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=**Using Youth Culture to Build Critical Literacies!**=

With Liddy Allee and Andy Yale
Our students bring many things with them when they come to school. These include their cultural backgrounds and identities, shaped by those around them and by immersion in a complex media environment.

We can become more effective as teachers if we improve our understandings of all that our students bring in the school door, and look through the cultural lens(es) that they do as we construct approaches to curricula. This approach will yield more connected and sustainable learning.

Additionally, we can work together with each other and with our students, even quite young ones, to identify, understand and address the biases implicit in modern media.

In this study group we will explore: • Reasons to use what our students bring with them, and issues/concerns with building on what they bring • What our students bring in the door • How we can we use what they bring

We will: • Read articles and explore some of the sources students use to get information, • Use what we learn about youth culture to develop strategies to embed in our literacy instruction • Implement and analyze the effects and effectiveness of one or more such strategies.

Participants will, with support, build lessons or units to make use of their findings about youth culture, with opportunities to make use of computer technology as appropriate.