Focusing on the wildly successful Twilight series, this collection of scholarly essays examines the phenomenon from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. Particular attention is paid to cultural, social, and economic aspects of the series and to the recurrent messages about youth, gender roles, romance, and sexuality. Essays discuss race and religion, and provide audience analyses of young adult, adult, anti-, and international fans. Other chapters are political-economic examinations into celebrity, tourism, and publishing. With new research by established and rising scholars,...

This book examines the powerful role of popular culture in the daily online literacy practices of young people. Whether as subject matter, discourse, or through rhetorical patterns, popular culture dominates both the form and the content of online reading and writing. In order to understand not only how but why online technologies have changed literacy and popular culture practices, this book looks at online participatory popular culture from MySpace and Facebook pages to fan forums to fan fiction. Interviews and observations reveal the skills and practices students develop, as they sit...

Adolescents Online Literacies: Connecting Classrooms, Digital Media, and Popular Culture is a compilation of new work that makes concrete connections between what the research literature portrays and what teachers, school librarians, and media specialists know to be the case in their own situations. The authors (educators and researchers who span three continents) focus on ways to incorporate and use the digital literacies that young people bring to school."

This is a collection of essays on the arts, new media, popular culture, and technologies as they influence practices of curriculum development and teaching. The authors artists, educators, scholars, and researchers with both scholarly and practical expertise share their teaching practices and curriculum knowledge, and reflect upon challenging issues in contemporary art, popular culture, new media, and technology. Each chapter proposes pedagogical structures and curriculum resources that can be adapted to diverse school contexts and technical resources. The perspectives gathered in this book...

The Beat Generation and Counterculture examines three authors associated with the -Beat Generation- Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac and the relevance of their attempt to travel, learn, and write about exotic non-Western cultures and repressed minority cultures in the United States, projecting the influence of history, premodern religious practices, and postcolonial social and intellectual problems into the written development of countercultural ethos and praxis. The Beat Generation and Counterculture underscores T. S. Eliot s emphasis on -earning tradition...

Media Education Goes to School examines the struggles involved in integrating media education across the curriculum at a small urban school. Based on quasi-ethnographic research specifically semi-formal individual and group interviews with twenty-one participants and participant-observation the text focuses on how students understand and make meaning of media education in their schools, and what they know about urban education and urban school reform. The book argues against the neoliberal ethos that continuously harms urban youth and the rhetoric of new school reform that replicates,...

Drawing on critical pedagogy, post-colonial analysis, hermeneutic interpretation, and reconceptualist curriculum frameworks, the twenty chapters in this edited collection address, from interrelated perspectives, a gap in the scholarly literature on the theory, practice, and policy of global citizenship and global citizenship education. The book provides readers with analyses and interpretations of the existing state of global citizenship education in post-secondary institutions, and stimulates discussion about the field at a time when there is an intense debate about the current drive to...

Cultural Collision and Collusion addresses the complexity of problems that surround youth culture and school culture. By broadening the scholarly dialogue and examining and disseminating relevant research to practitioners, the book seeks to provide insight into youth culture and some manifestations of popular culture (e.g., hip-hop). In addition, the book examines some of the tensions that develop when the values of youth and adults collide in U.S. schools. Finally, the book mines the extant literature for insight and enlightenment in the best interest of academic inquiry and practical...

From social networking sites to game design, from blogs to game play, and from fan fiction to commercial web sites, Girl Wide Web 2.0 offers a complex portrait of millennial girls online. Grounded in an understanding of the ongoing evolution in computer and internet technology and in the ways in which girls themselves use that technology, the book privileges studies of girls as active producers of computer/Internet content, and incorporates an international/intercultural perspective so as to extend our understanding of girls, the Internet, and the negotiation of identity.

d/Deaf and d/Dumb chronicles the author's dumb, 'deaf kid' origins in Bayport, New York to his current life as a young superhero writer. Portraying the conflicting cultural worlds of hearing and Deaf, it describes his life in an in-between underworld and his identity as it alternates between being oppressed and empowered. These feelings are inescapably and forever the reality of those who live on the margins of our larger society.