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Service-Learning Literacies: Lessons Learned From Middle School Youth, Steven Michael Hart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The dominant ideology driving the current educational reform movement positions adolescents as deficient in basic literacy skills. To address this deficiency, the trend has been to implement high-stakes standardized literacy tests and increase accountability to schools for developing basic literacy skills. Opposing this Discourse of “deficient youth,” literacy researchers have moved to adolescents’ cultural spheres of life beyond school to discover that traditional structures for teaching literacy appear to have resulted in a growing dissonance between literacies that take place within schools and those employed by youth in their personal worlds.

This research was conducted to explore how adolescents constructed …