ABSTRACT
The stories that are currently being constructed and represented about adolescents’ literacies are filled with tones of hopelessness and forewarn of an impending crisis. The decibels are especially high when shrieking in fear about the urban adolescent’s literacy prospects. A recent report made to the Carnegie Corporation stated, “In urban centers . . . only an estimated 20 percent of students are reading at grade level and thus are prepared to master high-school level content” (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004, p. 8). As this and other reports (e.g., Ballator, Farnum, & Kaplan, 1999; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) demonstrate, literacy, to a large extent, continues to be measured, researched, and taken up in popular discourses within rigid definitions of reading, despite the rapidly changing landscape of reading, writing, and other communicative practices. Like Magritte’s famous paradoxical painting, the representation of something is not, and can never be, the thing itself. Yet, for so long, test scores of many kinds have come to signify literacy, or more specifically an understanding of literacy, as “autonomous” (Street, 1995), and thereby a set of skills that is easily measurable (Irvine & Larson, 2001). While recognizing that representation is always necessarily partial, it is important, then, to strive for representations that better reflect the nuanced, multiple, socially situated, ideological, and layered nature of literacies. It is incumbent upon literacy researchers to extend the stories that are being told, shown, and demonstrated about literacies, particularly in the lives of youth living and growing up in urban centers. These stories characterize, and are characterized by, creativity, innovation, and texture in their representations, which chronicle both what has been learned through research and the story of the research itself.
