The national attention to boys' underachievement in literacy over the past two decades has resulted in many research studies focusing on the literacy practices that teen boys chose to do in their own time and for their own purposes. Often these out-of-school literacy practices are contrasted with school literacy. This qualitative in-depth interview study with 21 adolescent boys reframes understandings of teen boys' literacy practices in its analysis of the various literacy sponsors in teen boys' lives, sponsors that include more than just school and teachers. Drawing on New Literacy Studies and youth culture studies, I adapt Deborah Brandt's concept of literacy sponsorship and apply it to teen boys' experiences with literacy. I explore the people, institutions, and commercial forces that encourage, teach and support as well as discourage and withhold teen boys' literacy practices. Using methodology that indirectly gets at teen boys' literacy practices through the use of interview artifacts, my study asks the following questions: What are the texts, contexts, participants, functions and motivations involved in adolescent boys' literacy practices? When literacy is sponsored, what else is being sponsored? How do boys respond to this sponsorship? What motivates the boys to participate in the literacy practices they do? Specifically focusing on teen boys' family, sports, and church sponsorship situations, I propose that these literacy sponsors are directly sponsoring ways of being teen boys, and in the process indirectly sponsor ways of being literate boys. I offer the term "gendered literacy sponsorship" to describe how these sponsorship situations have consequences on how teen boys view themselves and what they are capable of doing and being.
Read
