Although I do not have any experience with yearbook writing, which is not a common practice in Italy, I have found in Finders's chapters some interesting matches with my own thoughts in respect to text analysis, identity formation, and reproduction of the status quo within and through the school system.
As far as I have understood, Finders suggests that the yearbook perpetuates power tensions and power relationships among teenagers precisely because students are not pushed by their literacy activities to challenge the power structure internal to their own groups and gangs. The lack of critical awareness of one's positioning within the class is due to the tendency of transforming the class and the school in a "safe environment" where an unproblematized expression of the self (for example through free reading or writing choices) is preferred to debates around why every single student's self is expressed through particular choices and behaviors. Therefore, an uncritical centering on the teenager's independence is likely to lead to a perpetuation of social discourses that, entering the school through the different students' identities, re-enact the power relations existing outside the school, and these relations are consequently maintained through the years, making school an environment unable to fully articulate a project of social change.
All this makes very much sense. I think that the focus it drives on literacy and language is very up to the point and powerful; in a way, Finders's argument points to the often overlooked complex value of literacy and literary products, that goes well beyond the mere aspect of providing people with a technology (in the case of literacy) and with a set of notions (in the case of literary products). In my opinion, commonsensical understanding of literacy and of the humanities tends to place literacy in relation to the basic skills needed to (economically) succeed in society, and the humanities (as understood in high school and, I'm afraid to say, also in college and university) in relation to some form of high culture leisure. In the high school (and I do not think there are real differences between the States and Italy), these discourses on literacy and literature apply in that literacy is understood as a taken-for-granted set of abilities, and literature is understood as a craft that students should be able to aesthetically decode and historically position: most of the time, superficial factual knowledge. Among the various consequences of this, there is the risk of alienating students from the powerful role that language and texts have in the formation or confirmation of social and individual values, roles, attitudes, and so on. Besides, this traditional and commonsensical approach to literacy is doomed to perpetuate unresolved political issues linked to present-day globalized and culturally mixed scholastic environments.
In Italy, the structure of the high school (that students attend from the age of 13 to the age of 18) is completely different from the American one. And so is the student population, which now has probably already changed from when I was attending my last year, 5 years ago, as the presence of student of non-Italian descent is becoming higher. Nonetheless I'm reading all those papers on multi-cultural (i'd rather say identity-shifting) education as extremely powerful insights on educational and integrationist issues that exist in every context in which class, gender, racial or cultural tensions are experienced and enacted. For sure, a teenager environment is one of these contexts, and a critical one as far as identity-construction is concerned. The idea of using literacy and literature/text analysis to create a practice of discourse-awareness and discourse-debunking (or at least critique) is, in my opinion, truly exciting in that it can prove very engaging for students, and truly useful for society itself, as it may fulfill what I consider the main aims of education: critical ability, and self-empowerment through community (-ies) empowerment. In this respect, the role of the teacher may become even more central and engaging (and difficult..) than it already is, as s/he may be required to function both as debate-generator and debate-regulator, focusing on the importance of formulating the clash within the class, in order to overcome it outside the class in the long run.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polis
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