ABSTRACT
Why does youth literacy, culture, or identity matter to teaching the visual and communicative arts? More to the point, why does youth literacy-that is, the literacy practices and texts that young people engage in or with of their own volition-matter at all? The simple answer is that youth literacies should matter to researchers and teachers because they matter so much to youth. These literacy practices-and their accompanying texts-should matter in particular to visual and communicative arts teachers and researchers because, as researchers such as Cowan (2005), Ingalls (2005) and van Helden (2002) documented, youths’ preferred texts are often multimodal. That is, youths’ texts typically draw from and integrate print, images, spoken words, music, and even performances. But youth literacies should matter to all teachers, especially when the popular assumption is that youth do not read or write much in their out-of-school lives. Rather than lamenting the alleged crisis of youth aliteracy (i.e., “kids don’t read anymore”), we should examine what young people do read and write. The emphasis in such work should be on understanding the kinds of texts and literacy practices that excite young people, with an eye toward both drawing from what youth know and love and expanding possibilities for youth to learn to use a wide variety of texts in their school, work, and play. Youth culture, literacy, and identity (YCLI) studies purports to do just that: to focus on what and why texts matter to youth and on how youth texts and literacy practices might inform academic literacy development.
