One of the most common vocalizations I've heard in my (admittedly brief) time in the classroom this year has been some variation on "who cares"? For any educator, not being equipped to answer this question with real-world applications of any skill can cause student disconnection from the material instantaneously. In terms of my content area, Secondary English, it may be extremely helpful to be able to market the creative and practical concerns of learning to write.
Author Marcella J. Kehus has written extensively on the subject of online publishing, and a network of feedback, for teenwriters. At teenlit.com, the site posted a monthly average of "approximately 1,500 visitors a week" (Kehus, 2000). In her article, "Opportunities for Teenagers to Share Their Writing Online", Kehus shares basic strategies for prompting teenagers to become more active in their interests of reading and writing actively. Beyond the obvious appeal of receiving thousands of visitors and hundreds of submissions per week, the true achievement of teenlit.com is the presence of a thriving comment section. Kehus states that the comment section of the site dominates the amount of hits that they receive, showing that they are fostering an active community of literary discussion for teenagers, by teenagers.
Kehus writes extensively on the privacy and protection measures applied to the young people posting on the site, but the tips for adult participation are of the most interest. Kehus encourages teachers to "enlist students to contribute content, design, and other ideas" to the site, or to start a literature collective of their own but to imbue it with the importance of an online source. Building off of the advice of Kehus, a teacher in any content area could promote an online or print source as a collecctive of knowledge for a class: Math teachers could allow for a word problem compendium written by and for students. The immediate applications of cultivating any kind of real-world application is a great way to motivate writing teenagers; not just to present it for criticism, but also to generate it in the first place.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 148-58. Retrieved from http://www.isrl.illinois.edu/~chip/pubs/03LIA/20-003.pdf Kehus, M. J. (2000, October). Opportunities for Teenagers to Share Their Writing Online.
And of course, some books.
The books that I have chosen are for a 9th grade English course. They supplement a unit southern literature, beginning with Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and ending with To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Goals within the unit include comprehension of theme and setting, as well as placing texts within a historical context including the climate of the American South after the Civil War and Reconstruction. The books selected below demonstrate historical demonstrations of the South as well as focused stories of victims of hatred like Emmett Till.
Madden, Kerry. Harper Lee. New York: Viking, 2009.
Osborne, Linda Barrett. Traveling the Freedom Road: From Slavery and the Civil War through Reconstruction. New York: Abrams, 2009.
Wright, Simeon with Herb Boyd. Simeon's Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010.
