popularwebsitesinadolescentsout-of-schoollives.docVIP

Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-school Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy Jennifer C. Stone, University of Washington Forthcoming in M. Knobel C. Lankshear (Eds.) A New Literacies Sampler. Peter Lang. I first became interested in popular websites several years ago when I was working as a teacher and curriculum coordinator for an after school program for middle school students of color. I noticed that during time in the computer labs, students were often sneaking peeks at websites. I would see several students huddled around a computer, talking, laughing, reading, and writing, all the while deeply engaged. Then, as adults would walk past, they would quickly close the sites and switch back to the official work of the program. Later, while teaching a workshop on website design in the same program, I started talking more to young people about these sites. In the workshop, students learned about various genres of websites and constructed their own informational sites. At one point during the workshop, a student who I call Devonte turned to me and stated matter-of-factly that the websites we were making were boring and that the sites he liked were entertainment sites, not informational sites. This spurred a great deal of discussion and debate among the workshop participants about what makes for a good website. One student even raised the possibility that an entertainment site could also be informational, leading Devonte and several others to create such sites for their final projects. These experiences, along with observing similar events in other settings, piqued my interest, both as a researcher and teacher, in what impact popular websites have on young people’s literacy learning. I have since started a three-pronged study looking at popular websites, including a survey of young people’s favorite websites, a textual analysis of these sites, and case studies of young people using these sites. This chapter focuses on the textual analysis component