Reading and Relevance, Reimagined

"Through conversations with six young men, which took place across ten years - beginning when they were attending a single-sex middle school in New York City - this book defines, and therefore reconceptualizes with nuance, the term relevance as it applies to and is applied within (literacy) education contexts. Four dimensions of relevance - Identity, Spatiality, Temporality, and Ideology - are introduced as a means for guiding educators in supporting the reading experiences of students in ways that do not essentialize them or treat them as racial, ethnic, gender, or other monoliths. Framing relevance from a student-centered perspective, as the condition of being practically, socially, and/or conceptually applicable to one's life, this book aims to disrupt problematic enactments of relevance in literacy spaces - enactments rooted in assumptions about who young people are, culturally or otherwise, as well as how they think and maneuver through the spaces and times comprising their worlds"--