Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture (Foreword)

by Thomas Newkirk, University of New Hampshire

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This book will be part memoir, part guide to teaching boys, part research project, part cultural analysis, part review of published research. I have imagined my self as a defense attorney making the case for the "low status" narratives enjoyed by boys - comics, jokes, media games, plot-driven fiction, sports tables. I hope to encourage those in schools to ask questions about what counts as literacy and what doesn't.

I am not using "literacy" in the loose way it has come to be employed - as virtually any competence. After all, if we can have "environmental literacy," "visual literacy," and "mechanical literacy," why not "gardening literacy" or "cooking literacy" (or "sexual literacy")? I am primarily interested in the written stories children choose to read and compose, although these stories often involve illustration, and are often drawn from cinematic models my primary focus will be on later elementary grades because the stories at this age are often so elaborate, so very unadultlike. As one-third grader put it, "In fiction, you make your own personal world, your own world, your own rules". This book is an attempt to understand these rules.

In many ways the writing of both younger and older students made more sense to me. Who could not appreciate the literacy breakthroughs of primary students, the miraculous invented spelling, and the astonishing growth? In middle school and beyond, students seem more adept at and interested in the kind of realism that we as adult readers enjoy. But the writing of older elementary students often seemed to me extravagantly different, a special genre, or set of genres, that includes friends, quotations from popular culture and plots that don't quit, - sequel after sequel. This writing often exhausted me, confused me. How could these young writers enjoy this writing that gave me so little pleasure as a reader? The task I set for myself was to play what Peter Elbos (1973) calls "the believing game," to read this work generously, to capture the intention and pleasure of young writers, particularly the boys. As a general rule, no one voluntarily persists at work they find meaningless - so what is the meaning, the payoff, for these endlessly repeated space stories.

But more is at stake here than a personal curiosity about boys' writing in the upper elementary grades. I will argue that too many of our schools are failing too many of our boys, in the area of reading and writing. By defining, teaching, and evaluating literacy in narrow ways - even under the banner of "choice" and a student-centered curriculum- we have failed to support, or even allow, in our literacy programs the tastes, values and learning styles of many boys. More specifically, we have discouraged devalued or even prohibited the genres of reading and writing that are most popular with many boys, stories that include violence, parody and bodily humor.

The decision (if it is a conscious decision) to exclude these forms of reading and writing is based on a number of deeply held beliefs: that there is a contemporary crisis of declining moral values and academic standards; that the influences of popular culture is a cause as well as a symptom this decline; and that the intrusion of this culture into the classroom would be wasteful and maybe even dangerous. Of course any claim of "decline" inevitably involves a comparison between the current cultural climate and the nostalgic memories of the adults making the complaint. But this narrative of decline was around when my generation was in school, when alarmists worried about juvenile delinquency and the corrupting effects of comic books, Catcher in the Rye, and, of course, Elvis.

The elephant in the room, the issue that cannot be ignored, is a deep cultural anxiety about the socialization of boys (a concern that goes back at least to Plato). More particularly, this concern is about boys' perceived propensity to violence and aggression, triggered by suggestions in music lyrics, violent video games, and action movies. We sift through the lives of the Columbine killers and come up with rock star Marilyn Manson as an obvious cause for what happened. (For all the hand wringing, it's more comfortable to see this threat as "out there" in Hollywood than within the dynamics of households or tied to economic disadvantage that promotes alienation.). The job of schools, then, is to stand against these antisocial narratives, to make a stand for more uplifting and humane relationships, to elevate the taste of students to more morally appropriate literature preferences. As appealing, even commonsensical, as this argument appears to be, it is one I want to argue against.

First, there is no clear or logical line connecting reading and writing about violence with acting violently in the "real world." In fact, the great literature promoted by the staunchest educational conservatives, such as the classic fairy tales, filled with aggression and cruelty, to the point where the originals are often softened for young reads today. It is, in other words, not logical or fare to allow horrific events, such as the Columbine shootings, to lead us to pathologize and police a whole generation of boys and their literacy education. It is also profoundly demeaning, not to mention inaccurate, to depict young boys as simply reactive organisms, triggered to imitative action by media suggestions. This reductive reading of boys is at the heart of my critique. For as we will see, boys almost never simply reproduce in their writing what they have seen in movies or on TV- they transform it, recombine story lines from various media, and regularly place themselves and their friends as the heroes.

This representation of boys as passive dupes of the media quite simply underestimates their capacity to resist, to mock to discern the unreality of what they see. Watch any group of twelve-year-old boys watching television - watch the ruthless surfing that gives the shows literally seconds to prove themselves. Listen to the caustic commentary. I usually leave the room, almost nauseated, as I get segments of a half-dozen shows. For a sneaking second I feel some pity for the writers and producers who have to face this audience, knowing that their shows, if watched at all, will be dismembered.

The core data for the book is a set of student stories and a series of interviews with about one hundred students, boys and girls, in five New Hampshire elementary schools where they had considerable latitude in choosing topics and genres. In these conversations, I tried to explore the sources of their stories, their criteria for good writing and their views on using violence in their writing. I will also draw on other published studies to ground and extend my own observations. But as in all qualitative research, the true test of what I say will be made by readers who test my claims against their own observations, in this case of young male writers.

I will be making my case unconventionally, juxtaposing Plato and Batman, Rousseau and Britney Spears, Beowulf and Jackass. The references to classical educational thinkers are essential to the argument I am making because it is too common to ignore continuities with the past, to think of educational problems in terms of crises and precipitous declines- to overrate the uniqueness of our times. I will argue that there is something egocentric, lacking historical perspective, something inaccurately nostalgic in imagining boys today as so qualitatively different from boys of my generation or of earlier eras. While media may change, the narrative content of the media is often strikingly consistent. Boys, without knowing it, endlessly replay the hero and monster epics of Anglo Saxons- as do many of their video games. American convictions about progress, decline, change and impermanence are deeply rooted, but I will try to make the case for some basic stabilities in boys' narrative preferences.

I will also take a more generous view toward the visual media-TV, movies, computer games - that children appropriate in their writing. These visual narratives are often depicted as The Enemy. They are the narcotic that keeps children, particularly boys, from more wholesome and self-improving activities like reading. According to this view, we need to take a stand for a print culture, for serious literature that seems increasingly slow-paced to a generation raised on channel surfing. In this book I will be joining educators like Anne Haas Dyson to ask if these visual narratives might be viewed as resources, as sources for plots and characters, as cultural material that can be put to good use. If TV is the primary entertainment for economically disadvantaged children, as surveys indicate, don't we have an ethical obligation to know and work with- as well as extend - those narrative affiliations? Can we really afford to be TV snobs?

While the primary subject of this book is boys' literacy, the issue of "popular culture" - and its appropriateness in schools - also affects valuations of girls' literacy. Girls will write about sports, and while they claim that boys are more "violent" writers, they also are attracted to horror fiction, in which violence, or its possibility, is an indispensable element. They are also a receptive audience to boys' action stories if they are done in an interesting way - which, as I will argue, is the skilful mixing of humor and action So the lines are not clear-cut, and I will quote extensively from my interviews with girls and hope that the argument in this book will work to their advantage as well.

Still, the materials that boys try to import must often violate stated or unstated rules of appropriateness. For example, one fourth grader explained his anxiety about using variations of The Simpsons plots:

DON: There's a lot of stuff in it that I can't do at school. Like a lot of drinking and stuff-but sometimes I get some stuff in. Like the episode tonight was this principal and he tying his shoe. Lisa, Bart's sister, gives Bart her project. It's the biggest tomato. So principal Skinner, he's tying his shoe and Bart has the tomato in his hand and he is looking down and he throws the tomato and Lisa goes, "No!" And the Principal Skinners goes, "Ahhh ! "Splatt!!!"

TN: It hits him on the butt ?
DON: Yeah, it was really funny - I like that kind of stuff.

Don is clearly testing limits of what he can "bring in": how can he employ the Simpsons plotlines without appearing too disrespectful to adult authority figures? Has he read it right? Is drinking unacceptable but practical jokes allowable? These boundary lines will be a major subject of this book.

When I was the age of the students I interviewed, we didn't have the options boys today have, whole channels devoted to music videos and subversive humour. But we did have Mad Magazine. Almost any male who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s has fond memories of Mad; it was for many of us, an introduction to parody, to irreverence. Unlike the stories we read in school, it seemed written for us, and we enjoyed the subversiveness of passing it around during class, hiding it behind our schoolbooks as we read "Spy vs. Spy" or Superduperman." The one standard fixture was Alfred E. Nueman, freckled, gap toothed, and clueless whose motto was "What, me worry?"

I suspect that some might consider that a motto for this book, since I am arguing for the viability and utility of forms of popular culture that many in education dismiss as inappropriate or worse. I am also crediting kids with the ability to interpret this culture - they are more than the passive dupes they are often made out to be.

But I do, of course worry.

I worry about bullies. I worry about the narrow construction of masculinity in our culture that views deviance as "queer". I worry about hierarchies that always put athletes on top. I worry about boys who don't fit this narrow definition, who are oppressed by "the boy code." I worry about schools so big that gets get lost in them. And like any parent I wary about the horrific violence that occurred in Columbine and other schools.

But my main worry is about boys who are alienated from school itself, who find the reading and writing in schools unrelated to anything that matters to them. Such boys - and I was one of them - partition their lives into "schoolwork" and "things that really matter"." For some, parental pressure and expectations are enough to keep them at it; others simply disengage. I worry about them. And there are a lot of them out there.

But I think there are opportunities for bringing these boys into Frank Smith's "literacy club". It will require us all, though, to ask the central question of this book - what counts as literacy? How can we learn about, appreciate, and make use of the narrative affilations of potentially alienated boys? How can we tap the interests that exist on the other side of the partition?

I am convinced that these boys can be reached if we are willing to interrogate our own values and open ourselves to a more comprehensive view of narrative choice. If that makes me an optimist - well, I've been called worse.

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