Jenna Spiering
Biography
Recent scholarship in English education highlights the pervasive nature of dominant discourses of adolescence (those that reduce teenagers to impulsive, hormonal, and incomplete) in the pedagogy and content of English language arts (ELA) classrooms. In this study, I investigate how these discourses of adolescence â?? both those that perpetuate and those that challenge normative biological, developmental, and prototypically White characterizations of youth â?? mediate literature learning and classroom literature response in one diverse high school English classroom.