Literacy Identity Work: Playing To Learn with Popular Media.

Abstract

I bought my first zine today! Actually, I had a bag full of zines ($48.44 worth, to be exact) by the time I left Bizarro-Wuxtry Comics in downtown Athens. You might say I got a bit carried away. But I've been interested in checking out zine culture for some time now. Several kids I know locally write zines, and Michele Knobel's recent talk [Knobel & Lankshear, 2001] on zines at the University of Georgia piqued my interest even further. Truth is, I've been thinking about zines and other forms of popular culture a lot this week—largely due to a question directed my way as I worked with some colleagues on a grant proposal to study adolescents ' literacy practices as they engage with popular media. The question had to do with frivolity. Did I think the reviewers of our proposal would dismiss it as being too frivolous? After all, my friends noted, there are teenagers who can't read, and we're proposing to study youth's fascination with zines, comics, videos, CDs, instant messaging, and the like. The question gave me pause, but then I remembered Robert (self-selected Alvermann & Heron 2 pseudonym) from our media club study. Do you recall how he struggled to read in school and yet seemed to have so little difficulty reading text from the Dragon Ball Z series on the computer screen? What do you make of that?

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