Pocket Writing: How Adolescents’ Self-Sponsored Writing Circulates in School

Amy Stornaiuolo University of Pennsylvania ; Bethany Monea University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

This article explores the mobile and material dimensions of a writing practice we call pocket writing. Emergent in our 6-year ethnographic fieldwork at a public high school, this practice involved adolescents composing and carrying their self-sponsored writing close to their bodies. We consider the pocket both a physical artifact—the place from which writing emerged at the right moment—and a metaphor describing how youth created small, portable boundaries around their writing to facilitate its invisibility and mobility. Using a transliteracies lens, we worked alongside youth to trace the circulatory pathways such writing took relative to the official institution of school. These high school students made agentive rhetorical choices, sometimes deliberately disconnecting their writing from school as an everyday resistance practice—an effort to keep school in its place. In theorizing pocket writing as a mobile and embodied extension of writing (for) the self, we argue its “pocketed” nature is key to its transformative power.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2023-07-01
DOI
10.1177/07410883231169508
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
OA PDF Hybrid
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Written Communication

References (86) · 17 in this index

  1. The dialogic imagination
  2. 10.1080/07370008.2016.1181879
  3. 10.1080/10665684.2017.1301837
  4. Blad E., Harwin A. (2017, January 24). Black students more likely to be arrested at school. Education Week. w…
  5. College Composition and Communication
Show all 86 →
  1. 10.1207/s15548430jlr3403_4
  2. 10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
  3. 10.2307/3333092
  4. 10.1080/00405841.2019.1705107
  5. College English
  6. Written Communication
  7. Critical Questions in Education
  8. Bergsonism
  9. 10.1177/1468798420914125
  10. Corridor cultures: Mapping student resistance at an urban school
  11. Research in the Teaching of English
  12. 10.1080/10665684.2020.1863881
  13. Research in the Teaching of English
  14. 10.7208/chicago/9780226206851.001.0001
  15. Filipiak D., Caraballo L. (2019). Growing together: Literacy and agency in an early-college research collabor…
  16. Written Communication
  17. Black literate lives: Historical and contemporary perspectives
  18. 10.3102/978-0-935302-48-6_23
  19. Pedagogy of the oppressed
  20. Garcia A., Cantrill C., Filipiak D., Hunt B., Garcia A., Lee C., Mirra N., O’Donnell-Allen C., Peppler K. (20…
  21. 10.2307/358484
  22. Literacy as a civil right: Reclaiming social justice in literacy teaching and learning
  23. 10.1080/10749039.2019.1652327
  24. 10.58680/vm201829510
  25. 10.1002/jaal.474
  26. 10.1002/JAAL.00126
  27. Identity and agency in cultural worlds
  28. Research in the Teaching of English
  29. Research in the Teaching of English
  30. Ito M., Gutiérrez K. D., Livingstone S., Penuel B., Rhodes J., Salen K., Schor J., Sefton-green J., Watkins S…
  31. 10.58680/ee20054116
    English Education  
  32. 10.1598/JAAL.49.8.6
  33. Research in the Teaching of English
  34. 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2011.02.006
  35. 10.1080/17439884.2018.1498352
  36. Rhetoric and praxis: The contribution of classical rhetoric to practical reasoning
  37. A search past silence: The literacy of Black males
  38. 10.5406/femteacher.26.2-3.0126
  39. Written Communication
  40. Research in the Teaching of English
  41. Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: Identity, agency, and power
  42. 10.1002/jaal.645
  43. 10.1093/oso/9780190874698.001.0001
  44. 10.1080/00405841.2017.1392164
  45. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education
  46. 10.2307/2967311
  47. 10.2167/le720.0
  48. Written Communication
  49. College English
  50. Written Communication
  51. 10.58680/ee201527170
    English Education  
  52. Cultivating genius
  53. Artifactual literacies: Every object tells a story
  54. 10.17763/haer.84.1.982l873k2ht16m77
  55. Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities
  56. College Composition and Communication
  57. Perspectives in Urban Education
  58. Prior P. (2018). How do moments add up to lives? Trajectories of semiotic becoming vs tales of school learnin…
  59. 10.1057/9780230250628
  60. JAC
  61. 10.17077/0743-2747.1298
  62. The school library as an other space: A case study inquiry into literacy and identity
  63. The coding manual for qualitative researchers
  64. Literacies, Learning, and the Body: Putting Theory and Research into Pedagogical Practice
  65. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
  66. 10.1215/9780822376781
  67. The Routledge handbook of literacy studies
  68. 10.1108/ETPC-03-2018-0033
  69. 10.1177/1086296X16683419
  70. Reading for their life: (Re)building the textual lineages of African American adolescent males
  71. 10.17763/1943-5045-86.3.313
  72. College English
  73. Research in the Teaching of English
  74. Journal of Language and Literacy Education
  75. 10.1177/01614681221086115
  76. 10.1080/10749039.2014.990037
  77. 10.1177/0042085916641174
  78. 10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.02.010
  79. Yagelski R. P. (2009). A thousand writers writing: Seeking change through the radical practice of writing as …
  80. 10.58680/ee201218439
    English Education  
  81. 10.58680/ej201729020
    The English Journal