Review of "Adolescents Rewrite Their Worlds: Using Literature to Illustrate Writing Forms" by V. Yenika-Agbaw and T. Sychterz
Abstract
Review Excerpt: Vivian Yenika-Agbaw and Teresa Sychterz’s edited volume, Adolescents Rewrite their Worlds, is presented as a guide for middle-level literacy teachers and teacher educators seeking to update traditional genre writing. As Yenika-Agbaw explains in the opening chapter, the book is designed “to share a few basic transformative practices that teachers can use to empower students (pre/adolescents) to maximize their interactions with literature in and out of the classroom to explore different genres” (p. 3). In nine chapters, the editors and four co-authors give examples of the ways that teachers can enact culturally relevant writing instruction in the context of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The authors draw on the writing pedagogies of Nancie Atwell (1998), Lucy Calkins (1994), and Laura Robb (2010), Louise M. Rosenblatt’s transactional theory (1978), and broader theoretical stances of Lev Vygotsky (1978) and Paolo Freire (1987, 2000).
