

 

Table A l 5
F all/Spring ERAS Recreational Subscale Comparisons by Homeroom

ERAS Recreational Subscale, Connors, by administration

 

Fall Spring

Mean 29.8 1 25 .94

Standard Deviation 5.69 6.09
N 16 1 6

t(15) = 3.13, p < 0.05, d = 0.66

ERAS Recreational Subscale, Price, by administration

 

Fall Spring

Mean 28 .91 28.26

Standard Deviation 7.41 6.65
N 20 20

t(19) = 0.44, p > 0. 05, d = 0.09

171

 

 

APPENDIX B

Figures

Figure Bl

Classroom library of Mr. Ed Connors

 

172

Figure B2

Classroom library of Ms. Julie Price

 

173

Figure B3

Reading comer in Ms. Julie Price ’s classroom

 

174

Figure B4

Visualization quiz administered by Mr. Connors

’-

WW
1,. l' . l'

1) What day of the week did Danny and hlS father fly the kite?
2) Where did they get the string to fly the kite?

3) Where did they release the kite7

4) What was the kite made of?

5) How long did the kite stay up in the our7

 

175

 

 

Figure B5

Genre Project assignment sheet

Qenre Book Reviews

A genre is a type of book. The following are different genres of
books: realistic fiction, science (fiction, historical fiction, biography, and
fantasy. Below are a description of each genre.

Realistic Fiction: The story happens now, it is not true, and it could
happen.
Science Fiction: The story happens in the future, it is not true, and it
includes futuristic technology.
Historical Fiction: The story happened at least 25 years ago, it is not
true, and it could have happened.
Biography: This story is true and is written by an author about

r“ another person.
Fantasy: The story could happen at anytime, it is not true, it often

includes magic and special powers.

For the second marking term each student is expected to read
one book from each genre. Each book must be at least 100 pages
except for the biography which must be at least 60 pages. When the
student has finished reading their book, they must complete a genre
book review form. All forms will be due Friday February 18. The
grading will be as follows: 100%: 5 books, 90% = 4 books, 80%: 3
books, 70% = 2 books, 60% = 1 book, 0%: 0 books.

176

 

_

 

 

Figure B6

 

Sample book review form for all genres except biography, completed by Ciera S., a focal

student

Li“
Name:
Book: L' w' ~. U’“" "
Genre 3- ”'4‘ G d W
Page: V33
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story happened);“r immune“ b“"“} We" id 32“)? '3 m

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177

Figure B7

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178

Figure B8

Sample book review form for biographies, completed by Ciera S., a focal student

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179

 

Figure B9

Book Project assignment sheet

.9

A B k Pr ' ct
Que.-MatLl.2.

1) The book must be at least 150 pages long. I will give extra points if the

book is over 250 pages or is historical fiction or science fiction.

2) Must be done on a poster board.

3) The poster must have the title, author, and genre.

4) The poster must also include sections on main character traits, main
setting, main events in the story, problem, resolution, theme, and a review

where you rate the story from 1-10 and explain why you gave it that score.

5) The poster also needs to include the following sections: 5 personal
connections, 3 questions that you had while you were reading, and 2

sketches of different events.

180

 

Figure B10

T imeline of classroom activities, data sources (with associated research questions) and

data analysis strategies employed in study

 

 

 

Timeline Classroom Activities Data Sources (RQs) Data Analysis
First Trimester - Teacher administers - Informal interviews - Proposal
(8/04 — 11/04) ERAS with teacher writing/revision &
- Independent Reading literature review
Logs & DEAR time
- Modeling aesthetic
responses with Daybook
activities
Second Trimester - Genre Project & DEAR - Archival data: - Constant-comparative
(1 1/04 — 3/05) time Gates-McGinitie, w/ interview transcripts
- Literature circles with ERAS (4) & field notes from class
Genre Project choices Genre Project book observations
- Modeling aesthetic reports (2, 3) - Genre & reading level
responses with Maniac - Classroom analyses of texts chosen

Magee

observations (2)

- Student interviews:
Round 1 - MRP (1, 2,
3)
Round 2 - follow-up
on MRP, review

in lst & 2nd trimesters
- Statistical analyses of
archival data

 

 

Genre Project reports
(1, 2, 3)
- Ongoing interviews
with teacher
Third Trimester - Book Project - Classroom - Constant-comparative
(3/05 — 6/05) - DEAR time observations (2) w/ interview transcripts
- Teacher administers - Bookstore browsing & field notes from class
ERAS activity & follow-up observations

 

 

interview(l, 2, 3)

- Follow-up ERAS (4)
- Ongoing interviews
with teacher

 

- Genre & reading level
analyses of texts chosen
in 2nd & 3rd trimesters,
& in bookstore brows'g_

 

 

181

Figure B1 1

Text Selections of All Students by Age of Text (Base Year 2005)

70

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number of Text Selections

 

 

 

 

 

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Ageotrenselacu

. 182

Figure B12

Mr. Connors’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR

 

183

Figure B13

Second view of Mr. Connors’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR

 

184

Figure B14

Third view of Mr. Connors’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR

 

185

Figure B15

Fourth view of Mr. Connors’ classroom during gym class, after DEAR

 

186

Figure B16

The Long Tail

The New Marketplace

Popularity

Long Tail

 

Products

 

 

 

Image reproduced from Anderson (n.d. ), permission to reproduce granted by author

under Creative Commons License 2.0

187

APPENDIX C

List of Texts Selected by Medium and Title

The 672 text selections documented in this study represent 472 unique texts, 368
of which were selected by only one student (accounting for 368 text selections), 59 by
two students (118 text selections), 22 by three students (66 text selections), 8 by four
students (32 text selections), 6 by five students (30 text selections), 5 by six students (30
text selections), and 4 by seven students (28 text selections). This appendix lists all of the
texts selected by students for which a specific title was documented. Forty-eight unique
texts are not represented on this list, due to incomplete title information provided by
students. For example, a number of students on Genre Project book report forms
identified the books they had read by series names, rather than by the books’ particular
titles, and some focal students could not remember specific books they had read for
recreational reading or Independent Reading assignments, but could remember the series
from which books came (e. g., Goosebumps) or topics about which books were written
(e. g., Tony Hawk biography). While as much information as possible about those 48 texts
is included in the overall database of 672 text selections, only the 424 unique texts for
which complete author and title information was available are included in this appendix.

The list below is organized first by medium (i.e., Books, Magazines and Comic
Books, Motion Pictures and DVDs, Television Programs, and Video Games), then
alphabetically by title. Authors, publishers and production companies are presented
where available, and numbers in parentheses indicate the number of students who
selected a particular text. Entries on the list without parentheses were selected by one

student.

188

Books

The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, Harold Schechter
Achingly Alice, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The Adventures of Captain Underpants, Dav Pilkey (4)
After the Rain: Virginia 's Civil War Diary, Mary Pope Osborne
Al Capone Does My Shirts, Gennifer Choldenko (2)

Alice Alone, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Alien Androids Assault Arizona, Jonathan Rand (2)

Aliens Attack Alpena, Jonathan Rand

All-American Girl, Meg Cabot

Amelia's Notebook, Marissa Moss

Amulet of Doom, Bruce Coville

Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess, Russia, 1914, Carolyn Meyer
Ancient Egypt, George Hart

Animal Farm, George Orwell

Anna Sunday, Sally Keehn

Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, Judy Blume
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer (2)

Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, Eoin Colfer

Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, Eoin Colfer

The Austere Academy, Lemony Snicket (6)

Backward Bird Dog, Bill Wallace

The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket (7)

Baseball Fever, Johanna Hurwitz

The Basket Counts, Matt Christopher

189

Basketball (0r Something Like It), Nora Raleigh Baskin
Be More Chill, Ned Vizzini

The Beast, R.L. Stine

The Beasties, William Sleator

Beetles, Lightly Toasted, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Beyond the Deepwoods, Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell
Big Ben, Jenny Dale

Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin

Blackwater Swamp, Bill Wallace

Blister, Susan Shreve (2)

Boltzmonl, William Sleator

The Boxcar Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Boys From Kalamazoo, T.J. Johnston

Broken Date, R.L. Stine

Bud, Not Buddy, Christopher Paul Curtis

Captain Underpants and the Big Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: Night of
the Nasty Nostril Nuggets, Dav Pilkey

Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, Dav Pilkey (2)
The Carnivorous Carnival, Lemony Snicket (5)

Cartoons and Cartooning, Harvey Weiss

The Case of the Phantom Frog, Edmund Wallace Hildick

The Championship Tradition Continues: 2003-2004 MSU Basketball Media Guide,
Michigan State University Athletic Department

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl (2)
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Roald Dahl

Charlie Bone and the Time Twister, Jenny Nimmo

190

Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul, Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen
Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul, Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen
Chicken, Chicken, R.L. Stine

The Chocolate Touch, Patrick Skene Catling

A Cinderella Story, Robin Wasserman (2)

Cinderella 2000, Mavis Jukes

Class Trip to the Cave of Doom, Kate McMullan & Bill Basso
Cleopatra VII: Daughter of the Nile, Egypt, 5 7 B. C., Kristiana Gregory
The Climb, Gordon Korman

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Dyan Sheldon

The Contest, Gordon Korman (4)

Conversations with J.K. Rowling, Lindsey Fraser

The Counterfeit Tackle, Matt Christopher

Creepy Condors of California, Jonathan Rand

Crews, Maria Hinojosa (3)

The Cricket in Times Square, George Selden

The Crow, J. O'Barr

A Dangerous Promise, Joan Lowery Nixon

Danny Champion of the World, Roald Dahl

The Dark Horse, Marcus Sedgwick

Dark Rival, Jude Watson

Dear Napoleon, I Know Y ou're Dead But ..., Elvira Woodruff

The Diamond Champs, Matt Christopher

A Different Season, David Klass (2)

Dinosaurs Destroy Detroit, Jonathan Rand (2)

191

Dirt Bike Runaway, Matt Christopher

The Disappearing Bike Shop, Elvira Woodruff

Dog, Juliet Clutton-Brock

The Doll People, Ann Martin & Laura Godwin

Don ’t Ever Get Sick at Granny's, R.L. Stine & J ahnna Malcolm
Don 't Get Caught Driving the School Bus, Todd Strasser
Don 't Get Caught In the T eachers’Lounge, Todd Strasser (2)
Dark in Disguise, Carol Gorman (3)

Double Fudge, Judy Blume

Double Trouble, Jenny Dale

Dove Song, Kristine Franklin

Dracula Doesn't Rock and Roll, Debbie Dadey

Dragon: Hound of Honor, Julie Andrews Edwards

The Eagle's Shadow, Nora Martin

Eat That Frogl: 21 Great Ways to St0p Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less
Time, Brian Tracy

Eleanor Roosevelt, Rachel Toor

Eleanor Roosevelt, Shannon Donnelly

Electronic Truth or Dare, Scholastic

Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine

Eragon, Christopher Paolini

The Ersatz Elevator, Lemony Snicket (7)

Escape, Gordon Korman

The Everyday Witch: A Tale of Magic and High Adventure, Sandra Forrester
Everything on a Waflle, Polly Horvath

Eyeballs for Lunch, Margaret Ragz

192

The Face on the Milk Carton, Caroline Cooney

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, J .K. Rowling

Fear Games, R.L. Stine

Fever 1 793, Laurie Halse Anderson

The Field Guide, Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi

Five Alien Elves, Gregory Maguire

Football Fugitive, Matt Christopher

For Love of the Game: My Story, Michael Jordan & Mark Vancil (3)
F rancie, Karen English (2)

Frederick Douglass Fights for Freedom, Margaret Davidson

Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the
Struggle, Sara Bullard & Julian Bond (2)

F rindle, Andrew Clements (2)

George Lucas, Dana White

George’s Marvelous Medicine, Roald Dahl (2)

A Ghost in the Family, Betty Ren Wright

Ghost Song, Susan Price

Ghosts Beneath Our Feet, Betty Ren Wright

Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood, Ann Brashares (2)
The Giver, Lois Lowry (3)

Go Free or Die: A Story About Harriet Tubman, Jeri Ferris & Karen Ritz
Good Burger, Joseph Locke

Goodbye, Vietnam, Gloria ‘Whelan (3)

Goosedl, Bill (Wallace

The Great Quarterback Switch, Matt Christopher

The Grim Grotto, Lemony Snicket (3)

193

Guinness Book of World Records 2004, Guinness World Records (2)
Guinness Book of World Records 2005, Guinness World Records
Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J .K. Rowling (3)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of F ire, J .K. Rowling (3)

Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, J .K. Rowling (3)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J .K. Rowling (4)
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, J .K. Rowling (5)
Hatchet, Gary Paulsen (2)

Help! I 'm Trapped in My Teacher ’s Body, Todd Strasser
Henry Huggins, Beverly Cleary

Hidden Past, Jude Watson

Hidden Talents, David Lubar

The History of the Philadelphia 76ers, Michael Goodman

Hit and Run, R.L. Stine

Holes, Louis Sachar

Holy Enchilada, Henry Winkler (4)

Hoot, Carl Hiassen (3)

The Hobbit, J .R.R. Tolkien (6)

The Hostile Hospital, Lemony Snicket (6)

The Hot and Cold Summer, Johanna Hurwitz

How I Survived Fifth Grade, Megan Stine & H. William Stine
How to Eat Fried Worms, Thomas Rockwell (2)

I Am Regina, Sally Keehn

Ice Run, Steve Hamilton

194

IceF ire, Chris D'Lacey

If Pigs Could Fly and Other Deep Thoughts, Bruce Lansky & Stephen Carpenter
In the Doghouse, Lisa Banim

In the Land of the Lawn Weenies, David Lubar (3)

Inkheart, Cornelia Funke (2)

Inside Monster Garage: The Builds, The Skills, The Thrills, Dan Rosenberg
Invisible Iguanas of Illinois, Jonathan Rand

Ironman, Chris Crutcher

Island of the Aunts, Eva Ibbotson

Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell

Jaguar, Roland Smith

Jakarta Missing, Jane Kurtz

James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl (4)

Jane Goodall: Animal Behaviorist and Writer, Brendan January
Jennifer Murdley's Toad, Bruce Coville

Joey Pigza Loses Control, Jack Gantos (3)

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, Jack Gantos (2)

Johnny Long Legs, Matt Christopher

Johnny T remain, Esther Forbes

Joshua's Song, Joan Hiatt Harlow

Kid Biz, Scholastic

Kids’Devotional Bible, Joanne Dejonge, Connie Neal & Lori Walburg
King's Fifth, Scott O'Dell

Knights Don 't Teach Piano, Debbie Dadey

Kreepy Klowns of Kalamazoo, Jonathan Rand (2)

195

Larry Bird, Mark Beyer
Last Shot, John Feinstein

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Oflicial Strategy Guide, Bryan Stratton and
Stephen Stratton

Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, Lemony Snicket
Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Lyons
Lily's Crossing, Patricia Reilly Giff

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS. Lewis (3)

Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder

Loch, Paul Zindel

The Lord of the Rings, J .R.R. Tolkien (3)

Loser, Jerry Spinelli (2)

Lucinda ’s Secret, Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi

Mad Game: The NBA Education of Kobe Bryant, Roland Lazenby
Madden NFL 2005: Prima Oflicial Game Guide, Prima Games
Magic Johnson: Champion with a Cause, Keith Elliot Greenberg (3)
The Magician 's Nephew, CS. Lewis (3)

Maniac Magee, Jerry Spinelli

Mariah Keeps Cool, Mildred Pitts Walter (2)

Marlfox, Brian Jacques

Martin Luther King, Jr. : Minister and Civil Rights Activist, Brendan January
Mattimeo, Brian Jacques

The Mayflower Project, Katherine Applegate

Mayhem on Mackinac Island, Jonathan Rand (2)

It's a Dog's Life, Bob Balaban

Michelle Kwan, Sam Wellman

196

Michelle Kwan, Sherry Beck Paprocki

Michigan Mega-Monsters, Jonathan Rand (2)

Midnight for Charlie Bone, Jenny Nimmo

The Midnight Fox, Betsy Byars

Million Dollar Shot, Dan Gutrnan

Miracle at the Plate, Matt Christopher

The Miserable Mill, Lemony Snicket (6)

Missouri Madhouse, Jonathan Rand (3)

Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry

Molly Moon 's Incredible Book of Hypnotism, Georgia Byng
Monster Nation: The Best Transformed Vehicles from Coast to Coast, Dan Rosenberg
The Monsters of Morley Manor, Bruce Coville

Mouse Rap, Walter Dean Myers

Mr. Popper's Penguins, Richard & Florence Atwater

My Brother Sam Is Dead, James Lincoln Collier (3)
Mythmaker: The Story of J.K. Rowling, Charles Shields
Myths and Monsters, DK Publishing

Nebraska Nightcrawlers, Jonathan Rand (2)

New Kid at School, Kate McMullan

New York Ninjas, Jonathan Rand

Nice Girls Finish First: The Remarkable Story of Notre Dame's Rise to the Top of
Women's College Basketball, Mark Bradford

Nightmare on Planet X, A.G. Cascone (2)
No More Broken Promises, Angela Elwell Hunt
Nobody Was Here: 7th Grade in the Life of Me, Penelope, Alison Pollet (2)

Number the Stars, Lois Lowry

197

 

 

The Official Guide to Battlebots, Dan Danko & Tom Mason
Ogres of Ohio, Jonathan Rand

The Penultimate Peril, Lemony Snicket

The Phantom T ollbooth, Norton Juster

Pilot Down, Presumed Dead, Marjorie Phleger

The Pity Party: 8th Grade in the Life of Me, Cass, Alison Pollet
Playing with Fire, Peter Robinson

Poisonous Pythons Paralyze Pennsylvania, Jonathan Rand (2)
Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire: Prima's Oflicial Strategy Guide, Elizabeth Hollinger
Poltergeists of Petoskey, Jonathan Rand

Princess in Training, Meg Cabot

The Pushcart War, Jean Merrill

Quadehar the Sorcerer, Erik L'Homme

Quidditch Through the Ages, J .K. Rowling

Racing the Past, Sis Deans

Ralph S. Mouse, Beverly Cleary (2)

Ramona the Brave, Beverly Cleary

Reach For the Stars, Anne Mazer

The Rebounder, Thomas Dygard

Redwall, Brian Jacques

The Reptile Room, Lemony Snicket (7)

Revenge of the Dragon Lady, Kate McMullan

Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki & Sharon Lechter

Riddle of the'Prairie Bride, Kathryn Reiss

The Right Way to Win: How Athletes Can Place God First in Their Hearts, Mike

Blaylock (2)

198

Rising Force, Dave Wolverton (2)

Rodents of the World, David Alderton & Bruce Tanner
The Secret of the Old Clock, Carolyn Keene

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred Taylor (2)

The Rough Guide to Skiing and Snowboarding in North America, Tam Leach, Stephen
Timblin & Christian Williams

Runaway to Freedom, Barbara Smucker (2)

Sahara Special, Esme Codell

Say Cheese and Die.’, R.L. Stine

Scared Stifl, Willo Davis Roberts

Scholastic Book of World Records 2005, Jenifer Morse
Scorpions, Walter Dean Myers

Scott Joplin, Katherine Preston

The Secret Window, Betty Ren Wright

The Seeing Stone, Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi
Shadrach, Meindert De J ong

Shiloh, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Shipwreck, Gordon Korman

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ann Brashares (2)
Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You, Barthe DeClements
Sleepwalker, R.L. Stine

The Slippery Slope, Lemony Snicket (4)

Snow Bound, Harry Mazer

Snow Dog, Jim Kjelgaard

The Snowman, R.L. Stine

Socks, Beverly Cleary

199

Sounder, William Armstrong

South Carolina Sea Creatures, Jonathan Rand

Spellbinder: The Life of Harry Houdini, Tom Lalicki (2)

Sports Great Nolan Ryan, William Lace

Sports Illustrated for Kids Year in Sports 2005, SI for Kids

Sports Illustrated: Almanac 2005, Editors of Sports Illustrated

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Jr Novelization), Patricia Wrede
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Matthew Stover

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Jr Novelization), Patricia Wrede (2)
Star Wars Jedi Apprentice: Deceptions, Jude Watson

Star Wars: Boba F ett: The Fight to Survive, Terry Bisson & Peter Bolinger
Star Wars: Legacy of the Jedi, Jude Watson

Star Wars: Secrets of the Jedi, Jude Watson

Stone Fox, John Reynolds Gardiner

Stonewords: A Ghost Story, Pam Conrad

Strange But True Auto Racing Stories, Al Powell

The Summer I Shrank My Grandmother, Elvira Woodruff

The Summit, Gordon Korman

Sunday's Heroes: NFL Legends Talk About the Times of T heir Lives, Richard
Whittingham, Mike Ditka, Paul Homung, & Pat Summerall (2)

The Supematuralist, Eoin Colfer

Survival, Gordon Korman

Surviving the Applewhites, Stephanie Tolan (2)
Tackle Without a Team, Matt Christopher

Tail of Emily Windsnap, Liz Kessler

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Jude Blume (2)

200

Teen Dream Power: Unlock the Meaning of Your Dreams, M. J. Abadie
Terrible Tractors of Texas, Jonathan Rand

Terror Stalks Traverse City, Jonathan Rand

T here 's a Boy in the Girls’Bathroom, Louis Sachar (2)
Things Not Seen, Andrew Clements (2)

The Third Horror, R.L. Stine

Thirteen Going on Seven, Marilyn Sachs

Three Point Play, Todd Hafer

Through My Eyes, Ruby Bridges

The Tiger Rising, Kate DiCamillo

Time Cat, Lloyd Alexander

T 00 Hot to Handle, Matt Christopher

Top 10 Football Quarterbacks, William Lace

Trial By Journal, Kate Klise

Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt (3)

Twenty and Ten, Claire Huchet Bishop

20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

Twin Terror, Janice Harrell

T wo-Minute Mysteries, Donald Sobol

The Two Princesses of Bamarre, Gail Carson Levine
The Ugly Princess and the Wise Fool, Margaret Gray
Under the Watsons'Porch, Susan Shreve

Unlocking the Animal Mind, Franklin McMillan
Upchuck and the Rotten Willy, Bill Wallace

The Vampire, Les Martin

201

The Vile Village, Lemony Snicket (6)

Visual Dictionary of Star Wars Episode III, DK Publishing

The Wanderer, Sharon Creech

The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963, Christopher Paul Curtis (2)
Warriors Don't Cry, Melba Beals (3)

Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, Louis Sachar

Wayside School is Falling Down, Louis Sachar

We '11 Race You Henry: A Story About Henry Ford, Barbara Mitchell
Werewolf Skin, R.L. Stine

Westward to Home: Joshua 's Oregon Trail Diary, Patricia Hermes
What Did I Do to Deserve a Sister Like You?, Angela Medearis
What Scares You the Most?, R.L. Stine

What Would Joey Do?, Jack Gantos (4)

When the Tripods Came, John Christopher

Which Witch, Eva Ibbotson

The Whipping Boy, Sid Fleischman (2)

The White Mountains, John Christopher

White Water Terror, Carolyn Keene

Who Was Harriet Tubman .7, Yona McDonough

Who's Been Sleeping in My Grave?, R.L. Stine

The Wide Window, Lemony Snicket (7)

Wisconsin Werewolves, Jonathan Rand (2)

The Wish List, Eoin Colfer

WI. T. C.H. Adventures: I‘Wren Lightning Strikes, tk

With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemies, Angela Medearis (2)

202

Wonder Worm Wars, Margie Palatini

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle (2)
A Year Down Yonder, Richard Peck (3)
The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Zlata's Diary, Zlata F ilipovic

Magazines and Comic Books

Amazing Spiderman, Marvel Comics

American Girl Magazine, American Girl LLC
Captain America, Marvel Comics

Game Informer, Sunrise Publications (4)

Incredible Hulk, Marvel Comics

J-14, Heinrich Bauer North America (5)
Museography, Kalamazoo Valley Museum
Nickelodeon Magazine, Nickelodeon

Nintendo Power, Nintendo

Radio Control Car Action, Air Age Publishing

The Simpsons Comics Spectacular, Matt Groening
Slam!, Primedia Magazines (2)

Spectacular Spider-Man, Marvel Comics

Sports Illustrated, Time Inc. Magazine Company (5)
Sports Illustrated for Kids, Time Inc. Magazine Company
Teen People, Time Inc. Magazine Company

VIBE, VIBE/Spin Ventures

Motion Pictures and DVDs

A VP: Alien vs. Predator, Paul W.S. Anderson (dir.), 20th Century Fox

203

Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie, C.B. Harding (dir.), Parallel
Entertainment/Warner Brothers

Bruce Almighty, Tom Shadyac (dir.), Universal

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Sara Sugarman (dir.), Walt Disney Pictures
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Rawson Marshall Thurber (dir.), 20th Century Fox
Footloose, Herbert Ross (dir.), Paramount

Friday Night Lights, Peter Berg (dir.), Imagine Entertainment/Universal

Larry the Cable Guy: Git R Done, Michael Drumm (dir.), Parallel Entertainment

Hulk, Ang Lee (dir.), Marvel Enterprises/Universal

The Incredibles, Brad Bird (dir.), Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar

Napoleon Dynamite, Jared Hess (dir.), Fox Searchlight

Remember the Titans, Boaz Yakin (dir.), Jerry Bruckheimer Films/W alt Disney Pictures
Rocky, John G. Avildsen (dir.), Chartoff—Winkler Productions

Rocky II, Sylvester Stallone (dir.), Chartoff—Winkler Productions/United Artists

Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone (dir.). Chartoff-Winkler Productions/United Artists

Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone (dir.), Chartoff—Winkler Productions/MGM /United Artists

Rocky V, John G. Avildsen (dir.), Chartoff—Winkler Productions/Star Partners II/United
Artists

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ken Kwapis (dir.), Warner Brothers (2)
Spider-Man, Sam Raimi (dir.), Marvel Enterprises/Columbia Pictures
Spider-Man 2, Sam Raimi (dir.), Marvel Enterprises/Columbia Pictures

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas (dir.), Lucasfilm (2)
Star Wars: Clone Wars, Genndy Tartakovsky (dir.), Cartoon Network/Lucasfilm
Van Helsing, Stephen Sommers (dir.), Universal

Van Helsing: The London Assignment, Sharon Bridgeman (dir.), Universal Home Video

204

Television Series

American Chopper, Discovery Channel
American Idol, Fox

Fear Factor, NBC

Monster Garage, Discovery Channel
Smallville, The CW (formerly on The WB)
Survivor, CBS

That '70s Show, Fox

The Amazing Race, CBS

The Apprentice, NBC

The Simpsons, F ox

WWE Smackdown!, The CW (formerly on UPN)

Video Games

Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies, Namco

Baldur's Gate, Black Isle Studios

Bionicle: The Game, Electronic Arts

Call of Duty: Finest Hour, Activision

ESPN NBA 2K5, Sega

Freedom Fighters, Electronic Arts

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Rockstar Games (2)
Jet Li: Rise to Honor, Sony Computer Entertainment
Midnight Club 3, Rockstar Games

NBA Street 3, Electronic Arts

NFL Street, Electronic Arts

RuneQuest, Avalon Hill

205

Sims Bustin' Out, Electronic Arts

Star Wars: Battlefront, Lucasarts Entertainment
Star Wars: Battlefront 2, Lucasarts Entertainment
T ak and the Power of Juju, THQ

The Simpsons Hit and Run, Vivendi Universal
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, TOMMO

Van Helsing, Ubisofi

I 206

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