Embracing Youth Culture

The following view on youth and youth culture is adapted from a paper that I wrote for C&T 4145 Critical Perspectives in Secondary Education titled "A Community of Stories: Challenging Discourses of Adolescence through Youth-Centered PBL."

In my early years of teaching, I would ask my students to analyze characters such as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird to identify aspects of the coming of age narrative. Never did I ask my students to question the notion that one day, as if by magic, they would cross the threshold from inferior beings into adulthood (Lesko, 2012). Though I did call into question the claim that, left to their own devices, adolescents would fight to the death as they do in Lord of the Flies or West Side Story, by the time we read these texts, the students already believed its messages to be true. Without critical questioning or differing perspectives from other cultures, the students and I were buying into two myths: that young people must wait for the end goal of adulthood and wisdom to arrive (pp. 2-4, 105-106), and that the youth are irrational beings controlled by the raging hormones of puberty and relentless peer pressure (pp. 3-4). While youth is surely a time of growth, this view of adolescence confines young people to a period of perpetual development that idolizes the future while trapping them in a powerless and unruly present that adults can easily dismiss. 

An alternative view of youth elevates students to valued producers of knowledge and recognizes their full humanity. Ladson-Billings (2021), for example, notes that a culturally relevant teacher recognizes that they are not the sole authority in the classroom (p. 74). In their work on Mira, Garcia, and Morrell (2016) articulate the need for recognizing students as “authors and experts of their own lives” (p. 5). Further, Paris and Alim (2014) argue that youth culture has inherent value and shouldn’t be leveraged with the aim of moving students from an inferior position toward something “better” (p. 87).  Rather than dismissing students’ actions and words as needlessly rebellious or provocative, a culturally sustaining teacher critically engages with youth to analyze the impact of their words (Paris and Alim, 2014, p.95) and make meaning of their own experiences (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 72). Working alongside youth in this manner elevates teens to collaborators in the pursuit of a better world. Additionally, countering harmful narratives about youth allows us to focus on the strengths of strong peer relationships. Knight-Manuel and Marciano (2019) argue that letting students work together can increase engagement and learning in the classroom as well as develop sociopolitical consciousness (p. 70). 

Thus, a youth-centered approach to teaching and learning must embrace adolescents as current drivers of change and experts on their own lives and needs, rejecting a canon that excludes diverse cultures and ways of being as well as approaches that center the teacher as the sole holder of knowledge. 

The following resources have helped me defend youth culture and youth literature as valuable in the classroom. I have also included resources that have shaped my thinking on how to choose books to include in curriculum and reading lists to help diversify my shelves on the Creating Local Canons page.