Innovative Practice in Teaching the English Language Arts: Building Bridges Between Literacy In School and Out

The research that Jeff Wilhelm and I did on the literate lives of adolescent boys both in and out of school (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002) was motivated by the fact that all available data demonstrates that boys underperform girls on measures of reading and writing. This underperformance is sometimes attributed to boys’ rejection of reading because they see it as a feminized, or at least as an inappropriate masculine activity (e.g., Martino, 1994, 1998). As a consequence, we began our research with the expectation that the young men in our study would reject literacy. But, strikingly, they didn’t. Instead, we found that all of the boys in our study were actively engaged in literacy outside school. Their rejection of school literacy, therefore, has to be seen not as a function of their attitude toward literacy in general but rather as a comment on the particular kinds of literate activity they typically encounter in school. In this chapter, I’ll argue that a powerful educational innovation would involve capitalizing on adolescents’ engagement in literacy outside school by building bridges between what they do out of school and what we want them to do in school.