Bronwyn T. Williams

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Of course Aaron knew the risks of shooting at a man keeping that close to the side of the car, but this particular factor wasn't what he was concerned about at the moment. All he was concerned about was shooting him before the jerk had time enough to recover from the blow. So he simply aimed the gun at him and turned his stomach and innards into a bloody hole with the sun shining through the spot where it came out his back. This would not have been much of a problem for Aaron had he not hit one of the tethers that held the SUVs down. The sheer weight of the SUVs caused the other tether to snap like the man's spine when the bullets hit it. Instantly the SUVs began to fall off the train car, some even going right through the bridge and into the icy, cold waters of Lake Michigan. (From "The Assassins" by Griffith Brydon-Williams)

My 12-year-old son wrote that passage. It is the first paragraph of a piece of fiction on which he is currently working. But he is writing it at home, not at school, where even the most progressive teachers might raise their eyebrows at a work titled "The Assassins" in which a man's "innards" are turned into a "bloody hole." As I quote this piece of his writing (with his permission) and marvel at his knack for pacing, detail, and metaphor, in the back of my mind I wonder what the content will make readers of this column think of him as a boy and of me as a parent.

I am reminded of the summer before my twin sons entered middle school when they went to a weeklong summer writing camp sponsored by the U.S. National Writing Project. On the last day of the camp, parents were invited in to hear the students read from their work. A number of girls stood up to read poems and stories about their best friends, horses, or a family trip to California. Then my son, Griffith, stood up, announced he was reading from his "novel" Mutant World, and proceeded to rip through a rather juicy passage of swooping starships, slimy aliens, and vast laser-induced explosions. Several of the parents glanced at me with curiosity, but the teachers smiled and congratulated Griffith on his action and description. He was followed by several other girls until it was my other son's turn. Rhys solemnly announced that he would read part of his work, "Survival at Stalingrad." As he began to read his scene of a tank battle on the frozen fields outside the Russian city, I noticed that the curious glances from the parents in the audience had turned to long, concerned looks. I wanted to turn to the many furrowed brows and protest, "We're not destructive people. We're pacifists. Quakers even! The boys are very kind and sweet and would never hurt anyone, except perhaps each other...."

Yet the parents' disapproving looks were not shared by the teachers, and Rhys's teacher was as effusive in her praise of his writing as she had been of all the other children. When the reading was over I asked the teacher how she felt about my sons and the rather violent content of their work. She smiled and said, "Their writing is imaginative and vivid. They're not writing about trying to hurt people. The action in their stories always serves a plot. They just want to take adventures in their minds, and I love it."

Touching Nerves

I have told this story a number of times—to friends, to relatives, but mostly to other teachers. It always gets a laugh, as I know it will. I think it touches two cultural nerves. The first is the way culture and gender socialization wash across our lives in inexorable waves. We feel powerless to stop them, and the best we can do is try to teach our children different ways to swim in (and often against) the culture and survive. There is the story of the boys whose parents scrupulously avoided buying them toy guns only to look out the kitchen window and see the boys pointing sticks at each other while making appropriately explosive sounds, which I found reproduced in my backyard one day when my sons were in grade school.

The second nerve my story hits, however, seems particularly on target with teachers. It is the way my sons' stories seem out of place in a writing classroom, even one operating as a summer camp. The well-regulated world of classroom literacy usually frowns on stories that are too violent and action oriented. Such stories, of course, are often the ones that boys have been socialized to find pleasure in reading and writing. Indeed, I have heard some teachers tell adolescent boys about what is not permissible in writing and reading, from no science fiction and no violence to less focus on action and more on character. When I asked one teacher why she had prohibited science fiction and fantasy writing in her class, she replied that "It just becomes all action and violence, and they get enough of that outside of class. I'd rather they thought about how people get along in the world." When I asked one of her students, who liked reading and writing science fiction, what he thought of the work he wrote for his teacher, he said, "It's OK, I guess. But it's sort of boring, you know."

When I think about the interaction between this middle school student and his teacher, I find my sympathies divided. On one hand, I support the teacher's goal: to get her students to write in new genres and forms as well as to consider that conflict need not always be resolved by laser blasts and space torpedoes, let alone handguns and cruise missiles. And yet, I also see in her student, and others like him, a creative, passionate writer who is being told, explicitly and implicitly, that the reading and writing he is drawn to not only has no value but is also potentially dangerous. It makes me wonder if at some point he will become one of those adolescents who remembers loving reading and writing as a child and losing that passion during middle and high school.

Cultural Influences

Everyone was grouped around the sonar screen when the alarm went off. "What the heck is goin' wrong now?" Captain Steve McClure spat.

"The torpedo, sir! It's headed right for us!" the radar technician shouted over the wailing alarm.

"Can't it just go around us?" McClure asked.

"They can't do that, sir. They're built to go through obstacles," Lt. Orisbyre said in a cold tone.

"Shoot!" McClure shouted as he stamped his foot on the floor for the last time in his life. The technician counted the seconds to impact, "Five...four...three...,

"Everybody find a safe place to hide!" McClure screamed in vain.

KABOOM!!

The torpedo smashed into the Bull Run, instantly incinerating McClure and his remaining crew. (From "Dangerous When Submerged" by Rhys Brydon-Williams)

When I think of that classroom where my sons read their stories, it leaves me pondering why their writing made me share unsettled glances with the other parents and why I felt compelled to ask the teacher how she felt about the violent content of their writing. I am consistently intrigued by the ways that culture, this time in the form of gender identity and socialization, influences how children engage in literacy practices and how their teachers' responded to them. A number of recent books and studies have explored how boys often want to read and write. Works such as Smith and Wilhelm's (2002) "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys": Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, Maynard's (2002) Boys and Literacy: Exploring the Issues, Booth's (2002) Even Hockey Players Read, and Newkirk's (2002) Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture are asking thoughtful questions about how boys, responding to the dominant culture, engage in literacy practices in and out of the classroom. In different ways, all of these authors maintained that boys who seem uninterested in literacy in the classroom may be enthusiastic readers and writers in different contexts. Yet the literacy practices that appeal to some boys are not always valued in the context of institutionalized school literacy and may be overlooked, to the frustration of both student and teacher.

It is important to note that the previously mentioned texts are not part of the recent trend of "backlash" books, such as Sommers's (2000) The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, that simplistically bemoan the plight of the supposedly emasculated contemporary male and place the blame on feminist theory and politics. Indeed, the scholars I have cited emphasize that they are not interested in denouncing feminism or pitting boys against girls to see who gets a better deal in school in some essentialist tug-of-war. As Newkirk (2002) argued, it must be "possible to focus on boys' difficulties in school without rejecting claims that girls may experience different difficulties or inequities" (p. 20).

The construction and display of gender identity is of huge importance to young men and women, as all of us who remember our own adolescence can attest. It is a time when boys and girls alike are torn between forming an individual sense of identity and establishing group identities; gender is a central part of these explorations and negotiations. It should be no surprise that the literacy practices of adolescents are often connected to issues of gender. Yet the kinds of literacy practices to which boys are often drawn—connected to action, violence, and popular culture—are usually prohibited in the classroom where the emphasis is often on "high-culture" literature driven by character and nuance. Such literature, and writing about such literature, as Newkirk (2002) noted, is often considered not only intellectually superior to other forms of literacy but also morally superior.

Yet it is texts that privilege mystery, suspense, plot, and action that boys often find most compelling. The authors I cited earlier report that the violence and emphasis on action in boys' writing, and in the books and popular culture they choose, often make teachers and others involved in schools nervous. Schools have traditionally assumed a civilizing mission as well as an academic one, and socializing boys away from violence, unruly behavior, and the popular culture that celebrated such actions is part of that mission. Violent reading and writing brings with it the fear that such violence might erupt beyond the page into the classroom. Newkirk (2002) maintained that "When violence is banned in boys' writing, the argument, though rarely spelled out, is that the representation of violence (even when fictional) causes more violence" (p. 15). Such concerns have only intensified in the wake of well-publicized school shootings, even as overall instances of violence in schools have declined. The underlying fear is that boys cannot distinguish between the violence in a story and the violence in real life, or that they are unable to process imaginative work but instead absorb it and are molded by it without thinking. Newkirk also noted that educators rarely worry that the violence in Hamlet, Beowulf, or The Great Gatsby will lead to real-life violence.

However, the conversations these researchers have had with boys about their reading and writing do indicate that, although the boys are drawn to books, writing, and popular culture that emphasize action and sometimes violence, they can distinguish between the page and reality and do not read and write about violence for its own sake. Newkirk (2002) maintained that "Suspense, not random violence, is the engine for the fictions boys truly like" (p. 130). I hear this from middle school boys who not only like the action in The Matrix films but also argue about the films' meaning and whether the story line makes sense. Story and suspense come up time and again in conversations with boys about their literacy practices. This was true even in my son's stories. Griffith's primary pleasure in Mutant World was not the explosions but the suspense of whether the good guys, outnumbered but savvy, could outwit and defeat the evil forces arrayed against them—which, in the end, they did. There are often similar concerns about some forms of comedy that many boys enjoy. Comedy that is either physical and violent, such as slapstick, or that undermines authority (often through parody) is sometimes regarded as dangerous to the "institution" because of its transgressive nature.

Action Has Appeal

The darkness sent only a roar of thunder and an icy cold shower of rain as an answer. A flash of lightning illuminated the forest behind Ferron's home for a split-second. Looking back at his house, Ferron saw a large black shape approaching the back door. Ferron quickly decided to go to the treehouse that someone had made in the forest and sped off. Some hours later Ferron came upon the clearing in the middle of which the tree with the treehouse was. He was climbing up the ladder when he felt something soft on the side of the tree. A blast of lightning illuminated the clearing revealing, to his horror, that he was touching a corpse and that a great black shape was approaching the house in the darkness. Ferron scrambled up the ladder having no time to really take a good look at the corpse. (From "The Crazed" by Griffith Brydon-Williams)

I read this piece of Griffith's work and see the suspense and the plot, but it is sometimes hard for me to reconcile such violent passages in my son's writing with the kind and compassionate boy I know him to be. In general my son doesn't get into fights, except perhaps with his brother (and even then they usually negotiate), and doesn't vandalize property or threaten to harm his classmates. Griffith goes out of his way to look after small animals, and Rhys, who is against the war in Iraq, has e-mailed the U.S. president to say so. My sons, with their generally good-natured and nonviolent dispositions, are not terribly different from other adolescent boys I've met. More than anything, they just want to be liked and accepted. So why does the suspense and danger of a story like "The Crazed" appeal to Griffith?

Newkirk (2002) argued that part of the appeal of action-oriented writing is that—in the same way young boys pretend to be superheroes on the playground and adolescents role-play board and video games—it offers a way to transcend the often powerless world of children into a fictional world where they can "claim power and privileges they could never claim in 'real life'" (p. 88). In these stories, whether as readers or writers, boys can be bigger, braver, and—most important—in more control than in a world where adults are still very much in charge. Again, I can see this in my sons' stories, where the protagonists, often facing seemingly insurmountable challenges, are able to triumph in the end. If these narratives seem all too familiar to adults, it is because they are embedded in the folk tales and myths that are seized upon and reproduced in the popular culture of today.

Another appeal of action-oriented literacy practices for boys is the way they can use them to make social connections. Friendships that develop among boys through stories and problem solving are as tight as those that develop through overt verbal expressions of friendship (Newkirk, 2002; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002). Behind the action and violence in the stories many boys like are also themes of loyalty, courage, and the ability to face and transcend danger with a cool head and the help of close friends. Such attributes may strike us as traditionally masculine, simplistic, or even downright corny, but they are not by their nature bad attributes. We can see them, for example, played out time and again in movie series such as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix that have been so popular with adolescent boys in recent years.

Literacy in adolescence seems to serve a similar social function for boys and girls (Finders, 1997), though such uses may manifest themselves in quite different ways. Maynard (2002) maintained that both boys and girls are likely to use literacy in social relationships but that their needs and practices may look quite different at times.

Teachers' attitudes toward boys' literacy practices vary, of course, from direct prohibitions on certain genres or characteristics of writing to the encouragement my sons received at writing camp. The teachers who encourage writing without regard to subject matter are the ones who are able to see that boys are using literacy practices when they seek out websites about video games or argue over the plot of a movie or television program. The writers of the recent books about boys and literacy I mentioned previously discuss these issues and many more. They also offer suggestions about how to draw on boys' varied literacy practices in effective ways (and about how not to neglect girls and their reading and writing). Some of these suggestions focus on bringing students' out-of-school literacy practices into the classroom (including popular culture) and making students aware of how integral, important, and pleasurable literacy already is in their lives (Blair & Sanford, 2003). At the same time, teachers are urged not to fear suspense and comedy in boys' writing but to acknowledge and engage students in thoughtful considerations of the complexity of violence in print and popular culture (Newkirk, 2002).

Larger Questions

Of course there are no easy answers—for me, for other teachers, and certainly not for adolescents—when it comes to issues of gender, identity, and literacy. I believe that nonviolent resolution to conflict is a value and a set of skills we need to impart to our children and students. I find the violence in some of my sons' stories unsettling, even as I see it serving suspense and plot. I also value character and thematic nuance in reading and writing. Yet knowing this creates more questions for me than answers. Should I dismiss or prohibit the writing and reading that many boys are drawn to and, if so, why? Do I regard adolescent boys as malleable dupes, unable to filter or distinguish representations of violence from the real thing? Do I fear they will turn to violence at the drop of a hat? To be honest, doesn't this kind of writing appeal to me too? Although I love subtle, character-driven novels and movies, I also love action and suspense. It was the suspense of Joseph Conrad that ignited my interest in literature in high school, not the nuance of Jane Austen. And don't get me started on how cool I find the The Lord of the Rings movies.

Such questions about boys and literacy also raise larger questions for me about the nature of our goals when we teach reading and writing. What do we want young people to learn about literacy? Is character analysis necessarily the pinnacle of literacy practice? If we say we are trying to teach creative and critical thinking through literacy, what activities do we imagine will achieve this, and what will such literacy look like? Are our students engaging in literacy practices outside of the classroom that we should pay more attention to and work with rather than against? Do we need to reconsider what creative literacy practices and thoughtful and analytical literacy look like? What choices, options, and possibilities can we offer? Most important, how can we help boys and girls learn about the many different ways that reading and writing can provide them with power, choice, and flexibility as they become adults?

References

Blair, H., & Sanford, K. (2003). Boys demonstrate literacy in ways the current curriculum doesn't assess. On Line Opinion. Retrieved September 8, 2003, from http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/2003/Feb03/Blair&Sanford.htm
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Booth, D. (2002). Even hockey players read. Markham, ON, Canada: Pembroke Publishers.
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Finders, M.J. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
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Maynard, T. (2002). Boys and literacy: Exploring the issues. London: Routledge.
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Newkirk, T. (2002). Misreading masculinity: Boys, literacy, and popular culture. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Smith, M.W., & Wilhelm, J.D. (2002). "Reading don't fix no Chevys": Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Sommers, C.H. (2000). The war against boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men. New York: Simon & Schuster.
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The department editor welcomes reader comments on the column. E-mail bronwyn.williams@Louisville.edu. Mail Bronwyn T. Williams, University of Louisville, Department of English, Humanities Building, Louisville, KY 40292, USA.

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Citation: Williams, B.T. (2004, March). Boys may be boys, but do they have to write that way? [Literacy & Identity department]. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 47(6). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/jaal/3-04_column/index.html