Boys and Literacy (part 6)

 

Smith and Wilhelm continue promoting the literacy of boys in their 2006 sequel to Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys. Going With The Flow integrates the scholarship of their 2002 book with powerful classroom-tested units that educators and parents can use to encourage strong literacy habits in adolescent readers. Again, Smith and Wilhelm draw on the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his premise that “more than anything else, men and women seek happiness, and that we cannot seek it directly, it must come from being fully involved with the details of our lives.” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.1). This is the aforementioned flow.

 

Perhaps a darker corner of the current boys and literacy emphasis is the gender power implications of much of the research. Social verses biological constructionists wage a battle regarding why boys develop specific attitudes and behaviors, and despite their finger pointing, boys continue to slip academically. Michelle Conlin fanned the fire with her attention grabbing headline in a 2003 issue of Business Week, The New Gender Gap: From kindergarten to grad school, boys are becoming the second sex. One of Conlin’s most intense observations is the perception of unfairly turning our attention to boys in the wake of girls advancing. She quotes Cornell University’s James Garbarino, author of Lost Boys: “Just because girls aren’t shooting 7-Eleven clerks doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Once you stop oppressing girls, it stands to reason they will thrive up to their potential.” (Conlin, 2003, p.8).