by Jason D. DeHart
“You spend too much time on the Internet,” a student said to me one day. She was in midst of a conversation with some of her peers using a recently coined bit of young adult jargon. When I joined the chat with knowledge of the term, she shared this admonition.
Teaching adolescents is both challenging and enriching. As in my time navigating my own period of adolescence, students are engaged in connected experiences that follow multiple streams of conversation – fandom, affinity, digital gaze, and more – all with the notion of community and belonging in mind. There is an always-changing multimedia flow of trends and treasured knowledge, often disseminated by digital platforms and what appears to be word of mouth.
Considering the literacy lives of the youth I work with daily, there is a clear sense of multiple channel navigation. Elements of identity weave together cultural practices and notes from popular culture. Youth are, indeed, like buoys among the stream of social media and technological message, including wider avenues of jargon and trend. They are purveyors of this wide range of culture, as well as curators of the space – whether they are fully aware of this aspect of their agency or not.
Spaces of Joy and Fandom
As Riesco and Goering (2025) recently explored, the anchor of popular culture continues to be part of adolescent practices. These changes in popular focus and language are fascinating from a researcher’s perspective, as well as a source of joy as an educator. This attention toward youth as the center of popular culture is hardly new – indeed, the mall culture of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as changing forms of music consumption have tracked with young people from the origin of the commercial. As a youth myself in the 1980s and 1990s, I was first the focal point of animation and branding that included popular characters; as an adult now reliving those days, I am a target of nostalgia branding. This is the sense of agency that companies do not necessarily consider when they are engaged in transmedia branding – they are handing their power over to youth, whose role is then to take up a particular trend and exercise this focal point of pop culture for so long as their engagement affords.
Indeed, language is always changing and the markers of what it means to be current are in constant flux. The popularity of comics is one site of further joy, as these texts were part of my literacy practices as a young reader and composer. While stakeholders in the film industry grapple with superhero fatigue, digital comics and manga continue to be mainstays of popularity (Benatti, 2024; Lowe, 2024). Students in my classroom autonomously engage with web comics during independent reading times, as well as graphic novels about popular characters like Blue Beetle and Plastic Man.
Critical Approaches and Boundaries
This collective sense of branding and messaging across multiple streams of meaning carries with it a series of significant questions for educators, especially those concerned with literacy. Rather than ask the question of how to stay relevant, I am curious about what is already continuously relevant about our pedagogy and about the series of actions and practices which result in or add to literacy development.
These practices are not limited to reading. Last year, I partnered with the media specialist at my school to engage in a grant-funded project that allowed students to read historically-based comics, select comics for their own reading choice, and then create one-page comics in response. Students were exposed to the range of stories, from superhero narratives to memoir, and their comics reflected this variance. Some composed responses included fantasy elements, while others documented friendships and other grounded experiences. In terms of composing, some students planned and developed their responses with traditional tools (paper, pencils, markers), while others used AI to brainstorm and plan their work and digital tools (Canva, Pixton) to create their responses.
My students are poised with a teacher whose positionalities exist alongside a variety of borders – completely up for popular character study alongside or even instead of the canon, yet (appropriately) critical of the ways that technology can be used to subvert multistep processes. I am an educator who is always interested in the step of thinking that occurs between teaching/assignment and turn-in.
Sometimes this means that I critique the material with which I am asking students to engage. Literacy is part of a wider ecosystem for adolescents, not an end. Older readers link engaged reading with topics that are relevant and interesting to them. VanderVelden and Apedoe (2025) recently explored the relationship of reading motivation and learning environment for adolescents, noting one particular area of importance. This area was inquiry – that is, readers needed to be engaged in an inquisitive set of discovery and problem-solving practices in order to be motivated. The purpose of the reading activity had to be clearly and clearly situated.
The Present and the Future
I continue to ponder and explore the best ways to teach my students. At times, I anachronistically reference prior trends to be ironic. At other times, I link my practices (like attending comics conventions) with student interests.
Literacy is also an expansive set of practices and interlinking set of ideas (Roberts et al., 2025). Effective reading and writing practices are linked within the wider space of conversations and culture, and they are reflective of the ways that people actually compose in daily life. This includes the digital and visual. I find that my identity as an educator in a cusp generation helps me bridge these links; that is, I remember what it was like to have one computer in the classroom, and to be expected to read the segmented literature presented in textbooks and answer the perennial questions at the end of the passages. I also remember what it was like to suddenly have computers at home, and I recall how these shifts only grew through the advancement of smaller, personalized technology.
I am not the teacher I was in 2007 when I embarked on my career, and I have no doubt that my instruction will change, refresh, and update along with the practices of my students as they continue to root and flow with questions of engaged citizenship, popular culture trends, and I contemplate what it means to be the educator that my students need me to be.
References
Benatti, F. (2024). Innovations in Digital Comics: A Popular Revolution. Cambridge University Press.
Lowe, S. (2024). Book review: Manga in libraries: A guide for teen librarians. The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, 5, 254-258.
Riesco, H. S., & Goering, C. Z. (2025). Italian brain rot and skibidi toilets: Students’ joyful literacies in an ELA space. English Journal, 114(6), 23-31.
Roberts, C. A., Wilhelm, A., Allred, B., & Hudson, R. F. (2025). Expanding literacy: Caregiver experiences with literacy engagement for their children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Exceptional Children, 91(3), 281-302.
VanderVelden, T., & Apedoe, X. (2025). The Relationship Between Situated Reading Motivation and Perception of the Learning Environment for Adolescent Students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 69(3), e70023.
