This edited volume supports implementation of a critical literacy of popular culture for new times. It explores popular and media texts that are meaningful to youth and their lives. It questions how these texts position youth as literate social practitioners. Based on theories of Critical and New Literacies that encourage questioning of social norms, the chapters challenge an audience of teachers, teacher educators, and literacy focused scholars in higher education to creatively integrate popular and media texts into their curriculum. Focal texts include science fiction, dystopian and other youth central novels, picture books that disrupt traditional narratives, graphic novels, video-games, other arts-based texts (film/novel hybrids) and even the lives of youth readers themselves as texts that offer rich possibilities for transformative literacy. Syllabi and concrete examples of classroom practices have been included by each chapter author

This edited volume supports implementation of a critical literacy of popular culture for new times. It explores popular and media texts that are meaningful to youth and their lives. It questions how these texts position youth as literate social practitioners. Based on theories of Critical and New Literacies that encourage questioning of social norms, the chapters challenge an audience of teachers, teacher educators, and literacy focused scholars in higher education to creatively integrate popular and media texts into their curriculum. Focal texts include science fiction, dystopian and other youth central novels, picture books that disrupt traditional narratives, graphic novels, video-games, other arts-based texts (film/novel hybrids) and even the lives of youth readers themselves as texts that offer rich possibilities for transformative literacy. Syllabi and concrete examples of classroom practices have been included by each chapter author

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Adventures in Adaptation: Confronting Texts in a Time of Standardization; Neo-Post-Urban-Noir Graphic Novels and Critical Literacy: The Hard Connection; Creating Critical Spaces for Young Activists; Teaching Students to Think Critically: Using Young Adult Literature in the 21st Century Classroom – The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963; Class on Fire: Using the Hunger Games Trilogy to Encourage Social Action; The Postmodern Picture Book: Reimagining Children’s Author “ity” as Readers; A Source of Self: Exploring Identity and Discourse in Young Adult Novels as Meaningful Text; What Mainstream Centers Cannot Hold: Growing Critical Literacy with Dystopian Fiction; Exploring the Tensions between Narrative Imagination and Official Knowledge through the Life of Pi; “Clankers,” “Darwinists,” and Criticality: Encouraging Sociological Imagination vis-à-vis Historicity with the Steampunk Novel Leviathan; Science and Fiction: A Polemic on the Role of Imaginative Fiction in Civics and the Economy of Innovation; Enacting a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture at the Intersection of Student Writing, Popular Culture and Critical Literacy; Shadows of the Past: Historical Interpretation, Propaganda, and the Story of Ender Wiggin; Critical Hits & Critical Spaces: Roleplaying Games and Their Potential in Developing Critical Literacy and New Literacy Practices; About the Contributors.