Sophia Sarigianides
Westfield State University, English, Faculty Member
- Young Adult Literature, Adolescence, Children's and Young Adult Literature, Adolescent Literacy, Critical Youth Studies, Teacher Education, and 19 moreQualitative Research (Education), Sexuality in Adolescence and Young Adulthood, Teachers' professional development, LGBTQ Issues in Education, English Education, Youth Studies, Critical Literacy, Multicultural Literature, Literary Canon, Gender and education, Young Adulthood, English Language Arts, Critical Media Literacy, Literacy Education, Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Theory, Anti-Racist Education, Social Justice Education, Critical Race Theory and Literature, and Class (Sociology)edit
- Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides is Professor and Coordinator of English Education at Westfield State University in the de... moreSophia Tatiana Sarigianides is Professor and Coordinator of English Education at Westfield State University in the department of English. Her research and scholarship focus on representations of adolescence in Young Adult Literature, teacher conceptions of youth, and antiracist literature instruction, especially for white students. With Carlin Borsheim-Black, she is the author of Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students, winner of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education's 2022 Outstanding Book Award. She has worked as a supervisor for new teachers in New York City schools for eight years, and as a literacy coach focused on professional development for four years in New York and in Massachusetts. She completed her Masters Degree and Ph.D. coursework in the University of California, Irvine’s English program where she also taught undergraduate English and Composition courses for three years. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA.edit
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Introduction to special issue of English Journal focusing on the role of teaching about social class in the ELA classroom.
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What might happen if teachers instruct youth directly about historically situated views of adoles- cence? This 10-week qualitative study examines what happened when a Black Jamaican English teacher instructed Black and Latino seniors in... more
What might happen if teachers instruct youth directly about historically situated views of adoles- cence? This 10-week qualitative study examines what happened when a Black Jamaican English teacher instructed Black and Latino seniors in AP English about adolescence as a construct and guided them to apply this sociocultural lens of youth to texts in English class and to their lives. Using scholarship based in critical youth studies and Butler’s theory of performativity, this study shows the effects of giving students access to alternative discourses about adolescence. This study contributes to scholarship focused on centralizing youths’ interests in literature curriculum, for the purposes of increased literacy engagement.
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Recent applications of Freud’s theory examine the social value of the lost love object as a way of understanding the suffering of non-majority groups. Rather than pathologizing the individual suffering the loss, the lens of racial... more
Recent applications of Freud’s theory examine the social value of the lost love object as a way of understanding the suffering of non-majority groups. Rather than pathologizing the individual suffering the loss, the lens of racial melancholia pathologizes the discourse that constitutes racially marked others as alien to the majority. Through a close reading of image and text, this paper applies Eng and Han’s (2002) theory of racial melancholia to Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese. I argue that texts such as American Born Chinese provide grounds for a public language for examining the suffering that ensures from the failure of assimilation as a desired outcome for immigrants in the United States.
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Teachers’ efforts to reconsider adolescence as a historically-situated social category exposes how dominant biological and psychological discourses of adolescence position youth who do not fit “proper” expectations of adolescence as... more
Teachers’ efforts to reconsider adolescence as a historically-situated social category exposes how dominant biological and psychological discourses of adolescence position youth who do not fit “proper” expectations of adolescence as abject. In this seven-month study with experienced White and Black teachers working with poor youth of color, I employ Kristeva’s notion of abjection to show how teachers’ recognition of their own complicity in the abjection of youth in their school offered them an opportunity to re-consider dominant conceptions of adolescence in their curriculum. Understanding their participation in larger discourses that aim to regulate abjected adolescents/ce, teachers’ views of specific students in their school who suffered as a result of teachers seeing them as abject created opportunities for re-thinking adolescence as a category.
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Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship that re-conceptualizes adolescence as a cultural construct, this article introduces a Youth Lens. A Youth Lens comprises an approach to textual analysis that examines howideas about adolescence... more
Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship that re-conceptualizes adolescence as a cultural construct, this article introduces a Youth Lens. A Youth Lens comprises an approach to textual analysis that examines howideas about adolescence and youth get formed, circulated, critiqued, andrevised. Focused specifically on its application to young adult literature, agenre of writing that explicitly names it audience, this article explores howa Youth Lens provides a much needed critical approach to interpreting and teaching young adult literature within literacy education, especially given the problematic representations of youth in many of these literary texts. Specifically, this article a) discusses the central assumptions thatgovern a Youth Lens; b) provides an explanation of the lens, including published and new examples and guiding questions; c) presents an in-depthcase of how a Youth Lens illuminates new possibilities for understanding The Hunger Games; and, d) offers specific implications aYouth Lens has for the analysis of young adult and other literary texts, approaches to teaching young adult literature courses for pre-service literacy teachers, and secondary literacy pedagogy involving young adult literature and media texts.
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This article--which frames the entire special themed issue of English Journal--argues for a reconceptualization of "adolescence/ts" in order to re-think the school subject, "English."
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This article shows how efforts to introduce experienced teachers to theories of adolescence as a construct become stymied when such re-conceptualizations of youth included views of youth as sexual. Though re-theorizations of adolescence... more
This article shows how efforts to introduce experienced teachers to theories of adolescence as a construct become stymied when such re-conceptualizations of youth included views of youth as sexual. Though re-theorizations of adolescence as a cultural construct potentially affect and disrupt a wide range of traits about adolescence, the trait that posed the greatest obstacle to considering a widely different way of viewing young people was imagining them as sexual. Part of the challenge of rethinking adolescence was detangling conceptions of sexually innocent youth from promises of the happiness to come from a life lived according to social norms that include youths' sexual innocence. Data are analyzed by following teachers' ‘felt investments’ to ideas about youth, as well as affective ‘jumps’ in their reactions to note when teachers felt vulnerable due to what appeared to be contested ideas about youth and about happiness. Data from the beginning of a seven-month study focuses on how teachers respond to theory and literature that challenges adolescent stereotypes.
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Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths’ consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension—and... more
Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths’ consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension—and pedagogical potential—of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial discourses of adolescence. Reflecting on six years of teaching the course at two different institutions with a strong focus on critical perspectives of youth, the article examines why students in the class would understandably strain against this curriculum, as well as what it might mean for secondary literacy curricula and secondary students if teacher educators and secondary teachers take up these pedagogical risks and sources of resistance in efforts to interrupt dominant and stereotypical discourses about youth.
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Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers' thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can... more
Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers' thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can facilitate pre-service English teachers' interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts so they might be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. The first focuses on teaching a Youth Lens in the context of a Young Adult Literature course, an approach that helps future teachers learn about adolescence as a construct and the linkages between this idea and English pedagogy. The second focuses on integrating youth into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices whereby they are " re-positioned " as experts and contributors to English teacher education. Together, these points of intervention provide ways to re-position youth systemically throughout English teacher education programs.
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Co-guest editorship (with Mark A. Lewis and Robert Petrone) of the January 2015 themed issue of English Journal focused on the role of conceptions of adolescence on English teaching.
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Full article available in February 2017 issue of Educational Theory.
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This article shows how efforts to introduce experienced teachers to theories of adolescence as a construct become stymied when such re-conceptualizations of youth included views of youth as sexual. Though re-theorizations of adolescence... more
This article shows how efforts to introduce experienced teachers to theories of adolescence as a construct become stymied when such re-conceptualizations of youth included views of youth as sexual. Though re-theorizations of adolescence as a cultural construct potentially affect and disrupt a wide range of traits about adolescence, the trait that posed the greatest obstacle to considering a widely different way of viewing young people was imagining them as sexual. Part of the challenge of rethinking adolescence was detangling conceptions of sexually innocent youth from promises of the happiness to come from a life lived according to social norms that include youths’ sexual innocence. Data are analyzed by following teachers’ ‘felt investments’ to ideas about youth, as well as affective ‘jumps’ in their reactions to note when teachers felt vulnerable due to what appeared to be contested ideas about youth and about happiness. Data from the beginning of a seven-month study focuses on how teachers respond to theory and literature that challenges adolescent stereotypes.
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Developmentalist conceptions of adolescence have been shown to rely upon raced, sexist, and classed ideas of adolescence that exclude the lives of minority youth. Yet, efforts to trouble developmentalist views of adolescence in teachers... more
Developmentalist conceptions of adolescence have been shown to rely upon raced, sexist, and classed ideas of adolescence that exclude the lives of minority youth. Yet, efforts to trouble developmentalist views of adolescence in teachers meet resistance because denaturalized views of adolescence seemingly endorse behaviors that threaten to abject young people. Only when teachers see the role that stereotyped conceptions of adolescence play in abjecting already disenfranchised youth—especially youth in their own classrooms—do shifts in thinking about adolescence become more possible. This paper argues for a Lacanian “ethics of the Real” in teacher conceptions of adolescence as a means of opening curriculum to the needs of minoritized youth. Data and implications from a seventh-month professional development study shared.
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Of all the stereotypes we work to disrupt in school—about race, class, sexuality, ethnicity—one set that remains entrenched focuses on “adolescence.” How do teachers’ stereotypical views about students impede teaching and learning? How... more
Of all the stereotypes we work to disrupt in school—about race, class, sexuality, ethnicity—one set that remains entrenched focuses on “adolescence.” How do teachers’ stereotypical views about students impede teaching and learning? How might conceptions of adolescence limit YA text choices for teacher education and secondary ELA classes?
As English Education champions the right of secondary students to access texts better aligned with a wider range of interests, abilities and life experiences through Young Adult Literature, so must teacher preparation coursework better... more
As English Education champions the right of secondary students to access texts better aligned with a wider range of interests, abilities and life experiences through Young Adult Literature, so must teacher preparation coursework better examine the assumptions teachers bring to the classroom regarding adolescence.
In a study focused on effective professional development through on-site literacy coaching in a middle-grade language arts classroom, one teacher pointed to research interviews as the most effective source of her professional growth.... more
In a study focused on effective professional development through on-site literacy coaching in a middle-grade language arts classroom, one teacher pointed to research interviews as the most effective source of her professional growth. Eager to honor her claim, yet reluctant to analyze it as evidence of “reflection,” I propose a view of research interviews operating as more form than method. Viewed through a theoretical framework stemming from cultural studies, a form-sensitive analysis of research interviews sees them functioning symbolically, carrying fluctuating, contradictory bundles of meaning in an educational setting offering limited sources of professional satisfaction to teachers seeking such recognition yet stymied by institutional opportunities to secure it.
In this professional development study, I theorize the role of “unsolicited” repetitions within research interviews by teacher and researcher subjects with a lot at stake. I presume research subjects to be fragmented and contradictory via... more
In this professional development study, I theorize the role of “unsolicited” repetitions within research interviews by teacher and researcher subjects with a lot at stake. I presume research subjects to be fragmented and contradictory via Butler’s theory of performative subjectivity. I utilize this frame to analyze a five-year sequence of data that focuses on a repeated mention of a crucial incident between my main research participant and me as classroom teacher and literacy coach/researcher. Conceptualizing teachers (and researchers) as “never finished” subjects, particularly fragile in professional development settings over-burdened by state surveillance around student achievement, my analysis emphasizes subjectivity over subject competency as a key site of professional development efforts and a heavy source of tension in such work.
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As the U.S. grapples with a racial reckoning, teacher educators need to know what education programs can do to send preservice teachers into the field committed to engage in antiracist teaching and confident that they can do it well. This... more
As the U.S. grapples with a racial reckoning, teacher educators need to know what education programs can do to send preservice teachers into the field committed to engage in antiracist teaching and confident that they can do it well. This semester-long, bi-institutional qualitative study of preservice teachers in two white-dominant methods courses for the preparation of English teachers examines the research question: What factors contribute to preservice teachers’ commitment to teaching about racism in the context of literature study? Defining commitment as a combination of intention and demonstrated ability to enact antiracism in future antiracist teaching through Love’s concept of abolitionist teaching, as well as Kant’s conception of a categorical imperative, this study identified four factors affecting participants’ commitment to antiracism: 1) knowledge about race and racism; 2) the role of participants’ racial identity in doing antiracist English teaching; 3) experience with ...
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In the United States in 1972 a perceived trend toward an economy based on “big business” slowed and then reversed itself. In other economies, including that of Europe, a similar trend was observed. All prior indications had suggested that... more
In the United States in 1972 a perceived trend toward an economy based on “big business” slowed and then reversed itself. In other economies, including that of Europe, a similar trend was observed. All prior indications had suggested that the Industrial Revolution and subsequent management approaches were leading us toward the concentration of capital and innovation that economists and sociologists had been predicting for years. Educators took note. David Birch's declaration of the importance of small businesses for overall job ...
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What might happen if teachers instruct youth directly about historically situated views of adoles- cence? This 10-week qualitative study examines what happened when a Black Jamaican English teacher instructed Black and Latino seniors in... more
What might happen if teachers instruct youth directly about historically situated views of adoles- cence? This 10-week qualitative study examines what happened when a Black Jamaican English teacher instructed Black and Latino seniors in AP English about adolescence as a construct and guided them to apply this sociocultural lens of youth to texts in English class and to their lives. Using scholarship based in critical youth studies and Butler’s theory of performativity, this study shows the effects of giving students access to alternative discourses about adolescence. This study contributes to scholarship focused on centralizing youths’ interests in literature curriculum, for the purposes of increased literacy engagement.
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Research Interests: Class and Adolescence
This article shows how efforts to introduce experienced teachers to theories of adolescence as a construct become stymied when such re-conceptualizations of youth included views of youth as sexual. Though re-theorizations of adolescence... more
This article shows how efforts to introduce experienced teachers to theories of adolescence as a construct become stymied when such re-conceptualizations of youth included views of youth as sexual. Though re-theorizations of adolescence as a cultural construct potentially affect and disrupt a wide range of traits about adolescence, the trait that posed the greatest obstacle to considering a widely different way of viewing young people was imagining them as sexual. Part of the challenge of rethinking adolescence was detangling conceptions of sexually innocent youth from promises of the happiness to come from a life lived according to social norms that include youths' sexual innocence. Data are analyzed by following teachers' ‘felt investments’ to ideas about youth, as well as affective ‘jumps’ in their reactions to note when teachers felt vulnerable due to what appeared to be contested ideas about youth and about happiness. Data from the beginning of a seven-month study focuses on how teachers respond to theory and literature that challenges adolescent stereotypes.
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Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths’ consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension—and... more
Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths’ consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension—and pedagogical potential—of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial discourses of adolescence. Reflecting on six years of teaching the course at two different institutions with a strong focus on critical perspectives of youth, the article examines why students in the class would understandably strain against this curriculum, as well as what it might mean for secondary literacy curricula and secondary students if teacher educators and secondary teachers take up these pedagogical risks and sources of resistance in efforts to interrupt dominant and stereotypical discourses about youth.
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UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Subject to form: Research interviews, performative subjectivity, professional development. ...
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As English teachers, we challenge racial stereotypes in texts, complicate discussions of class in literature, and present gender and sexuality as social categories without a predetermined set of characteristics. We grapple with these... more
As English teachers, we challenge racial stereotypes in texts, complicate discussions of class in literature, and present gender and sexuality as social categories without a predetermined set of characteristics. We grapple with these challenges to teach our students complex views of a complex world. Yet, many teachers who question and complicate these social categories often leave canned, or stereotypical, representations of adolescence untouched. By ignoring society's constructions of adolescence, teachers implicitly suggest to secondary students that dominant and mostly demeaning views of adolescence present true expectations for youth. As guest editors of this special issue, we have great concerns about the implications of re-circulating these dominant views in our English classrooms, and we see tremendous potential for students' literary analysis and analytic and creative writing to critique and to talk back to how the world sees them as youth.Why Re-think Adolescence?In...
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Abstract Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers’ thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher... more
Abstract Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers’ thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can facilitate pre-service English teachers’ interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts so they might be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. The first focuses on teaching a Youth Lens in the context of a Young Adult Literature course, an approach that helps future teachers learn about adolescence as a construct and the linkages between this idea and English pedagogy. The second focuses on integrating youth into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices whereby they are “re-positioned” as experts and contributors to English teacher education. Together, these points of intervention provide ways to re-position youth systemically throughout English teacher education programs.
Research Interests:
Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship that re-conceptualizes adolescence as a cultural construct, this article introduces a Youth Lens. A Youth Lens comprises an approach to textual analysis that examines howideas about adolescence... more
Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship that re-conceptualizes adolescence as a cultural construct, this article introduces a Youth Lens. A Youth Lens comprises an approach to textual analysis that examines howideas about adolescence and youth get formed, circulated, critiqued, andrevised. Focused specifically on its application to young adult literature, agenre of writing that explicitly names it audience, this article explores howa Youth Lens provides a much needed critical approach to interpreting andteaching young adult literature within literacy education, especially given the problematic representations of youth in many of these literarytexts. Specifically, this article a) discusses the central assumptions thatgovern a Youth Lens; b) provides an explanation of the lens, includingpublished and new examples and guiding questions; c) presents an in-depthcase of how a Youth Lens illuminates new possibilities forunderstanding The Hunger Games; and, d) offers specific implication...