A Social Event Book Selection in Book Club Time
Our students often select the “coming-of-age” novel, in which a trusting, narcissistic adolescent encounters some of life’s realities about topics like sex, sexuality, relationships, death, crime, family, work, or travel. Through the personal, life-transforming experiences of the characters, our students find the inner windows to their voices. As we listened to their book club exchanges, we saw Rosenblatt’s (1946, 1985) and Gee’s (1996) theories in action. We saw the novel lay out the actions of the characters while providing a model our students used to craft insights about how they might personally respond to similar real-life situations. Views of a character’s life were, for them, an introduction to a Secondary Discourse they found intriguing. Secondary Discourses are those to which people are apprenticed as part of their socializations within various local, state, and national groups and institutions outside early home and peer-group socialization—for example, churches, gangs, schools, offices. They constitute the reconcilability and meaningfulness of our “public” (more formal) acts.
Discourses are ways of Replica Watches being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of identity kit, which conies complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize. (Gee, 1996, p. 127)
Through the characters, our students were able to discover possibilities of new voices and actions, which could be drawn upon if they ever encountered these new “public spaces” (Gee, 1996). Their involvement with these characters continues to occur in the more familiar but yet Secondary Discourse of school where many of them never expected to have such exposures through books, because these books of their choice were not the ones they had been traditionally invited to read as a part of their school curriculum. Grappling with the acceptance and rejection of features within multiple Secondary Discourses is often experienced by readers, but we found this to be profoundly so for these adolescents.
We are overjoyed that in addition to piquing their interests, their selections regularly lead them to a next text, sometimes even a classic. An example of this occurred during this unit on racial profiling. After one group of students finished The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff, they presented a whole-class share of what they had discussed in their book club. The whole-class share led to an online book rap. Based on their conversation, we made connections with other texts and shared these with our students. The result was a request from Robert to form a book club on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The book club subsequently engaged in discussion about the motivations, actions, and reactions of the characters within the book and contrasted them with those of Barney, Luke, Harlem, and Principal Moore, the characters they met in Hentoff’s novel.
Over the past decade adolescents have been one of the fastest growing segments of Replica Oris Watches the U.S. population (Magazine Publishers of America, 2004; U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). This increased “market” has spawned more products designed for the young adult (YA) population, resulting in a growth spurt in YA literature and other reading materials targeted to teens, such as teen websites, magazines, and graphic novels. The numbers of books published for young adults, ages 13—19, have grown extensively in recent years (Bean, 2003; Donelson & Nilsen, 2005; Horning, Lingren, Rudiger, & Schliesman, 2004), and new YA imprints specifically for more mature teen readers have appeared, such as Edge, Push, and Speak. Another indicator of the rise in YA literature is the introduction of two YA book awards, the Michael L. Printz award (through American Library Association) for the best YA book of the year, and YARA, the Young Australian Readers’ Award, a readers’ choice award.
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