Newkirk, Thomas (2002)
Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Thomas Newkirk, author of numerous books on writing and professor of English at University of New Hampshire, has joined a small, but growing number of authors addressing our understanding of how boys learn and how they are taught in our elementary and secondary schools. After decades of attention to girls’ and women’s education, educators and researchers are beginning to turn their attention to what has been happening to the education of boys.
Newkirk takes an interesting and literate look at one aspect of boys’ education, literacy in the late elementary years. He defines literacy as the “written stories children choose to read and compose” (p.xv). Coming to the issue from a post-Columbine perspective, Newkirk finds a rather dismal scene for boys—one in which many of the topics most attractive to boys (topics involving violence or wild adventures) are actively discouraged or forbidden in the classroom. Through the eight chapters of this book, he presents a challenge to the reader to rethink standard practices that restrict the topics that children are allowed to read and write about in the classroom. Using data based on a set of student stories and interviews with around one hundred children in elementary schools in New Hampshire, Newkirk asserts that we are failing boys in our educational system by narrowly defining what topics are suitable for elementary age boys to engage with as they build their reading and writing skills.
In the first two chapters of Misreading Masculinity, Newkirk carefully addresses issues of gender equity as central to any discussion of the education of boys. He delicately and knowledgably finds a middle ground between the two ends of the gender equity spectrum, indicating both his agreements and disagreements with such representative writings as the AAUW’s How Schools Shortchange Girls and Christine Hoff Sommers’ The War Against Boys. The third chapter takes an historical look at literacy and the ways in which schools and our educational system have routinely (if inadvertently) made reading less engaging for boys through the emphasis on silent reading, on reading as a way to keep students quiet and still.
In chapter four, he argues against the kind of moral hierarchy often applied to various forms of literature and writing, encouraging the reader to think first of engaging boys with a good adventure story (or with writing about a Simpsons show) as a beginning. Once engaged, the process of directing boys’ choices of topics for reading or writing moves more easily.
In the fifth and sixth chapters, he takes on a most difficult argument—making a case for the relaxation of restrictions on topics for reading and writing that involve violence. Chapter 5, “Violence and Innocence,” makes the case that the claims of the effects of media violence are overblown. Using excerpts from interviews with children, he lets their words show the reader how boys are capable of making distinctions between fantasy violence in an adventure movie and actual violence. Chapter 6, “Misreading Violence,” looks more closely at how violence is used in boys’ writing, illustrating that the violence in boys’ stories may be viewed in more positive ways than we have become accustomed to interpreting it. One boy’s writing experiences are examined in depth and violence in girls’ writing is briefly described.
In Chapter 7, the power of bodily humor and parody to attract boys to reading and writing activities is explored, including a number of examples from popular culture In the final chapter, Newkirk offers suggestions for opening up the array of topics appropriate for reading and writing in the elementary school. Newkirk argues that we should allow boys (and girls) to express themselves via fantasy writing, cartoons, parodies of TV plots and other topics that come from popular culture and offers several specific recommendations for action. A substantial bibliography completes the book.
This is an excellent read. Newkirk writes beautifully and illustrates his points with such a variety of literary and historical references that even if the reader is not in agreement with Newkirk’s arguments and solutions, it is a book that will challenge the reader to think about his or her own assumptions about boys, about the role of popular culture in education, and about how both boys and girls can be thoroughly engaged in and take pleasure from their own writing and the writing of others
Pages: 202
Price: $19.00
ISBN: : 0-325-00445-5
Reviewed by Carla A. Hendrix, Plattsburgh State University
