Abstract of

At Play in Fields of Ideas

Andrew Schofield

Theresa Rogers

The authors have come to believe, based on several years of collaborative work in an alternative literacy program, that developing the multiple literacies of struggling youth requires a curricular playfulness with students' ideas, biographies, and imaginations across genres and media. Social literacy and multiliteracy theories are powerful and important reminders that literacy practices are varied and situated across different media and that school-based literacy practices need to be inclusive of a broad range of students, cultures, and text formats. The youth literacy program described in this article leans on this work and recent reconceptualizations of adolescent literacy by integrating verbal and visual imagination, the material contexts and biographies of student lives, traditional print-based literacies, and opportunities for students to express themselves across multiple literacies. The authors build on language and nonlanguage skills, which may or may not be valued in many schools, and scaffold literacy skills needed to augment student life skills and talents. To bring these arguments to life, the authors provide examples of the ways students rearticulate, transform, and integrate their own narratives into curricular texts through poetry, art, music, and video—activities that can, at times, lessen or mitigate their resistances to schooling.

Abstract from Schofield, A., & Rogers, T. (2004, November). At Play in Fields of Ideas. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(3), 238–248. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.48.3.5