RUNNING HEAD: ENGAGING DISENGAGED READERS
“Basking in the mirror of yesterday’s glory…”: Engaging Disengaged Readers
Raquel Pointer
Vanderbilt University
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Abstract
This capstone paper concerns disengaged urban readers in the middle school context. In
this paper, I sought to explore two primary questions: 1) How have disengaged readers been
portrayed in the research historically? 2) How have recent studies attempted to disrupt the prior
notions about disengaged readers? Disengaged readers were often viewed from a deficit
perspective—the onus of being a disengaged reader was placed on the student, and the student
was perceived as lazy and as someone who did not read outside of class. However, recent
literature disrupts this notion and advocates for shifting the burden from students to texts. This
involves shifting from a deficit to an additive perspective. The literature, in shifting the
responsibility for disengagement from reading, places that responsibility in three primary areas:
mismatch between students’ home and school culture, disengagement as a point of resistance,
and disengagement as a result of the shifting context of middle school. Attributing
disengagement to a mismatch between students’ home and school culture maintains that the
literacy skills that we require students to utilize within the classroom, including the texts we ask
them to read and the ways in which we ask them to read, are not congruent with the literacy
skills in which students engage outside of school. Attributing disengagement to being a point of
resistance against mainstream culture purports that urban adolescent students seek to engage in
other forms of literacy, such as popular culture, and disengage from academic literacy, such as
reading canonical texts, because they do not see their experiences reflected in the latter and feel
connected to the former. Attributing disengagement to the shifting context of middle school
acknowledges that the middle school experience necessitates that students read and interact in
ways not previously required of them. Acknowledging that the issue of disengagement may not
be a problem with the learner but with the texts, teachers must shift the focus to examining the
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texts used in the middle school classroom in order to make what students do with respect to
literacy in school and outside of school congruent. The paper ends with possibilities for engaging
students in reading in the urban English classroom.
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“Basking in the mirror of yesterday’s glory…”: Engaging Disengaged Readers
I came into the Learning, Diversity, and Urban Studies program with lingering questions
and interest existing from my undergraduate program concerning ways to incorporate technology
into the literacy classroom. Through reading the coursework, discussing in class, and writing
papers for classwork, my interest shifted from being in technology in the literacy classroom to
concern about means by which teachers may connect students’ outside of school practices with
the practices that occur within the confines of school. Further research informed me that what
students do outside of school does, in fact, often have academic merit and does involve skills
transferable to the literacy classroom. My interest in this idea evolved into one about a much
larger idea—that of engaging disengaged readers within urban contexts, especially within middle
school classrooms, which is the age level at which I found myself most comfortable and in which
I found myself most interested. My work in the Learning, Diversity, and Urban Studies Seminar
for the fall semester and my interest in bridging in-school and out-of-school literacy lead me to
use that as the focus for my final paper, and as I explore the potential and possibilities for the
literacy classroom, I will incorporate some of the suggestions about how to engage students in
the literacy classroom from that seminar paper into this capstone paper.
In this paper, I hope to explore and navigate through the literature pertaining to two
central questions: 1) What picture has been painted of disengaged readers in the literature? In
other words, to what has research attributed urban student disengagement from literacy in middle
school, and why might it happen at this level in particular? 2) How has recent literature begun to
talk about disengaged, urban, middle school-aged readers differently, and what are the
implications of this shift for the urban literacy classroom? Through the exploration of these
questions, by the end of this paper I hope to argue and substantiate with recent literature
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concerning the literacy practices of urban adolescents that there must be a shift in the onus
concerning disengaged readers from the reader to the texts that teachers choose within the
classroom.
The next section of this paper will provide a rationale as to why literacy is an area on
which emphasis should be placed for urban students and some initial definitions to frame the
paper. The section following will provide background information concerning disengaged
readers, grounding the image of disengaged, urban, adolescent readers in the literature,
answering and nuancing the question of to whom or to what the disengagement of this
population has been attributed historically. Having established that disengaged readers have
historically been placed at fault for their own academic literacy shortcomings, I will delve into
the relatively recent literature concerning adolescent, urban student literacy that seeks to explain
students’ disengagement in alternative ways that attribute this phenomenon to the texts being
chosen and the social/ historical context of academic literacy. This section will also seek to
nuance the idea of why middle school might be the age at which adolescents’ motivation to
engage in academic literacy declines. Finally, I will present the literature that details some
specific implications and possibilities for classroom teachers seeking to engage urban,
adolescent, disengaged readers. Included in this section will be a brief piece about the ways in
which the definition of the word “text” continues to change and the ways in which that impacts
the issue at hand of engaging disengaged readers.
Rationale
As a result of my program focus and my own individual interest, this paper will focus on
the literature and implications for the urban learning environment. And, while “literacy” as a
construct will be defined and re-defined throughout this paper, one word that is worth
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mentioning and defining is the word “urban.” The word is a particularly loaded one and one that
will be used throughout this paper; while “urban” does not mean “bad,” the connotation is often
such (Milner, 2012) when in all actuality, the problems that plague urban environments are just
different than those in suburban environments, for example. “Urban,” as I have come to know it
from my readings and interactions, while particularly difficult to define, will refer to locations
that are densely populated and often plagued by high level of poverty. In addition, urban
locations are marked by racial and ethnic diversity. Milner (2012) supports this idea in the piece
“But What is Urban Education?” In this piece, Milner (2012) notes that urban intensive areas are
those characterized population density, the sheer number of people who live within the city. As a
result of this density, Milner (2012) states, it is difficult to adequately provide resources to the
entirety of the population in areas such as housing, schooling, and public transportation. In short,
urban intensive areas, along with places that have less dense populations, urban emergent and
urban characteristic areas, are characterized by the challenges associated with a shortage of
resources for a large population. Students who live within these areas will be called urban
students throughout this paper, and public schools located within these cities will be called urban
schools throughout this paper.
With all the issues that plague urban schools, including, according to Payne (2008), a
bureaucratic system that is set up to fail both students and employees in the most dysfunctional
public school systems, the initial question at hand is that of why literacy would be the area to
address, the most effective means of improving the urban school environment. Why, out of all
the larger issues to address, would an area as small as the literacy classroom be the best place to
begin? While urban students’ education in literacy may not be the most important area to address
when considering the improvement of urban education, it is one of the most important areas. In
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fact, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2005) state that there is “no problem more serious that the
failure of urban students of color to acquire the literacy skills needed for academic advancement,
professional employment, and active citizenship” (p. 285). Callins (2006) echoes these
sentiments and fleshes out more the imperative nature of being a literate member of society when
she makes the point that participating in literacy communities as an adult is essential to
becoming a productive member of society. This issue, Callins (2006) emphasizes, is imperative
because it actually costs and takes a toll on society for individuals to be illiterate, as is reflected
in the cost to upkeep prison systems, for example. On an even deeper level, literacy is an
important area in which to intervene because one’s literacy practices play an important role in
helping to shape and to develop individual identities, a point Finders and Tatum (2005)
emphasize in their book review of Mahiri’s (2004) What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in
the Lives of Urban Youth. The literature repeatedly emphasizes the importance of developing and
cultivating literate individuals, as a benefit to society and the individual identity.
Further, literacy is an interesting access point by which to address the problems of urban
schools when you consider a point Finders and Tatum (2005) address when they state the
following: “At here is the ultimate issue of schooling…if as Noguera suggests, ‘young people
…are searching for allies’ (p. 45), don’t we have the responsibility to be those allies for youths to
make schools more productive sites of literacy learning?” This point struck me as especially
interesting as I read in the literature and considered the point that literacy classrooms appear to
be less and less relevant to urban students who come through English courses. The first step to
making classrooms more productive sites of learning is to address the fact that many students see
the classroom as irrelevant and find little value in the process of being an academically literate
individual. Considine, Horton, and Moorman (2009) begin their discussion of addressing literacy
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in a class full of students engaged in current technology outside of the classroom by stating,
rather plainly, that students in general see the literacy classroom as irrelevant and boring.
Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2005) take that point a step further in addressing urban students’
view of the literacy classroom by pointing out that, for middle class White students, the
exchange of being bored in school is worth it because they know they have a chance of being
successful. For lower class and urban students, becoming academically literate is not worth being
bored in school, as the chances of continuing to live in poverty and violence are still very high
(Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2005). In addition to finding the classroom irrelevant, many urban
students find classroom texts to be inaccessible. Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004) discuss
this in the book chapter “What They Do Learn in School: Hip Hop As A Bridge to Canonical
Poetry.” In explaining their choice to heavily incorporate popular culture as a site of discussion
and learning in their classroom, Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004) make the point that
students often choose not to participate in school literacy because they feel they cannot access
the texts—the subject matter and language in many academic literacy texts feel foreign, to say
the least. Indeed, a gap exists between the literacy practices in which students engage in their
free time and the literacy practices in which we as literacy teachers ask them to engage once they
are within the school walls (Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2005).
Background
Two questions I originally posed when beginning the research for this capstone project
were, “How have disengaged readers in urban middle schools been portrayed and talked about in
the literature? To whom or what has the phenomenon of students being disengaged from
literature been attributed?” What follows are some of the portrayals of disengaged readers in
middle school in particular when the literature allows. Gottfried (1985) is one of the more
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important, founding researchers in the field of motivation, which is directly related to
engagement; he was interested in the fact that all middle school students, regardless of race or
socioeconomic status, seem to be less interested in traditional literacy practices as they get older
and approach middle school age. Gottfried (1985) found that intrinsic motivation for reading
declines between grades four and seven; conversely, extrinsic motivation increases. Implications
for this finding are that students at this age may be less motivated to pick up a book and read
“just because,” but they may be more motivated to read if there is a prize or grade involved. As
student motivation for a given topic decreases, engagement in that topic also has the potential to
decrease, and it is the job of teachers to know this and plan teaching accordingly.
In more recent literature, Ivey and Broaddus (2001) conducted a study of what middle
school students in particular want to read in the piece “‘Just Plain Reading’: A Survey of What
Makes Students Want to Read in Middle School Classrooms.” Ivey and Broaddus (2001), before
delving into the details of their study, acknowledge that, historically, middle school students in
particular have been known for their negative attitudes and resistance towards reading. Kirkland
(2011) addresses the topic of adolescent literacy practices concerning Black males in particular.
Kirkland (2011) acknowledges that, historically, Black males who were disengaged from reading
or who struggled with academic literacy skills were viewed in a negative light. Teachers and
administrators addressed the situation by asking what was wrong with the population of Black
males that they would have such a hard time engaging in texts traditionally associated with
academic literacy. Kirkland (2011) calls this type of discourse concerning Black males when it
comes to literacy in particular “crisis vocabulary” (p. 201) and expresses that this “crisis
vocabulary” implies that just because students are “disengaged” (p. 201) means that they are not
reading, which could be incorrect. Additionally, the disengaged adolescent reader has been
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portrayed as a low achiever, an individual who is unmotivated to participate in classroom literacy
practices, and someone who lacks cognitive competency (Guthrie & Davis, 2003). Guthrie and
Davis (2003) make explicit how the stigma of struggling readers came to include those who were
simply disengaged by presenting the traditional definition of a struggling readers: those who are
disengaged from reading activities that are related to school. Moreover, Tatum (2006) adds on to
the previous studies by acknowledging that the barriers to engaging in reading have traditionally
been seen as internal; however, Tatum (2006) also points out that locating barriers to engaging
with academic texts internally fails to take into account the roles of text and learner in the
engagement process.
The literature mentioned in this previous section points to one paramount image
concerning traditional views of disengaged readers: the disengaged reader is one who is
struggling with reading, who does not enjoy reading, and the onus is placed on the student (often
internally, as Tatum (2006) points out). If students were disengaged, the issue became one with
the student and not with the texts teachers chose. These previous portraits of disengaged readers
did not take into account student interest, other ways of being literate outside of reading
academic texts, nor did they take into account the many ways in which the middle school
environment differs from the elementary environment from which students just beginning middle
school came. I would suggest, as would the researchers in the proceeding sections of this paper,
that teachers and administrators reconsider this traditional view of a disengaged reader. Perhaps,
as Tatum (2006) proposes, the issue is not with the student but with the texts we as teachers
choose to engage in teaching in the classroom. I suggest and agree with the literature that the first
step in addressing this issue is that there should be a shift in the onus of engaging disengaged
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readers. In the next section, I will detail and outline some of the alternate, more recent
explanations for student disengagement that have been presented in the literature.
Challenging Traditional Notions About Disengaged Readers
As researchers begin to think about shifting the burden from students to the text and other
areas as a means of addressing the issue of disengaged, middle school, urban readers, many
different explanations and frameworks emerge. I deduced three primary, connected explanations
from the literature addressing the issue of engaging readers who are disengaged in the classroom:
a mismatch between students’ home and school culture, the idea that disengagement from
literature among urban students is a point of resistance as a result of this cultural mismatch, and
the idea that motivational decline (resulting in disengagement from reading) can be attributed to
the shifting context of middle school.
Mismatch Between Students’ Home and School Culture
One of the primary reasons that researchers champion in the literature as to why students
are disengaged from academic literature concerns the difference between school literacy and
students’ literacy practices outside of school. One study in particular that typifies explores this
point well is Ivey and Broaddus’s (2001) “‘Just Plain Reading’: A Survey of What Makes
Students Want to Read in Middle School Classrooms.” In this article, Ivey and Broaddus state
that the tension between adolescents and reading is not as a result of anything internal, but rather,
it is due to a mismatch between what students need and the instruction they receive. According
to Broaddus and Ivey (2001), reading demands do not take into account the development and
personal differences between students, instead prescribing the same texts to students year after
year. As a result, there is a mismatch between what students want to learn and the content
requirements of the school—students may be unable to reconcile in-school and out-of-school
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reading and writing, which results in a lack of motivation to participate in literacy activities
within school (Ivey & Broaddus, 2001). In this study, the authors found that students valued free
reading time and when teachers read aloud within the literacy classroom; in addition, students
reported that they were motivated by “good” materials and choice. In fact, the students’ reported
worst experiences were with assigned reading texts, and many students expressed that the
classroom is not a place with “good” reading materials. Surprisingly for the authors of this piece,
the students expressed considerable interest in informational texts and not just fiction texts (Ivey
and Broaddus, 2001). An incongruence exists between what these middle school students
expressed as needs—free reading time, teachers reading aloud, choice—and what often goes on
inside the class—assigning reading to be done outside of class, silent reading, and assigned
reading texts.
While the Ivey and Broaddus (2001) study held implications for middle school students
in general, my concern is with urban students of middle school age, and Morrell and DuncanAndrade (2004) address this demographic when they discuss the topic of incorporating hip-hop
into the classroom when teaching poetry. Morrell and Duncan Andrade (2004) state that many
urban students find the school curriculum to be inaccessible; the authors advocate hip-hop as the
voice of the generation. Accordingly, the messages in the poetry of old get lost in translation as
students show little to no interest in traditional academic texts and let the lyrics of hip-hop speak
for their experience. Morrell and Duncan Andrade (2004) demonstrate that students simply view
academic texts as inaccessible by giving readers a glimpse into their classroom and
demonstrating that, by using hip-hop as an access point to show students that they are capable
translators of poetry, students are able to make meaningful connections not only to hip hop but
canonical poetry texts. Additionally, Kirkland (2008) addresses the issue of Black students being
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disengaged from reading, acknowledging the disconnect between the canonical texts that the
literacy classroom traditionally values and the experiences of Black students. In another article,
Kirkland (2011) states that the texts that we teach fail to engage youth, especially Black males,
and in the article at hand, Kirkland (2008) advocates for New English Education, a “construct
that privileges the lives and identities of the present without forsaking the past” (p. 74). Kirkland
(2008) begins to attempt to make strides to bridge the gap that exists between the urban student
experience and the literacy classroom so as to engage students in reading in the classroom.
Disengagement as a Point of Resistance
Another point that arose in the literature in reference as to why urban, middle school students
may be disengaged from literature is that students use disengagement from canonical literature as
a point of resistance from the mainstream culture that is forced upon them every day. For
example, Kirkland (2011) proposes that Black males in particular demonstrate an aversion to
reading academically literary texts as a site of resistance because they do not see themselves in
those academic texts. However, Kirkland (2008) demonstrates, Black males are willing to
engage in the recitation of hip-hop as poetry because the music tells the story of their lives; they
see themselves in it. Similarly, Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2002) in the article “Promoting
Academic Literacy with Urban Youth Through Engaging Hip-Hop Culture” identify rap as a
voice of resistance and liberation, citing this as the reason that students will engage in hip-hop
culture if it is incorporated into the classroom and yet not necessarily engage in canonical texts.
Morrell (2002), in the article “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy
Development Among Urban Youth” expands on this point by identifying hip-hop as a site of
struggle between dominant and subordinate cultures and advocates for classroom engagement
with popular culture as a way to deconstruct the dominant (often negative) images urban students
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encounter about themselves in canonical texts and in many forms of modern media. In the
literature about disengagement resistance, there is also a push towards bridging this gap—in this
context, by incorporating popular culture, which the authors see as an acceptable form of literacy
in which students are engaging, into the classroom.
Disengagement as a Result of the Shifting Context of Middle School
Guthrie and Davis (2003) focus on why middle school students in general, regardless of
whether the context is suburban, urban, or rural, have a difficult time engaging in in-school
literacy practices, and they hypothesize that disengagement is a result of the shifting context of
middle school. Indeed, middle school requires students to think and perform differently and in a
different environment than elementary school. Guthrie and Davis (2003) conducted their own
study measuring students’ responses to various classroom-related literacy acts at different grade
levels, and they found that, as students got older, their responses became more and more negative
as it related to reading, beginning around the middle school age. Guthrie and Davis (2003)
propose six ways in which middle school literacy shifts from elementary school, causing this
literary disengagement: the detachment of reading instruction from content, formidable
textbooks/ book structures, formal/ non-personal response expectations, diminished student
choice, isolation of students from teachers, and the estrangement of reading from real-world
interactions. These six shifts, in a way, summarize the points made about disengagement being a
point of resistance and the mismatch between students’ home and school cultures. These reasons
proposed by Guthrie and Davis (2003) essentially emphasize that when all students transition to
middle school they are faced with different types of books and book structures and less personal
students environments. While the Guthrie and Davis (2003) study does not specifically focus on
urban students, these six reasons are probably exacerbated and exaggerated in urban middle
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school environments, in many of which schools are understaffed and in which there is a shortage
of new, relevant, and engaging literature as a result of having less funding for such expenses.
Implications and Possibilities
The paper up until this point was intended to demonstrate the ways in which literature has
discussed middle school-aged, disengaged, urban learners and to present some of the literature
that provides a counter narrative for adolescent, urban disengagement from canonical texts. The
literature in the previous section suggests a paradigm shift, from blaming the reader and
possessing a deficit perspective concerning students’ disengagement from reading to questioning
whether the texts and practices employed in the classroom are being formatted to fit and relate to
the lives and experiences of our students. This section is intended to demonstrate what some of
the possibilities are for the urban, English classroom. While the examples are not always middleschool specific, they are adaptable, and the lessons learned from the vignettes in the literature are
generalizable to classrooms with students of all ages. First, however, it is important to address a
notion that has not yet been directly addressed, and that is the task of defining what a “text” is. If
literacy is the understanding, analysis, and application of concepts presented in a given text, then
what constitutes a text is of great significance. I would suggest, and the literature supports the
idea, that the notion of a text being written words on pages of books is not only limited but does
a disservice to the many ways in which school-aged adolescents in particular are literate outside
of the classroom. It is important to address briefly and explicitly the challenges surrounded by
defining literacy.
The image that comes to mind when most people think of literacy is probably that of
books in the physical form, and for a long time this image was an accurate portrayal of the way
in which one could be literate. The literacy concerned with traditional knowledge (such as the
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topics in the canon) in traditional form (such as in a book) is known as academic literacy.
Morrell (2002) defines academic literacy in the following way: “forms of engaging with,
producing, and talking about texts that have currency in primary, secondary, and postsecondary
education” (p. 72). What Morrell and other researchers encourage, however, is shifting to
teaching students with a critical literacy framework, as opposed to a traditional academic literacy
framework. Morrell (2002) talks about critical literacy pedagogy concerning popular culture in
particular in the following way: “where students and teachers learn from and with one another
while engaging in authentic dialogue that is centered on urban youth as participants in and
creators of popular culture” (p. 73). As students become more and more engaged in popular
culture and technology, one of the ways to bridge the incredible gap between students’ home
literacies and school literacies is to incorporate popular culture, technology, and texts of student
interest into the classroom in meaningful ways. There is, however, a considerable amount of
opposition to the notion that students’ engagement in technology, popular culture, and popular
literacy texts can be considered academic. Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2002) propose and
demonstrate in this article and others that the skills students use to engage in and understand
popular culture are the same ones needed to understand the literary canon. Since students are
using the same skills, Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2002) emphasize that the technologies and
culture with which students engage in their free time can, indeed, be considered texts when
leveraged appropriately. Students read, discuss, and analyze movies, music, and internet texts in
similar ways as they would interact with traditional texts. Having established that engaging in
popular culture and technology can be academically and mentally rigorous, the real question is
how to incorporate them into the classroom in ways that will be meaningful and encourage
students to become critical consumers of the information they receive every day. The meaningful
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incorporation of popular culture, technology, and student choice in text help to bridge the gap
between students’ home and school literacy activities, which increases student motivation and
increases student engagement in the literacy activities occurring in the classroom because they
are compatible with those in which they engage outside of the classroom. The incorporation of
non-traditional texts can be used as entry points for canonical texts as Morrell and DuncanAndrade (2004) demonstrate, or they can be used on their own to teach students many of the
skills that are learned when studying a traditional text as Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2005)
demonstrates. Expanding definitions of text while teaching students to navigate and value
traditional texts also fall within the frameworks of urban education practices that researchers
advocate. For example, this practice embraces Ladson-Billings’ (1992) notion of culturally
responsive teaching because it legitimates students’ culture by making it a frame of reference for
texts. Further, the practice of teaching students to value both traditional texts and their own
forms of literacy could fall under teaching students to understand Delpit’s (1995) notion of codes
of power. The following section will provide specific example of ways in which teachers in the
literature have leveraged students’ interest and incorporated them in the classroom in order to
engage students in literacy in school.
Possibilities
One of the complaints students mention in the Guthrie and Davis (2003) study is that
texts incorporated in the middle school classroom are boring and uninteresting. Hughes-Hassell
and Rodge (2007) conducted a study about the leisure reading habits of adolescents and found
that students do, in fact, enjoy reading, and they indicated a strong preference for reading
magazines and about people like themselves. For teachers who wish to engage readers in written
texts in particular, one route to take is to incorporate literature with characters who are like the
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readers in the classroom. For a diverse, urban classroom, this may mean incorporating
multicultural literature. There is an example of this practice in Al Hazza’s (2010) “Motivating
Disengaged Readers Through Multicultural Children’s Literature.” In this article, Al Hazza
(2010) emphasizes that stories reflective of students’ cultures transmit positive values, and
reading about your ethnic group/ culture has positive effects on your identity development. Al
Hazza (2010) implemented Middle Eastern children’s literature into her literacy curriculum for
her class of students primarily from the Middle East. She decorated her classroom to mirror a
Middle Eastern environment with tents and incense for example and allowed students to read
Middle Eastern fairy tales and to compare them to American fairy tales, allowing students to see
themselves in literature (Al Hazza, 2010). In support of other research literature, Al Hazza
(2010) found that the process of incorporating multicultural literature into her classroom
contributed to positive values, attitudes, and lifestyle choices among her students.
Another way to help engage disengaged readers is by incorporating popular culture and
explicitly demonstrating the ways in which skills interpreting messages in popular culture can be
used for traditional literacy in the classroom. Skerrett and Bomer (2011) discuss their experience
leveraging students’ knowledge of popular culture in the article “Borderzones in Adolescents’
Literacy Practices: Connecting Out-of-School Literacies to the Reading Curriculum.”
Recognizing that most of their students carry out literacy-rich lives and that their students use
social media as literacy to express ethnic identity and solidarity, the authors planned a unit to
bring what students are interested in outside of the classroom into the classroom. Skerrett and
Bomer set a goal to help students learn how to use their out-of-school interests to determine what
types of books they like and had in-depth conversations with students about their interests to get
students engaged in books that would be relevant and of interest to their lives. By making
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students’ unofficial literacy practices the content for texts, students experienced belonging and
legitimization and felt that their interests in texts were “worthy objects of academic attention” (p.
1273). Further, Skerrett and Bomer explicitly talked to students about how the cognitive
processes involved with reading and participating in popular culture are similar. Part of the
incorporation of popular culture involved just creating a more student-centered environment, and
Skerrett and Bomer found that “in order to learn, the learner has to feel that the learning is for
them” (2010, p. 1275). Skerrett and Bomer’s (2010) work demonstrates that it is possible to
engage students in both print text and popular culture if the students’ interests are leveraged
correctly and if the focal point for engagement is the text.
Recognizing that their English Language Learner students were having a difficult time
navigating print text but were avidly reading graphic novels, Frey and Fisher (2004) designed a
unit to incorporate graphic novels, which are considered an aspect of popular culture, to scaffold
writing instruction. The initial activity was to pick a graphic novel that they felt was
representative of students’ experience. The teachers then walked the students through a thinkaloud of one of the stories in the graphic novel but left the last two frames blank, allowing
students to predict what would come next. Students then drew an ending to the story in blank
frames of their own. From this activity, the teacher scaffolded the students into writing with
words the stories they had created through pictures and expanding those stories to include
descriptive information and dialogue. Frey and Fisher (2004) found that comics can engage
students in authentic writing and that popular culture and new media can be used to invite
students into classroom literacy.
Final Thoughts
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The purpose of this paper was to review the literature surrounding questions of urban,
disengaged readers in middle school—how have they been characterized? What have been some
of the purported causes of readers being disengaged in the past? How have recent researchers
sought to disrupt the stereotypes about this population? What I have seen in the literature is that
disengaged readers have often been viewed as students who do not read outside of school, who
are not engaged in literacy practices, and who are lazy concerning school. However, the problem
as I see it is that such descriptions place the burden of being disengaged on the reader and not on
other influencing factors. Recent literature has been a proponent of shifting the burden of student
disengagement from the student to the text. As students engage in a rapidly-changing society by
interacting with popular culture, technology, and written texts that cater to their individual
interests, the ways in which we as teachers define what a text is and what it means to read a text
must change as well to match students’ developing and changing literacy skills. One of the
primary points of this paper is that there is a disconnect between the literacy in which students
engage and the literacy in which we call upon them to engage in the classroom, which is one of
the primary reasons that students disengage from the academic literacy practices. As Kirkland
(2008) so eloquently states, “Once so beautiful, English classrooms have been left to bask in the
mirror of yesterday’s glory” (p. 70). This statement profoundly characterizes the way in which
we have held on to the perceived glory of canonical texts, leaving urban, middle school students
in particular left behind and disengaged by feeding them texts that are irrelevant with teaching
styles that often do not even attempt to make connections to students’ lives. Literacy competency
being important is a pretty well established fact. So, the next step is to seek ways to promote the
importance of teachers actively including elements of students’ outside-of-school literacy
practices into the classroom so as to hook disengaged readers and help them to see the merits in
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ENGAGING DISENGAGED READERS
the literacies in which they engage outside of class and their existing capabilities to understand
canonical texts.
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