Study & Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature

How Does Contemporary YA Literature Represent Rural People and Places?

Jennifer Sanders — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This article presents a critical content analysis of representations of rural people and places in contemporary, middle grades and young adult novels. Interrogating representations is vital for implementing critical rural place pedagogies. Findings indicate this award-winning text set included diverse representations of racial, religious, and sexual identities. Characters often felt a sense of place-based belonging and identity but also experienced tensions of feeling stuck. Rural places were frequently depicted as places of despair and pervasive poverty, with a lack of middle or upper-middle income representations. Implications for teacher education are presented with suggestions for critical place pedagogies and developing counternarratives that convey the diversity of rural people and places.

Reading the Rural Queerly

Kate E. Kedley, Ryan Schey — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

In this article, we describe an interpretive framework for teachers and teacher educators to use when engaging with two areas of English language arts curriculum and research – ruralness and queerness – as they work alongside readers of young adult literature. Too often rural communities and queerness are characterized as opposed if not incompatible. This binary—i.e., urban-as-queer-affirming and rural-as-queerphobic—has become so common that queer theorists have developed the term metronormativity to name and interrogate this ideology (Halberstam, 2005; Gray, 2009; Herring, 2010). Having lived and taught in rural and small town communities, we are concerned that metronormativity can, at times, go unrecognized if not uninterrogated in educational research. By offering a framework for teaching and analyzing literature in classrooms and teacher education classrooms, we encourage readers of queer young adult literature to ask questions about how and why ideas about spaces and sexualities become naturalized ideologies that are accepted as truth. Such questions matter not only for queer youth in rural contexts. Instead, they offer productive ways to think about literature and its relationships to life for readers in urban, suburban, and other contexts regardless of their sexual identities.

Queerly Rural, Rurally Queer

Josh Thompson, Clint Whitten — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Recently, the number of books featuring both queer and rural youth experiences has increased (Kedley et al., 2022), including Jamison’s (2021) Hillbilly Queer: A Memoir. The present study examined how this book functions as a memoir about young adult experiences and analyzed the possibilities it offers rural queer students as well as rural and/or queer educators. Through a queer autoethnographic literary analysis, the authors draw upon their experiences as once closeted rural queer youth and former openly queer secondary English language arts educators teaching in rural and rural-serving public schools. This study found important benefits for rural queer adolescents and significant implications for the English language arts classroom.

The Country's a Drag

Gretchen L. Schroeder — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This paper examines the queer rural spaces in Julie Murphy’s 2021 young adult novel Pumpkin. In particular, it explores the concepts of rural-urban binaries, rural out-migration, and drag culture as they are related to the LGBTQ+ community. The author argues that Pumpkin creates a portrait of modern rural communities that confutes previous assumptions that queer people don’t exist in rural spaces, and if they do, they must leave in order to find acceptance and community.

Indigenous Knowledge, Young Adult Literature, and Teacher Education

Joaquin Muñoz — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This paper explores how Indigenous Young Adult Literature (IYAL), offers teacher candidates (TCs) spaces for examining crucial ideas regarding Indigenous knowledge and worldviews. Using IYAL as a pedagogical approach with TCs in education programs is one step toward developing anti-oppressive education practices that work to understand marginalized peoples while also enacting pedagogies “that work against the privileging of certain groups, the normalizing of certain identities, and that make visible these processes” (Kumashiro, 2000, p. 35). By incorporating Indigenous knowledge as story (Rice, 2020), IYAL can be a tool for developing nuanced understandings of Indigenous youth, Indigenous Peoples and communities. Supporting TCs to better attend to the needs of Indigenous youth through IYAL allows for exploring the complexity of youth, identity, and culture of Indigenous Peoples. IYAL can feed the spirits of Indigenous youth in schools, a place that has historically been hostile, violent, and deadly to them. This paper explores how IYAL can further support non-Indigenous teacher candidates to develop better understandings of Indigeneity at large.

“This Isn't a Place for Castoffs. We're Here Because We Want to be Here”

Terri Suico — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Former classroom teacher, teacher educator, and young adult literature scholar, Lisa Hazlett offers insight on her experiences in rural areas and how these experiences prompted her to write her book Teaching Diversity in Rural Schools. In this discussion, she explains the singularity of the Upper Midwest and why place matters when it comes to reading and teaching young adult literature.

Learning from Those Who Came Before Us

Leilya Pitre — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This extensive interview by Leilya Pitre with Chris Crowe is the first installment of a new feature in Study & Scrutiny, “Conversations with ALAN Elders,” which will appear in every other issue. In this far-ranging conversation, Crowe recounts his experiences as a student of Ken Donelson, one of the founders of the Assembly of Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) in 1974, his relationships with other early leaders of the organization, and with his own students. He also speaks to the purpose of this section: Keeping the roots of teaching and scholarship of young adult literature in the light. As Crowe is wont to do, he offers a metaphor to make his point: “There is a science-fiction/time-travel novel, called Timeline by Michael Crichton (1999), in which one character, a historian, says that people who don’t know history don’t know anything. It’s like being a leaf that doesn’t know it’s part of a tree. The tree of young adult literature has lots of interesting roots and branches.” This interview project led by Leilya Pitre, Terri Suico, and Crag Hill intends to surface the connections between the roots and each season’s fresh leaves.

Reading, Writing, and Rurality

Terri Suico — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This review examines two recent scholarly books on teaching English language arts in rural areas. Robert Petrone and Allison Wynhoff Olsen’s Teaching English in Rural Communities: Toward a Critical Rural English Pedagogy offers strategies and research-based rationales on how to teach students to think critically about depictions of rurality in texts. Teaching Diversity in Rural Schools by Lisa Hazlett focuses on using young adult literature to teach students in rural schools about diversity. The review evaluates the texts’ contents and examines how both books contribute to educators’ understanding of rurality and the specific needs of rural schools.

YA in Rural Spaces

Terri Suico, Editor, Lisa Hazlett, Patricia Lane, Ann Marie Smith — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

With 19% of US students reading and learning in rural areas, adding books representative of these populations is important for all our students. The reviews and rationales that follow provide titles worthy of space in our libraries and classrooms. Lisa Hazlett explores Pumpkin by Julie Murphy; Patricia Lane provides a glimpse into Dark and Shallow Lies; and Anne Marie Smith reviews Full Flight by Ashley Schumacher.

Rural Young Adult Literature

Rachelle Kuehl, Chea Parton — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Welcome to Study & Scrutiny, Issue 6.2. For this special issue of Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature, deftly curated by Rachelle Kuehl and Chea Parton, we are excited to share with you research and analysis on rural young adult literature. The study of young adult literature in rural settings is not new, but it has never been so focused. Research abounds across many scholarly journals, and other resources for exploring rural young adult literature have been established to enrich our understanding of this vital body of literature.