What Did We Learn from Ned’s Interest in Goodie MOb?
As noted earlier, we set out in this article to identify some strategies that Ned used to make meaning of the images, language, and sounds associated with his favorite rap group. And while we were able to identify several such strategies, which we alluded to in the last section and will discuss at length in this one, we cannot claim that knowing about them directly informed our understanding of how Ned made meaning of the various kinds of popular culture texts he encountered -- the lyrics (both printed and rapped), the videos available on Goodie MOb Web sites, the personal e-mails from Kevin, the CD inserts, and the CDs themselves.
Rather, we might more plausibly claim this: Identifying the strategies Ned used to obtain information about his favorite rappers gave us a greater appreciation for how he relied on his own experiences and on certain kinds of “literate currencies” (Obidah, 1998, p. 52), which had worked for him in the past, to make meaning of the images, language, and sounds associated with Goodie MOb. We maintain that it was Ned’s command of several multiple and overlapping literacies gleaned through personal, familial, and social interactions both in and out of school that afforded him the opportunity to act like -- and, just as important, to be recognized as -- a competent and literate person in the media club setting. Or, as the work of Gee (1996), among others (see, e.g., Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000; Lankshear, Gee, Knobel, & Searle, 1997), implies, literacies, like Discourses, are social practices that once acquired or learned make it possible for individuals to speak, think, and behave in the world in ways that allow them to recognize, and to be recognized by, others like themselves. Developing an awareness of how different literacies construct an individual as competent or not, we argue, is preliminary to understanding how that individual makes sense of all manner of things, including popular culture texts.
But for the present, what can we say about Ned’s use of strategies? First, it appears that he knew the importance of positioning himself as competent and literate, at least in the public library where we interacted with him on a weekly basis for several months. He demonstrated that he was a capable reader and writer in his uses of a variety of popular culture texts having to do with Goodie MOb. For example, witness his success in reading Kevin’s e-mailed messages and responding to them, his willingness to search for Web sites that he could read (image-, language-, and sound-wise) and then recommend to Kevin, and his skill in constructing a home page for the M-L-P Boyz. Among his peers in the media club, Ned became known as someone who could find his way around the Internet with ease. This marked him as a competent and literate being in their eyes as well.
Second, Ned was strategic in his dealings with other people. He appeared to value the socializing that went on in media club, especially in the CD and video game room, and he sometimes tried to duplicate much of that atmosphere in the Young Adult section of the library. There, seated in front of a computer and surrounded by three or four boys who were not members of the media club (typically they were members of his rap group, the M-L-P Boyz), Ned would surf the Web for information on sports and rap music.
His social nature also led him to capitalize on the club’s easy access to us, as adult facilitators. For instance, he invited Donna to listen to various songs from Goodie MOb’s debut album. In a later section of this paper, we elaborate on why we initially thought it uncharacteristic that he would so easily discuss rap with adults, particularly since we had assumed that he extended this invitation more for reasons of politeness than out of any great need to share rap lyrics with someone four times his age. However, in Kevin, someone much closer to his own age, Ned found a fellow admirer of Goodie MOb. Neither Margaret not Donna had been particularly interested in this group initially, nor did we have much knowledge of its music; as such, it was unlikely that we could have facilitated Ned’s media club project -- at least not to the extent that Kevin was able to do, given his close, personal connection to the group.
A third strategy that worked well for Ned was his will to independence. Somewhat akin to the first strategy we observed him using -- taking up the dual position of competent reader and writer -- Ned’s inclination toward self-sufficiency worked both for and against him. On the positive side, it afforded him opportunities to explore what he found interesting and compelling in popular culture texts on his own terms. For example, Ned approached his media club project, which he dubbed his “freedom activity,” with a strong sense of purpose: he wanted to know more about Goodie MOb and its music. Unlike many of his peers, Ned did not rely on us to get him started. He also needed little prodding from us to e-mail Kevin, at least initially. And on days when he seemed more inclined to surf the Web than to compose a message to Kevin, we sensed an air of self-determination at work that was difficult to ignore.
Ned’s sense of independence manifested itself in other ways as well, some of which could be viewed as working against self-improvement in school literacy skills. For example, he never asked for help with spelling when he e-mailed Kevin, and his seeming inattention to spelling errors resulted in some of the same words being spelled correctly one day but not the next. Difficulty in spelling also led him to make numerous errors when searching for information on the Internet.
Finally, a fourth strategy we observed Ned use with measured success was that of asking questions. Although the questions he asked about Goodie MOb were more often general than specific in nature, eventually -- with Kevin pushing him to explore the dedication to the album Soul Food -- Ned began to focus on finding specific answers to specific questions. He also showed evidence of being able to infer answers to questions that were still open for investigation, as was the case when he asked Kevin if Brandon Williams was related to him. Along similar lines, Kevin’s e-mail in which he praised Ned’s skills as a researcher may have served to reinforce the idea that asking questions and posing possible answers are some of the most valuable skills one can possess when it comes to comprehending texts of all kinds, popular culture and otherwise. But perhaps most telling of all is the fact that Ned succeeded in getting adults to pay attention to his questions and to take them seriously. This is no small feat given the power relations often at play in the adult-run world that youth inhabit.
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Pushing the Envelope Identified in school as a student lacking reading competence for his grade level, after school Ned strategically used literate competencies related to images, language, and sound to make sense of his interest in Goodie MOb and to share his knowledge about and pleasures in these literacies with others. In the final section of this article, we consider how his literacy strategies related to media and popular culture, which are complementary to but regularly subsumed by alphabetic and print-based literacies, can be used concomitantly in promoting literacy in educational endeavors that involve adults and youth. Rather than focusing solely on Ned as an adolescent in this section, we shift our attention to an examination of adult assumptions related to popular culture. To this end, we revisit the assumption stated earlier -- that we as adults believe it is possible to arrive at an understanding of how adolescents make meaning of popular culture texts by observing them in action -- and we examine two examples of this assumption that work for and against adults in interactions with adolescents and popular culture. From these illustrative assumptions, we discuss spaces that acknowledge the legitimacy of literacies and position adolescents’ and adults’ use of popular culture. To know or not to know the text? That is the question. Popular culture is often attributed to the likes of youth and youth culture (Valentine, Skelton & Chambers, 1998). Because it is seemingly given over to youths’ interests, adults often estrange themselves from popular culture by positioning themselves as more knowledgeable about the meanings youth will make from popular culture texts or as “clueless” about these texts. Let’s look at each of these assumptions separately. At times, adults position themselves as more knowledgeable about the meanings adolescents make of popular culture, and assume they already know what those meanings will be. When this happens, adults stabilize the meaning of the text, according to their own perceptions and experiences of it, foreclosing other possible meanings of and uses for texts that adolescents might create on their own. For example, in Ned’s case, both Donna and Margaret positioned themselves as knowledgeable (and perhaps as more knowledgeable) about Goodie MOb at different times when working with him. Donna shared with Ned an article from a magazine, while Margaret sent him an e-mail about Web sites she thought Ned might like to pursue. Likewise, Kevin positioned himself as more knowledgeable about Ned’s interest, and erroneously anticipated that Ned would like one of the band’s members over another. As adults, we assumed that any information we forwarded to Ned about Goodie MOb would be well received and useful to him. This was not the case. As Ned began to show us and to teach us about his interests in Goodie MOb, we had to shift our thinking and position ourselves as learners in the process, watching to see how his interests constantly shifted and changed. Though appreciative of the information we shared with him, he had his own agenda for engaging with texts concerning Goodie MOb. Clearly, the meaning he made from the text was not the meaning we made from the text. By examining Ned’s uses of Web, lyric, and song texts and the meanings he created from them about Goodie MOb, we realized that his objectives were perhaps different from our own. His desire to learn about Goodie MOb closely related to his desire to become a rap artist, which cannot be underestimated. In the southern United States, rappers like Goodie MOb have brought a regional and national lyric-filled message to the African American community. In fact, educational historian Derrick Alridge has described Atlanta’s rap music scene as a possible venue for a new Harlem Renaissance of the South (personal communication). (To learn more about the music scene in Atlanta, visit Social Step, Creative Loafing, Music Midtown, Uplift Enterprises, or 1st Fridays.) Using various media to learn about the group, studying the group as rappers, and narrowing his interests to a specific study of one of the members and the lyrics he created illustrate how particular texts, though not all texts, related to Goodie MOb became texts of identification for Ned. In this way, he used texts in ways similar to Walkerdine’s (1990) description of texts. As she explains, readers use texts to construct meaning and to create places for identification whereby they construct subject-positions for themselves. Ned’s position related to Goodie MOb was that of a knowledgeable user, interested in the group’s texts to inform the workings of his own newly formed rap group. We, on the other hand, had also positioned ourselves as knowledgeable about Goodie MOb, though Ned had to shape and to focus our sharing of texts with him so that he could continue his identification with and learn what he desired from engaging the text. Furthermore, part of our assumption as we positioned ourselves as more knowledgeable than Ned about Goodie MOb was the fact that we implicitly believed that any and all texts we shared about the band would interest him. Often, because popular culture is associated with pleasure, adults assume that when we match a text to a child’s interest, he or she will find pleasure in that text. As Ned led us to see, pleasure in texts is often individually defined. Just as adults often position themselves as more knowledgeable about the meaning youth will make from popular culture, we also position ourselves as naive about or oblivious to popular culture. We assume that popular culture is solely “youth culture” that we don’t (or can’t) understand. Adults often take a hands-off approach, leaving discussions involving differing meanings of popular culture texts unsealed. This is frequently attributed to a “generation gap,” which keeps adults from venturing to inquire into youth’s popular culture interests. Instead of traveling into what we perceive as youth territory to learn from as well as to teach, adults habitually stay safely distanced from these areas, thinking that youth’s popular culture is of little interest to their adult tastes or that youth would not want to share these interests with adults. Interestingly, several studies have illustrated that youth are usually quite willing to share their likes and to teach others about their interests if adults show a willingness to listen and to learn from them (Alvermann, Young, Green, & Wisenbaker, 1999; Bloustien, 1998; Knobel, 1999). Ned’s actions corroborate that adolescents’ literate practices in and around popular culture texts include interactions with adults when opportunities exist for positioning themselves as both learner and teacher. As Ned corresponded by e-mail with Kevin about their mutual interest in Goodie MOb, he learned about Kevin’s personal connection to the rap group while he also taught Kevin about new Web sites and his own interests in the group. Thus, both Ned and Kevin positioned themselves as learners and teachers, shaping and being shaped by the e-mail conversation. Ned also acted as a teacher as he shared his learning with Donna and Margaret, who were the novices about Goodie MOb. By including Donna in listening to the music while showing her the lyrics in the CD insert and by responding to Margaret’s e-mail about Web sites, Ned seemed to notice the new-found interest they had in Goodie MOb, and he competently inculcated them into what he knew and was interested in about the group. As he positioned himself adeptly in using various media literacies (e-mail, the Internet, CD player, and CD) while socializing with us, he easily and seamlessly crossed generational lines to share his understandings of popular culture texts related to Goodie MOb. To know and not to know the text. That is an answer. It seems that adults are in a conundrum when we examine our assumptions about our own positions related to adolescents’ interests in popular culture: we run the risk of appearing to know too much or seeming to know too little. Though it might appear to be a no-win situation, we think that attending to these assumptions can in fact aid in developing more in-depth understandings about meaning making when both adults and adolescents are involved in literacy activities that invite popular culture into the discussion. Certainly in our engagement of texts with Ned and with other young adolescents like him, we struggled with our assumptions about meaning making in texts we knew and didn’t know; and, to be sure, we continue to think about it. Based upon the tenuous positions we took up related to Ned’s and to other adolescents’ interests in popular culture, we did, however, locate two points helpful in designing spaces for the inclusion of popular culture that recognized the legitimacy of the meaning-making and literacy strategies adolescents use: In many ways, these activities also served to help us grapple with being both teacher and learner. Buckingham (1991) explains that adults should “get inside the experience of [popular culture], to grant a legitimacy to the pleasures it offers” (p. 31) before asking youngsters about those interests. Rather than immediately jumping in the middle of the media club members’ interests, we used a slower approach, watching and learning how they used multiple tools such as CDs, the Internet, e-mail, and conversations as part of their literacy repertoires and noticing what kinds of interests they exhibited. We noted that when we gave adolscents time to engage in literate activities related to popular culture and to become teachers about their interests, we built a level of trust such that Ned and others felt comfortable sharing those interests with us as adults. Over time, as we learned, our interest in texts often varied as we used them differently and took up diverse positions. The meanings we each constructed from texts weren’t necessarily the same. It was in discussions with adolescents about texts and the meanings they created that we learned how they perhaps saw and used texts differently. In working from the assumptions that we, as adults, are both knowledgeable and sometimes clueless about youth and popular culture, we may be able to look more closely and to see the multiple meaning-making strategies that adolescents like Ned use in their everyday literate lives. Ultimately, we return to Foucault’s speculation that what people “don’t know is what what they do does.” We agree. People can’t ever really be sure about the meaning that gets made from popular culture, whether that meaning is defined as comprehension or as some sort of effects. Certainly, Ned didn’t have any idea that his interaction with texts regarding Goodie MOb would have any effect or bearing on anyone or anything outside of himself. But in interacting with Ned, we observed some strategies he used and found ways to describe how those strategies and our assumptions about popular culture could create new spaces for ephemeral meaning making using popular culture texts. In order to push the envelope so as to incorporate the images, language, and sounds of popular culture texts with everyday print-based literacy practices, we think adults need to recognize that youth have much to teach us about the content of popular culture in their lives. At the same time, we need to look for ways to assist youth in developing the literacy skills necessary for engaging with these kinds of texts. Now, what we don’t know is what what we’ve written will do. Back to menu
References Alvermann, D.E. (2001, May). Reading adolescents’ reading identities: Looking back to see ahead. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 676-690. Alvermann, D.E., & Hagood, M.C. (2000a). Critical media literacy: Research, theory, and practice in “new times.” Journal of Educational Research, 93, 193-205. Alvermann, D.E., & Hagood, M.C. (2000b). Fandom and critical media literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43, 436-446. Alvermann, D.E., Young, J.P., Green, C., & Wisenbaker, J. (1999). Adolescents’ perceptions and negotiations of literacy practices in after-school read and talk clubs. American Educational Research Journal, 36, 221-264. Barton, D., Hamilton, M., & Ivanic, R. (2000). Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context. New York: Routledge. Bloustien, G. (1998). “It’s different to a mirror ’cos it talks to you”: Teenage girls, video cameras, and identity. In S. Howard (Ed.), Wired-up: Young people and the electronic media (pp. 115-134). London: UCL Press. Buckingham, D. (1991). Teaching about the media. In D. Lusted (Ed.), The media studies book (pp. 12-35). New York: Routledge. Dreyfus, H.L., & Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gee, J.P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. Hagood, M.C. (2000). New times, new millennium, new literacies. Reading Research and Instruction, 39, 311-328. Knobel, M. (1999). Everyday literacies: Students, discourse, and social practices. New York: Peter Lang. Lankshear, C., Gee, J.P., Knobel, M., & Searle, C. (1997). Changing literacies. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Nikole, C. (1999, November). A few good men. Blaze, 64-71. Obidah, J.E. (1998). Black-mystory: Literate currency in everyday schooling. In D.E. Alvermann, K.A. Hinchman, D.W. Moore, S.F. Phelps, & D.R. Waff (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives (pp. 51-71). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Valentine, G., Skelton, T., & Chambers, D. (1998). Cool places: An introduction to youth and youth cultures. In T. Skelton, & G. Valentine (Eds.), Cool places: Geographies of youth cultures (pp. 1-34). London: Routledge. Walkerdine, V. (1990). Schoolgirl fictions. New York: Verso. About the Authors Donna Alvermann is Distinguished Research Professor of Reading Education at the University of Georgia (309 Aderhold Hall, Athens GA 30602-7125, USA; e-mail dalverma@arches.uga.edu). A former middle school teacher, her research currently focuses on adolescents’ media literacy practices and their comprehension of popular culture texts. From 1992 to 1997, she codirected the National Reading Research Center. She is coauthor (with Margaret Hagood and Jennifer Moon) of Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Researching Critical Media Literacy (International Reading Association/National Reading Conference, 1999). A past cochair of IRA's Commission on Adolescent Literacy, Alvermann is the incoming coeditor (with David Reinking) of the Association’s journal Reading Research Quarterly. Margaret Hagood is a doctoral candidate in reading education at the University of Georgia (309 Aderhold Hall, Athens GA 30602-7125; e-mail mhagood@coe.uga.edu). Her research interests include local and global trends in young adolescents’ literacy practices related to media, particularly as those practices intersect with adolescents’ out-of-school uses of popular culture. Kevin Williams is the former project coordinator for the Injury Prevention Center at Hughes Spalding Children’s Hospital in Atlanta, where he taught health education to patients, parents, and staff. While an undergraduate at Florida A&M University and a graduate student at Atlanta’s Morehouse School of Medicine, he completed internships with the Office of Minority Health (Rockville, Maryland), Leon County School (Tallahassee, Florida), the Georgia State Health Planning Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Morehouse’s Regional Research Center for Minority Health. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in the department of Social Foundations of Education at the University of Georgia, where he focuses on education and health policy. He is also president of Uplift Enterprises, a special events production company, and a vice president of Wolfpack Enterprises, which hosts “1st Fridays Atlanta,” a monthly event for young African American professionals. For index of other articles in the New Literacies in Action series, click here. To print this article, point and click your mouse anywhere on the text; then use your browser's print command. Citation: D.E. Alvermann, M.C. Hagood, & K.B. Williams (2001, June). Image, language, and sound: Making meaning with popular culture texts. Reading Online, 4(11). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/action/alvermann/index.html Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
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Posted June 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232