Reading in Relation: Youth Mentors and Adults Co-Constructing Teaching and Learning in a High School Literacy Classroom

Abstract

Most schools operate as hierarchical structures, where adult stakeholders largely dictate what counts as knowledge and how to teach it. While previous scholarship has documented the promise of youth-led initiatives to trouble hierarchical structures, these explorations tend to occur outside of schools and do not typically account for the kinds of changes in relations between youth and adults necessary to disrupt hierarchical structures from within. Using third-generation cultural-historical activity theory as our theoretical framework, in this study we explore the shifts in subject-subject relations that emerged as high school youth literacy mentors, their teacher, and university researchers participated in iterative processes of co-configuration to open up new possibilities for literacy learning at their public school. We examine how youth mentors and adults co-designed and co-taught the Literacy Mentorship Class (LMC) while increasingly engaging contradictions as double binds within the Literacy Mentorship Debrief (LMD). We trace how evolving subject-subject relations in the LMD contributed to shifts in divisions of labor, rules, objects, and mediating artifacts in and beyond the LMC. Ultimately, we propose debriefs as a set of reflective practices to facilitate future possibilities for co-configuration among youth and adults that can be responsive to the particularities of any school community.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the youth literacy mentors and their teacher for their collaboration, Rodeline Prince for her research assistance, Andrea Bien and Déana Scipio for the invitations to “chat about CHAT,” Beth Warren for her thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and sustained engagement with this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All year one mentor names are pseudonyms. Some year two mentors requested to use their real first names or nicknames instead of self-selected pseudonyms. We obtained a waiver from our institutional review board to honor their wishes; these mentors’ names are denoted with an asterisk the first time they appear in the article.

2 We refer to Ms. Murphy by her own name to acknowledge the collaboration and her contributions to the project.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Faculty Research Awards from the Boston University School of Education (now Wheelock College of Education and Human Development).