What Can Terrance Tell Us About Alternatives

By Author: allan
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A critical and often unacknowledged component of adolescents' literacy development involves encouraging them to transform identities they may have constructed as nonreaders into new identities as more capable readers and learners. As students explore and experiment with possible selves, teachers can encourage them to try on new reader identities, expanding their visions of whom they are and who they can become. Such identity work is critical if they are to embrace literacy, engage as readers, and improve academic performance. To do such work, teachers must get to know young people's current literacy-related identity constructions (Hall, 2009). Replica Longines Watches

Terrance (pseudonym) is a ninth grader who demonstrates what can be learned when one gets to know a young person who struggles with school literacy tasks. He is identified for special education services with an individualized educational plan focused on accelerating his reading development. He receives support for completing coursework and homework, and he remembers that it was difficult ...
... to learn to read: It actually was hard for me to like comprehend reading when I was like first and second grade because I couldn't understand any of what I was reading, but I knew that I was reading something. So now I like really understand what I'm reading since I practice like every night and all day, like reading on the Internet and stuff. So now I really understand what I'm reading.

Terrance notes that "Teachers and my momma and my friends and family helped me actually understand what I was reading." He explains, they got me in support classes where the teacher actually helps me with my work and projects and homework and stuff, so I do a lot of reading in there on the Internet and do projects, and she helped me read and understand everything like that.

Terrance's out-of-school reading demonstrates his facility with new literacies that are interactive, multi-modal, and often Internet-based:

Well, my favorite type of reading is reading on the Internet because there's actually a lot of things I can read and some things, like CNN, MSNBC, like the news. I like to watch the news a lot so I just surf the Internet and watch the news or listen to the news. I also like to read like the billboards that they have outside, them big tall signs.I like to read those especially because some of them now are like high tech and they switch like a slash-up.

I read Jet and People magazines. And I also like the newspaper. I'm a big fan of the news, actually. I like gossip, [about] celebrities, mostly. Like child stars who would have been big but are not big now. And famous marriages and stuff that are breaking up in divorces. Terrance spends his own money, acquired by raking neighborhood yards and cleaning a nearby barber shop, on newspapers and magazines. Terrance's self-motivated reading outside of school belies the easy binaries often drawn between "readers" and "nonreaders" among our middle and high school students. When asked whether he reads books, however, Terrance sounds more like the reluctant reader familiar to educators: Replica Oris Watches

Uh, it's not really. Well, I got books that I read outside of school, but I don't read them all the time, like every day. I mostly just like lie on the bed or [get] on the Internet or play a game or something. So I really don't read anything when I get home. Even though Terrance describes himself as "practicing every night and all day, reading on the Internet," he neglects to count these literacy practices as reading in the shadow of school-sanctioned book reading. In school, although Terrance admits that "some days I don't feel like reading," he will read, particularly when he is able to connect the reading to his interests:

Today I didn't feel like reading a book for second period, but I read it anyway because it's actually interesting facts that they have in there. I mostly like go to the library and get nonfiction books. I get murders, biography sketches, and mythology books. And I get thriller books.