This research study is based on a two-year qualitative study with early adolescent boys in three distinctly different communities and schools in western Canada: one rural-community school, one inner-city school, and one suburban school. The schools, although predominately Anglo Canadian, do include children from a diversity of backgrounds. In this research we are looking at the boys’ perceptions of literacy in relation to their literacy practices as evident in their “in school and outside of school” activities. Our observations have focused on boys, in a variety of school classes, including language arts, social studies, math, and science. In order to better understand the nature of boys’ literacies, we recorded their selection of reading texts, writing topics and practices, and use of media and technology. In the first year of our study we surveyed the boys about their literacy practices and interviewed 29 boys from Grades 3 through 6. In the second year we followed 15 of these boys to new classrooms and some to new schools. We had discussions with the boys in the project in which they talked about their “out of school” and “in school” literacy experiences including digital formats such as computer and video texts. We conducted backpack/desk “literacy digs” with a cross section of the boys in which we went through everything in their packs and desks and analyzed each item to ascertain what purpose it served for them, so as to better understand the functional nature of their literacy practices.

Our initial findings were seductive and fit with common beliefs that schools are failing boys, that “boys will be boys”, they don’t like to read and write, and they don’t interact around literacy and don’t have enough male models. However, this was not true for all of the boys and didn’t seem to provide us with any depth of understanding of what they were doing. We went back to our data to look for descriptors, themes, and a way to better understand what was happening. We reproblematized the emerging gendered trends and wondered if there were shapes of these boys’ literacy configurations that we were missing. We interviewed the boys again, pursuing the boundaries and non-traditional texts. These interviews, combined with ongoing observations and analysis of literacy artifacts, provided further evidence of their literacy perceptions and practices.
The social nature of these boys’ literacy practices started to become more obvious to us. Sometimes it was in the form of loud and boisterous sharing of comments across the entire room and other times the clustering around an activity, such as a computer game, that engaged them. We came to recognize literacy as a dominant social practice through which the boys in our study shaped their identities and developed and maintained close personal relationships, and often their literacies gave greater emphasis to taking from the text rather than pouring over it, in order to share information with their friends. The boys’ use of literacies to shape their identities and develop shared interests with friends connected to the themes that have emerged from our data.
These boys wrestled with making meaning of their school literacy experiences in relation to their out of school experiences and they talked about their literacy practices overall. Five themes arose repeatedly in their comments:

(a) personal interest;
(b) action;
(c) success;
(d) fun; and
(e) purpose.

These boys were “morphing” what they had learned in school and out of school, and they were transforming it for their own purposes in order to fulfill their need to position themselves in the world and to support their relationships with peers. They were transforming their own life literacies into their academic literacies in order to stimulate their real and imaginary lives that included challenge, risk, excitement, and opportunities to win. Through these transformations the boundaries of school and life literacies often become blurred. These five themes identified through working with the boys are interlocking pieces of a larger literacy profile and are instrumental in supporting their developing gendered identities.

When they had the opportunity, the boys in our study chose reading selections that helped inform their personal interests, feeding their quest for their individual and collective identities and social communities. The students were regularly required to take books out of the library, and some of their common reading choices included “how-to” books, informational books, and fantasy. The out-of-school reading selected by these boys often supported their personal interests, such as newspapers, sports magazines, computer magazines telling them how to win at the computer games, superhero comic books, and other graphic texts. These texts were a marked contrast to their in-school selections and were not seen as appropriate for in-school reading. These richly textured literacy artifacts played a major role in these boys’ out-of-school literate lives.

Boys’ personal interest in text is connected to the active emotional, mental, and physical engagement they experience and to the amount of success they experience in the engagements. Not only do they like to read and write about action, but they also “really want to get into the action” themselves, to “do stuff, and they “don’t want to have to wait.” The early adolescent boys in our study also wanted to be challenged, but in contexts in which they felt confident of success or at least improvement. These boys often selected visual, humorous, and active texts such as comic books, magazines, and cartoon anthologies. It became apparent to us that a critical factor in selection of their readings was purposefulness, whether in getting information, figuring out how something works, keeping track of sports statistics, or staying connected with their friends.

Boys are often disadvantaged in academic literacy as a result of current curricular emphases, teacher text and topic choices, and lack of availability and acceptability of texts that match their interests and needs. The changing nature of literacy and the role of technology and boys’ underachievement in literacy may not readily translate to electronic technologies outside of school. Many of the boys in our study have a great deal of expertise and interest in numerous forms of digital literacies, often much greater than their teachers. These literacies very often inform and transform the strategies and discourses they use in school.

Despite the structured nature of classroom rules and expectations regarding learning and literacy, some boys have demonstrated alternative approaches to making meaning from school texts, attempting to transform traditional school literacies into something more useful and manageable to them, with some approaches more successful than others. In the past decade there has been considerable thought given to education for girls: how education can be structured, what curricular areas need focus and attention, and how to create successful environments for girls. However, the same thought has not been given to the curriculum as it is offered to boys.

School definitions of literacy have been slow to change, and slow to acknowledge the changing nature of literacy in society. There is a critical need to reframe the reading curriculum and to rethink assessment strategies and criteria to promote the kinds of literacy that are required in the workplace and in the home. There are many real constraints to change, both external and personal, that affect the possibilities for transformation. Externally imposed standardized testing, the increased emphasis on “covering” the curriculum, fragmented timetables, and large groups of diverse students all distract teachers from considering more subtle issues affecting the learning of their students. Schools as historically constructed institutions are entrenched in society’s collective understanding of what schooling is and should be; as such, there is considerable resistance to significant structural changes. Alternative “texts” and “literacies” are often dismissed as irrelevant to the agenda of school. Teachers are products of teacher education programs that have not provided the time or space to address broad issues of literacy, gender, power, and other social-justice concerns. Therefore, their background knowledge and previous experiences of literacy learning, along with professional development models offering brief, one-time-only sessions, limit teachers’ ability to closely examine their practices in light of intersecting factors such as gender. These external constraints also influence the types of activities generally found in classrooms, where critical literacy and the opportunities to understand the biased nature of language play a limited role in the overall educational experiences of students. Literacy is not recognized as a social practice but as either a body of knowledge to be absorbed or a tool for learning other bodies of knowledge that will be absorbed. Gender as a construct has been ignored in teacher education and curriculum, and often remains an unacknowledged factor in student learning.

Just as factors impacting boys’ literacy are being ignored in classrooms, so are boys ignoring schooling practices that they see as boring, meaningless, and passive. The boys themselves are “morphing” literacies to suit their purposes and, as our conversations with them have indicated, they are becoming literate in spite of school instruction. Boys and girls are engaging in literacy events outside of the classroom; however, although the literacies of girls are more aligned with practices encouraged by school (reading fiction, writing stories and poems) and are more compliant in the face of dull, meaningless activities, boys are better preparing themselves for the world beyond school. The abilities to navigate the Internet, experiment with alternative literacies, and “read” multiple texts simultaneously are more useful workplace skills than is the ability to analyze a work of fiction or to write a narrative account.

As literacy educators of both boys and girls, it is vital that we increase opportunities for awareness, analysis, and action regarding issues of gender for ourselves and for our students. We can do this in many ways. However, we need to be cautious of overly simplistic solutions that suggest that we can motivate boys to read simply by introducing “boy-friendly” literature and we need to be wary of literature that serves to reinforce undesirable stereotypes for boys.

In conclusion, it is evident that boys can read, but are selective in what they read; they use reading strategies that they have adopted in school and have morphed them to help make sense of new literacies that appeal to them. As teachers we need to transform our ideas about literacy to help boys recognize their strengths and move them beyond their own to broader, more global literacies. We need to better understand their “morphing literacies”, critique the arguments that would position them as failing and remind ourselves that there are multiple definitions of literacy and multiple paths to becoming literate. We need to deepen our understandings of the subjectivity of literacies for both boys and girls given the socio-cultural configurations from which they emerge. We need to encourage our students to see the multiplicities of perspective and recognize the morphing of their own literacy practices.