Encoding Youth: Popular Culture and Multicultural Literature in a Rural Context

This article focuses on representations of youth identity and culture that circulated in a long-term teacher and researcher study group. These representations are important to examine because the way that teachers of adolescents envision their students' identities and cultures relative to that of other adolescents is fundamental to how they interact with their students, choose texts to share with them, and raise issues relevant to them. Related to youth identity and culture, two patterns emerged from the data: participants universalized adolescence, and participants constructed adolescents as “Other.” Over time, however, participants began to examine the ways that they encoded youth identities. This involved disrupting normalizing discourses and challenging established ways of reading. Both were important to understanding how language works to encode or normalize particular representations of youth and how language can be used to revise these codes.