The Snowball Effect And The Appeal Of Everyday Texts

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For these students, interactions with one media text snowballed, or led to their engagement with other texts. For example, Gina stated that each video game she played made her want to play more or engage in other forensic-related media. The Nancy Drew video games motivated her to watch First 48 on Court TV (now TruTV), which shows detectives using forensic science to solve a crime within the first 48 hours after it occurs. Gina remarked, "After watching one show, I was hooked and wanted to watch more shows and see how everything is solved."

Students commented that reading their Tag Heuer Replica books prompted them to engage with other texts. These comments included the following:

"I liked the story so much I read other forensic stories."
"I will possibly watch more forensics shows now [after reading my book] such as CSI."

These students pursued additional forensic texts either through their own self-explorations or through direct referrals—they followed links on forensics websites to explore related sites and also paid attention to forensic ...
... television program advertisements to visit the show's website to take quizzes, play forensic games, and watch trailers and replays of episodes.

The students' engagement with multiple texts that focused on forensic concepts exemplified the inter-textual or connected nature of their literacy practices (Gee, 2004). The students demonstrated their tendencies to make connections between concepts found in one textual form to another and related concepts learned in school to the everyday texts they explored on their own. They enjoyed the opportunity to exhibit and share their knowledge of forensics concepts with their friends and family and apply forensic tools and processes to situations they found in everyday life.

Each of these digital or media texts had at least one of four appealing elements in common. These four motivating features included fostering interactivity, facilitating collaboration, positioning individuals as experts, and promoting observation and reasoning skills. Of all of these elements, perhaps the most appealing to students were the observation and reasoning skills that the everyday texts promoted. Girls in particular found these texts to be liberating because they were enabled to assume the roles of problem solvers without being marginalized in their participation. In engaging with these texts, students displayed an extraordinary inclination to practice and apply their observation and inquiry skills. Students relished opportunities to use clues and evidence to solve crimes through inductive and deductive reasoning. Their enjoyment of media texts such as television programs and print texts such as forensic fiction was enhanced by their ability to make inferences by using forensic concepts and procedures to predict outcomes. These interactions demonstrated the artificial separation between home and school literacies (Hull & Schultz, 2002) and illustrated the natural tendency for students to blur boundaries between their formal and informal learning.

These experiences provided personal involvement with text and put individuals at center stage in resolving problems. Students were challenged by these everyday texts to draw on their expertise with scientific concepts, tools, and processes. Doing so enabled them to represent themselves as competent Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Watches and knowledgeable individuals who purposively engaged with texts in ways that reinforced their understandings of scientific concepts. In some instances, these texts positioned students so they were able to display their knowledge in an instructive way to their parents, thereby reinforcing the model of adolescents as capable and articulate people who are not less than adults but merely different from adults (Alvermann, 2009).

Outside of school, students sought out texts that allowed them to interact or collaborate with others in problem solving. Students enjoyed predicting and analyzing clues in video games, books, or television programs with friends and family members, illustrating literacy as a social activity (Street, 1995). Their proclivity for interactivity was evidenced both in competition and collaboration, as students either attempted to problems solve with others or competed with others to figure out a crime.