Robert Petrone

Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers' thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can facilitate pre-service English teachers' interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts so they might be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. The first focuses on teaching a Youth Lens in the context of a Young Adult Literature course, an approach that helps future teachers learn about adolescence as a construct and the linkages between this idea and English pedagogy. The second focuses on integrating youth into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices whereby they are " re-positioned " as experts and contributors to English teacher education. Together, these points of intervention provide ways to re-position youth systemically throughout English teacher education programs.

Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship that re-conceptualizes adolescence as a cultural construct, this article introduces a Youth Lens. A Youth Lens comprises an approach to textual analysis that examines howideas about adolescence and youth get formed, circulated, critiqued, andrevised. Focused specifically on its application to young adult literature, agenre of writing that explicitly names it audience, this article explores howa Youth Lens provides a much needed critical approach to interpreting and teaching young adult literature within literacy education, especially given the problematic representations of youth in many of these literary texts. Specifically, this article a) discusses the central assumptions thatgovern a Youth Lens; b) provides an explanation of the lens, including published and new examples and guiding questions; c) presents an in-depthcase of how a Youth Lens illuminates new possibilities for understanding The Hunger Games; and, d) offers specific implications aYouth Lens has for the analysis of young adult and other literary texts, approaches to teaching young adult literature courses for pre-service literacy teachers, and secondary literacy pedagogy involving young adult literature and media texts.

At the heart of Rethinking the “Adolescent” in Adolescent Literacy is a call to English language arts teachers to examine the very assumptions of adolescence they may be operating from in order to reimagine new possibilities for engaging students with the English curriculum. Relying on a sociocultural view of adolescence established by scholars in critical youth studies, the book focuses on classrooms from diverse contexts to explain adolescence as a construct and how this perspective of youth can encourage educators to reenvision literacy instruction and learning.Working from and looking beyond Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, the authors explore the “myth” of adolescence and the possibility of a curriculum that positions youth as experts and knowledgeable advocates fully engaged in their own learning.