Extract

Donna E. Alvermann

Introductions to books with a shelf life longer than five years are ripe for storytelling. Of course, the story need not be long nor detract from newer material. It should, however, disclose a side of the book’s development not shared before. Building on the first edition, the revised version of Adolescents’ Online Literacies: Connecting Classrooms, Digital Media, & Popular Culture reveals new lines of inquiry that address some of the earlier chapter authors’ calls for research. Scholarly answers to those calls have evoked a storyline, which in turn requires a narrator—a role I take up here, ever mindful that “to begin a story, someone in some way must break a particular silence” (Wiebe & Johnston, 1998, p. 4).

I do that in this introduction as a way of connecting the first edition’s chapters to the four new ones. Beyond connecting, however, the notion of breaking particular silences that envelop adolescents’ online literacies is a theme directly applicable to all 10 chapters. Also featured in this revised edition are numerous artistic representations of middle grades students’ self-selected graphic novels and the fan fiction those choices prompted as part of an in-class multi-genre unit on fandom. Like the earlier edition, the book remains “dippable” in that its organizational structure invites skipping around without worry of losing sight of the broader theme. ← 1 | 2 →