A Call for Action: Building Bridges Between Literacy In School and Out

Our research on the literate lives of adolescent boys both in and out of school (Smith and Wilhelm, 2002) was motivated by our concern over the fact that boys underperform girls on measures of reading and writing in all states, provinces and countries around the world where data is available. This underperformance is sometimes attributed to boys' rejection of reading because they see it as a feminised, or at least as an inappropriately masculine, activity (e.g., Martino, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1998). We began our research with the expectation that we'd see similar attitudes in our participants. But we didn't. Instead we saw that all of the boys in our study were actively engaged in literacy outside school. Their rejection of school literacy, then, cannot be a function of their attitude toward literacy in general and instead must be a comment on the particular kinds of literate activity they encounter in school. That recognition led us to examine our own practice and the beliefs that give rise to that practice as the source of the problem.

In this chapter, we'll first document how our boys felt about literacy and then explore some of our foundational beliefs and how they've been challenged by what our boys taught us. We'll conclude with a discussion of the curricular reform we see as most likely to result in young men's embracing school literacies the way they embrace their out-of-school literacies.