Much recent research in the field of adolescent literacy has focused on the connections — or lack thereof — between students’ literacy practices inside and outside of school. Michelle Knobel’s first book, Everyday Literacies: Students, Discourse, and Social Practice, contributes to this inquiry. Knobel uses a case study approach in which she portrays the language and social practices of four adolescents who differ in socioeconomic backgrounds, type of school they attended, and academic success. This work is one of many recent studies that expands the conception of literacy beyond just reading and writing. Knobel bases her analysis of these students’ experiences with language and schooling on Jim Gee’s notion of Discourse — with a capital “D” — which refers to ways of using language and other symbolic forms of expression that identify one as a member of a social group. This theory allows Knobel to explore the “multiple social identities and subjectivities” and interpret “what often appears to be contradictory memberships in Discourses enacted in adolescents’ lives; such as between displays of concurrent membership in academic and streetcorner Discourses” (p. 37). Although Knobel and the teenagers she studies are Australian, readers will recognize many similarities between Australian and U.S. “Discourses,” and will probably find many of her conclusions relevant to adolescents’ educational experiences in North America and Western Europe. Alluding to similarities between Australia and the United States in terms of the climate of educational reform, Knobel reminds us that any serious conversation about educational reform must consider the Discourses that shape adolescents’ everyday literacy practices.

An articulate and lucid interpreter of theory, Knobel is also a keen observer of the students’ everyday lives. After establishing the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the study in the first two chapters of this book, Knobel presents the four adolescents in fluent, descriptive language, into which she subtly interjects analytical commentary. Her willingness to share her own life experience with certain Discourses and to reflect on how this experience may have affected her interpretations makes this work especially appealing as a qualitative study. For example, in deliberating about how to make sense of apparent contradictions in the Discourse practices of one of her subjects, she writes, “I attribute some of the initial difficulties in interpreting Layla’s Discourse coordinations in part to my own close familiarity with the Discourses that constitute and coordinate Layla” (p. 152). Such reflections remind the reader of the standpoint from which Knobel conducts her investigation — that of a White, female, Lutheran academic researcher whose own teenage years are still fresh in her memory.

This collection of case studies is as much about Knobel’s research methodology as it is about the lives of the four adolescents whose Discourse practices she studied so carefully. She gives a clear explanation of the analytic method of “event mapping,” and of the other methods she used to interpret the data. She writes, “Deliberate strategies used to enhance the communicative validity of the present study include: cross-examination of multiple sources of evidence, member checks, and description of the research methodology (which includes researcher self-reflexivity)” (p. 15). Knobel makes these strategies visible to the reader when she reflects upon, questions, and presents alternatives to her interpretations of the discourses that shape the adolescents’ experiences, thus rendering her argument all the more convincing.

Everyday Literacies will be of special value to language and literacy researchers, particularly those who are interested in qualitative research methods. It may also be interesting to general readers in the field of education who appreciate a theoretically oriented glimpse into the language practices of adolescents.

S.W.B.