Young Adult Literature and the Digital World

This book considers the practical intersection between digital media and young adult texts. In these books, teachers and teacher educators offer practical examples for engaging students with crafting critical responses to young adult literature through digital spaces. It examines how teachers can use these spaces to help students encounter, evaluate, and engage in the world in which they live. Young adult literature offers a vehicle through which students can discuss and explore the world in a more removed manner, while digital media offers a paradigm for helping students craft multimodal responses that extend beyond the traditional literary essay. This intersection asks teachers to consider how they are asking students to interact with the texts they read. It asks them to invite students to enter and contribute to broader conversations through the production of their own texts. This book illustrates pedagogical principles in practice, showing what is possible in literature study in classrooms.

This text will be a valuable source for instruction as it not only introduces digital formats and assignments that may be new for many teachers such as transmedia writing, but also shares fresh and exciting ways to use familiar types of digital media such as Google Maps, YouTube, and TedTalks.  There are also plenty of hyperlinks to online content so teachers can immediately start trying out new ideas! , At the core, young adult literature has always forced us as readers to challenge our own assumptions, engage in difficult conversations, and think more critically about race, class, gender, and other markers of identity. With Young Adult Literature and the Digital World, Dail, Witte, and Bickmore have curated a collection that presents us with yet another set of lenses that bring new literacies to the fore. With contributions that examine everything from emojis and hashtags to graphic novels, TED Talks, and transmedia storytelling, more than twenty educators featured in this volume push us to think about subversion, culture jamming, affinity spaces, and even reinterpretations of Shakespeare for a digital age. Indeed, the concept of "ubuntu" – “I can be me because of who we are together” – lives in this collection, and we see how teachers bring YA issues and identities to light in a variety of innovative ways., Young Adult Literature and the Digital World debunks once and for all the tired, outdated idea that young adult literature and digital media tools are mere add-ons to the ‘real’ ELA curriculum. The contributors to this volume display in vivid, engaging fashion how young people are taking inspiration from books that honor them as readers and thinkers and leveraging digital communication tools to raise their voices as young scholars and citizens. This book is vital to all teachers mentoring young people as they compose new personal and social lives into existence., Young Adult Literature and the Digital World: Textual Engagements through Visual Media is a much needed text; one that highlights how digital and traditional literary spaces collide, providing teachers a plethora of ideas for guiding their students down a multitude of learning paths. This text provides teaching ideas that will help teachers ignite youth passion, and it will support teachers as they guide students in establishing personal learning trajectories centered on young adult literature and digital media., The mobile phones young people carry around with them have more computing power than NASA when astronauts went to the moon in 1969. What it means to be a young adult is undergoing a radical transformation in the 21st century, dizzily perpetuated by the speed, reach, and ubiquity of digital devices. How are teachers to explore that transformation clearheadedly? Dail, Witte, and Bickmore have a way forward. They have invited some of the best voices in the field to escort readers through the worlds of young adult literature and digital literacies. The result is a fantastic collection of pedagogical moonshots that will leave readers gazing anew at the stars with their feet firmly planted on the schoolground.

Jennifer S. Dail, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English Education at Kennesaw State University where she works with graduate students in secondary English Education and directs the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project. Her primary focus is on digital media and technology in English language arts classrooms, and she has a deep love of young adult literature.Shelbie Witte, Ph.D., is the Chuck and Kim Watson Chair in Education and Associate Professor of Adolescent Literacy and English Education at Oklahoma State University, where she works with preservice English Language Arts teachers. She is the director of the Initiative for 21st Century Literacies Research and the Oklahoma State University Writing Project.Steven T. Bickmore is an Associate professor of English Education at UNLV and maintains a weekly academic blog on YA literature (http://www.yawednesday.com/). He is a past editor of The ALAN Review and a current editor of Study and Scrutiny: Research in Young Adult Literature.