Teenage Boys' Leisure Reading Dispositions: Juggling male youth culture and family cultural capital

Abstract

This paper draws on Rogoff's (1995) notions of guided participation and participatory appropriation and Bourdieu's (1991) notions of habitus and cultural capital to provide a more complex examination of boys and reading reluctance than is currently available. Drawing on questionnaire and interview data from teenage boys and their parents in a highly educated middle-class school community, we found that by mid-adolescence, boys identified as reluctant readers (those who can, but choose not to read) generally resist appropriating family reading dispositions which privilege selected print-based materials invested with a school approved form of cultural capital. Through the voices of these boys, a powerful sense of their agency emerges in their decisions to pursue specific types of print and electronic-based leisure reading which carry immediate pragmatic and social investment and which contribute to the construction of their masculine identities at this point in their lives. Through the voices of their parents, a sense of struggle emerges as they attempt to balance their sons' engagement with multi-modal forms of leisure reading with their investment in their sons' life trajectories, an investment conditioned by more traditional notions of literacy. Inserting notions of teenage boys as 'agentful' into existing models of social apprenticeship accounts for reciprocal social influences, where teenage boys shape family leisure reading practices as much as parents shape their sons'. The notion of boys as agents in their literacy choices also centralises concerns about how teachers and parents can negotiate pathways between traditionally valued print-based literacy practices and the increasingly more multi-modal literacy practices valued by teenage boys, practices whose status in both the home and the school is uncertain.

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