{"id":13818,"date":"2020-05-04T16:55:24","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T23:55:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/?p=13818"},"modified":"2020-05-04T16:55:24","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T23:55:24","slug":"performative-youth-the-literacy-possibilities-of-de-essentializing-adolescence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/performative-youth-the-literacy-possibilities-of-de-essentializing-adolescence\/","title":{"rendered":"Performative Youth: The Literacy Possibilities of De-essentializing Adolescence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our May reading for the 2019-20 Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN Marginal Syllabus<\/a> describes what happens when educators and youth partner together to explore historically situated views of adolescence. This article details the ways in which one educator, Rachel (a pseudonym), redesigned her AP English curriculum to support students in reading a variety of texts using a \u201cYouth Lens\u201d (Petrone, Sarigianides, & Lewis, 2004). Rachel\u2019s instructional and curricular innovations helped familiarize students with the genealogy of adolescence, understand the ways that discourses around adolescents\/adolescence function in the world, question the implications of these discourses for themselves and their peers, and explore the possibilities for performance and taking action. Sophia Sarigianides examines the effects of enabling students to access these alternative discourses and describes what emerged in the context of one literacy classroom.<\/p>\n

This is the seventh month of LEARN 2019-20, a Marginal Syllabus co-developed with the National Writing Project (NWP) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Each month of the 2019-2020 academic year, we\u2019ll collaboratively read and discuss an article, published in four different NCTE journals, that investigates the intersection of literacy and equity. Refer to the the 2019-20 syllabus<\/a> for information on all the annotatable readings, which will go \u201clive\u201d on the first Monday of each month, along with related events hosted by the National Writing Project.<\/p>\n

May topic: What is possible when youth are asked to engage in the discourse about what is meant by \u201cadolescence\u201d?<\/h4>\n

For Atticus, learning that thinkers reshaped their ideas of adolescence at a specific time unsettled the idea of adolescence as a stable life stage, as an inevitable \u201ctruth.\u201d With this new information, Atticus had more questions: What were youth people like or how were they thought before all these changes to the concept?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Performative Youth: The Literacy Possibilities of De-essentializing Adolescence<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

As part of our close study of this text, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides joined the Marginal Syllabus team to talk about her article and broader research about youth, adolescence, and the implications of her work for youth agency and learning in literacy education.<\/p>\n