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Resources
- Discussion Papers
Boys
and books: literacy and the lives of young men
Jeffrey
D. Wilhelm, University of Maine, Orono, ME USA
(with
Michael W. Smith, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ USA)
ABSTRACT:
A year-long study of boys’ lives and the role of literate activity
in those lives yielded several findings that bridged from their passionate
interests out of school to the ways in which they conceived and enacted
various literate practices. This paper will focus on the informants’
interests and how these impacted their reading and writing. The paper will
argue that four major themes emerged: a need for a sense of control and
competence, a challenge that requires an appropriate level of skill, clear
goals and feedback, and a focus on the immediate experience. This paper
is a draft of Chapter 2 of the book, Reading don’t fix no Chevies:
the role of literacy in the lives of young men, forthcoming in 2002 from
Heinemann publishers. The
research
Making the connection with ‘flow’
A sense of competence and control
A challenge that requires an appropriate level
of skill
Clear goals and feedback
A focus on the immediate experience
The importance of the social
The importance of getting away
The importance of activity
The importance of avoiding the routine
Summary
The
research Michael
and I spent a full academic year researching the lives of young men and
the role of literacy in their lives. We followed 49 adolescent boys, grades
6 -12. These boys represented a wide variety of social classes, ethnicities
and geographical areas. They spanned the gamut of literate achievement
from illiterate boys, to those who were passionate readers. We observed
them throughout the school day, outside of school; they kept logs of their
daily activities and were interviewed about these on a monthly basis;
they responded to two different instruments that ranked their interests,
and that measured responses to different kinds of men responding to literacy
in different ways in different circumstances; and they recorded protocols
to 4 stories that differed along axes of protagonist gender and external
vs. internal action.
One of our
most striking findings was that all of our informants, including those
who were considered to be most at-risk, experienced a great sense of satisfying
success in their out of school lives. If boys are successful outside school,
then it raises the question of whether it’s the context or the kids
that are to blame for their problems in school. We believe that trying
to understand the sources of young men’s success and enjoyment outside
of school may shed light on how schools can better serve them. So, first
I will look at what characterizes the activities that the boys in our
study value and see how that relates to their feelings about school in
general and reading in particular.
To find out,
we asked our participants to rank the activities they most enjoyed and
talked with them about their rankings in interviews that ranged from 30-60
minutes. I modified the list of activities to be ranked somewhat, chiefly
by specifying other kinds of reading that one might do. (For example,
we added Reading a Magazine to the ranking sheet.) After transcribing
the interviews, we coded them for the major themes that the boys raised
in the interviews .
As we looked
at our data, we wanted to be on guard against assuming a homogeneous population
and over-generalizing. The stance we took was a teacher’s stance.
When we thought about a theme, we asked ourselves whether a theme sufficiently
characterized the group that it would be a sensible starting point for
us as teachers when we planned our curriculum and instruction. We found
several such themes. We also found several important ways in which the
data suggest that our participants defied generalization. The implications
of both the commonalities and the differences challenged us as teachers
and teacher educators. Although we’ll explore those challenges in
detail in our final chapter, we’ll highlight some key issues that
our data raise for us as we discuss our data, beginning with the generalizations
that we thought were warranted.
Making
the connection with ‘flow’
Before we
present them, though, we want to turn to the lens that has helped us understand
them. And interestingly, that lens was not provided by the myriad studies
of gender that we discussed last chapter. Instead it was provided by Mihalyi
Csiksentmihalyi (1990), a psychologist who researches what he calls flow,
‘joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life’
(p. xi).
Csikszentmihalyi
begins his book with a simple premise: that ‘more than anything else,
men and women seek happiness’ (p. 1). Everything else for which we
strive, he argues, money, health prestige – everything, is only valued
because we expect (sometimes wrongly) that it will bring us happiness.
Csikszentmihalyi has spent his professional life studying what makes people
happy, more specifically by examining the nature of flow, ‘the state
in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems
to matter’ (p. 4).
He offers
eight characteristics of flow experiences that we think can be usefully
collapsed into four main principles:
A sense
of control and competence
A challenge
that requires an appropriate level of skill
Clear goals
and feedback
A focus on
the immediate experience
These principles
resounded in our data. What we found in our study is that all of the young
men with whom we worked were passionate about some activity. They experienced
flow. But, unfortunately, most of them did not experience it in their
literate activity. Before we talk about how they talked about their reading,
we want to give an idea of how they talked about the other activities
that they loved.
A
sense of competence and control
According
to Csikszentmihalyi, when people describe flow experiences, they typically
talk about a sense of control, a feeling that stems from having developed
sufficient skills so that they are able to achieve their goals. He quotes
a dancer’s exclaiming, ‘What a powerful and warm feeling it
is! I want to expand, to hug the world. I feel enormous power to effect
something of grace and beauty.’ And though chess is a much different
activity, a practitioner offered a similar description: ‘I have a
general feeling of well-being, and that I am in complete control of my
world’ (pp. 59-60). The young men in our study shared similar feelings.
They gravitated to activities in which they felt sufficient competence
that they had a feeling of control. What they were good at varied widely,
but their feeling of competence was crucial.
Here’s
Johnny on cooking:
Um,
it's kind of a way I can express myself. I like to cook for my family
and friends. They all like to cook. And when they know I'm cooking they
say, ‘Oh, I'm coming over for dinner.’ And they usually do.
I
just like cooking. It's really the only thing I'm good at.
And Deuce
on rapping:
Well,
music, I've been doing music and art the same amount of years. Since I
was young, I was doing music, and music, I just had this talent in music
that I know. It's something called freestyling or when you have just a
person just knock over the song. When people try to battle me, it's like
a big thing. You know, different artists try to battle each other. I just
look quiet, but everywhere I go, all around town, nobody can beat me.
I get respect from everybody. Everybody comes out of their houses to come
listen on the corners and stuff, and I just walk away. I know that I can
write because I'm smart. You know what I mean? I'm smart. Plus, I'm street
smart so I know I could write about some good, interesting stuff. You
know what I mean? So I'm real confident with music, and I'm confident
in my team.
Our data
also suggest that there may be a cost to this emphasis on competence,
for it keeps many of the young men from developing new interests and abilities.
Justin makes this very clear:
Yeah,
I can't do snowboarding. I thought I could, my parent got me a snowboard
for the first time and I couldn't even stand up on it so I gave up on
that real quick.
As does Clint:
Like
I try and do new stuff but I usually stick with what I already know. Like
if I try and do something new, and I'm no good at it like I won't just
try something for a minute and then say I don't want to do it because
I'm no good at it. I'll try it for a long period of time, but if I don't
get better at it, I'll just stop.
Ben feels
much the same way. He is a prize-winning mountain biker and he speaks
about how he enjoys the feeling of competence and control his sports gives
him:
Just,
I don't know, it just gives me a thrill and a sense of accomplishment
I guess. I mean it's something that I did, not something you know that
someone else did or you know it's all about if I had a good race, then
I had a good race, and if I had a bad race, well then that was me.
The same
feeling marked his mechanical work:
Um,
I guess it's just kind of a sense of accomplishment as far as you know
if I actually put something together or take something apart and
plus
I'm learning while I'm doing it. If say I'm replacing my exhaust and my
dad's there teaching me how to do it and that's something I can learn
and then I know and I can pass that on to my kids and it's just something
it's kind of like attained knowledge I guess that you can get from you
know just from doing.
But without
that feeling of control and competence, Ben does not enjoy pursuing an
activity, even if he thinks it is important:
I
don't know, something about computers, I'm really not all that, I mean
I like I like the communication aspect of computers, but I'm really not,
I don't know, something about them that I'm not--first of all I'm not
all that computer literate and second of all there's just something about
them that I'd rather, they're too complicated for me I guess.
Joseph takes
it one step further, suggesting that even within an activity in which
he feels competence, he focuses on his strengths rather than trying to
address his weaknesses:
Stick
handling is a hobby for me. I don't know if people will think--keep that
as a hobby but I'm not very fast, I don't have the, I don't have the speed
like some people do, but I'm always aware and stick handling is one thing
I'm very good at, like most people would say I'm very good at and ah,
it's something I always want to work on because I know I'm not the fastest
guy. I know I have to work on my speed, but I don't know, stick handling
is just fun to improve, it's fun to work on what kind of new moves you
can come up with and you can, it's also you can watch professional hockey
and see what kind of moves they have and try them out.
Again and
again we heard boys talk about how a feeling of competence kept them involved
in an activity. Again and again we heard boys exclaim that they would
quickly give things up if they did not gain that competence. That’s
why it was so striking that only one boy made a link between accomplishment
and reading:
Um,
I haven't started reading until this year pretty much . . . . I have been
starting novels this year because of Mrs. XXXX kinda like assigns the
homework and this is the only time it's really been due so I've been reading
pretty good novels now and I like John Steinbeck and stuff. A lot of novels
like that get to me and Mrs. XXXX's been kinda showing me the road and
the path. I kinda thought reading was dumb, but now I'm kinda getting
more into it.
Brandon goes
on to talk about the recognition his teacher has given him and the pride
he takes in recognizing his own improvement. Several boys, however, reported
that reading didn’t give them that feeling. Mark explained why he
ranked reading so low: ‘It feels like it is almost a waste of time,
because you are not accomplishing anything.’
Thus far,
we’ve focused on competence. The boys also discussed the importance
of feeling control. This came out clearly in their discussion of school.
Csikszentmihalyi notes that ‘knowledge that is seen to be controlled
from the outside is acquired with reluctance and it brings no joy’
(p. 134). The boys in our study seemed to concur, both in their discussions
of reading and writing.
Here’s
Chris talking about writing:
A
lot of times with writing I get excited, especially when the teacher doesn't
give you a limitation. Like with XXXX, we did a lot of writing assignments
with poems and what not and that really caught my
interest
because you could write about whatever you wanted to write about.
Garret echoed
his point:
I
like writing without having any guidelines to follow, just where you have
to. The only thing I might not mind having a guideline is how long it
has to be, but I don't like having a topic to write about just to make
up my own story.
What was
true for writing was also true for reading according to some of the boys.
Nathan noted the importance of control over his reading:
Sometimes
if I have already read it or if I can read it on my own. I don't like
it if I have to read it, but if I read it on my own then it would probably
seem a little better.
One indication
of the salience of the theme of control is way it provoked Melissa Larson,
a student of Michael’s who did much of the transcription for this
study. Michael began every class by inviting a brief discussion in what
he called opening circle about anything education-related that was of
interest to the students. The only time Melissa initiated the opening
circle discussion was when she brought up the issue of choice. ‘Choice
is so important to so many of the kids whose transcripts I’m typing.
I’m wondering what you [her classmates] are going to do to allow
choice.’ A long discussion ensued about balancing the desire for
choice with the mandates of curricula and desire to foster work on common
projects. From the time we began this study, our data have provoked similar
questions for us. We’ll explore those questions in our final chapter.
A
challenge that requires an appropriate level of skill
Csikszentmihalyi
notes that ‘By far the overwhelming proportion of optimal experiences
are reported to occur within sequences of activities that are goal directed
and bounded by rules–activities that require the investment of psychic
energy, and that could not be done without the appropriate skills’
(p. 49). Later he explains ‘Enjoyment comes at a very specific point:
whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are
equal to his or her capabilities’ (p. 52). The young men in our study
gravitated to activities that provided the appropriate level of challenge.
Unlike Martino
who found that sports were used as a way to enforce a particular kind
of masculinity, it seemed that the young men in our study spoke instead
of sports as a way to provide a particular level of challenge. Geo describes
it beautifully:
Because
when I get the ball - people draw things and stuff like that--that's my
art, get the ball, I like to run make moves, and like if they make good
blocks, I just read the blocks, it's like, I don't know, It's a challenge
every time and I like challenges. So, I'm just going to go up there hard,
if people are big, I'm going to run there anyway.
But the boys
didn’t have to be starting on varsity teams as tenth graders as Geo
was to have similar feelings. Wolf played on a club hockey team and his
remarks resonate with Geo’s:
I
don't know, I just enjoy it. I think I like it because what other sport
can you play on ice, you know. There is a lot more skill involved than
playing football or basketball or baseball. Not to say that those games
are not completely, totally skill oriented, it is just that in hockey
there's a lot more going on. That's more of a thinking game than it is
a physical game, despite what it looks like. I mean there is a lot going
on. I mean, yeah, there is a lot of hitting and checking and elbowing
and sticking and things like that, but that is just like minor stuff.
That's like low level, you don't have to think about that. At the same
time you got to know where everybody else is on the ice and you've got
to put yourself on the court, you need to be in a good position to make
a play.
Even when
the boys were not involved in team, sports, they spoke of the importance
of challenge. Deuce, who saw himself primarily as a rapper reports:
Basketball,
I'm not competing that much. Well, you got to compete, but I just like
playing basketball, just like playing it. It seems like everything I like
doing is proving a point to myself: How good can I do this? Do you know
what I mean? I don't never do nothing to lose. I don't ever do nothing
to lose.
We wrote
earlier about the boys’ feeling of the importance of control and
competence. But control did not mean domination. Challenge had to remain.
Aaron suggests that without an appropriate level of challenge, sports
lose their interest:
Well
gym is, we're playing badminton in gym and my partner and I are like 9
and 0 in badminton games and I think we had--when we were both there--a
total of 6 points scored on us in the 7 games that we were both there
for. So it's kind of, gym is kind of boring.
Not every
boy was involved in sport. But challenge was important nonetheless. Our
data suggest that one of the primary attractions for the boys who enjoyed
video games was that they provided the kind of challenge they found compelling.
And once again if that was not the case, the boys rejected the games.
Maurice talked
about why he likes Lara Croft:
Yeah,
they're more of a challenge. Like you have to search here, kill animals,
find keys, and find codes, and door latches, and everything. It's an adventure.
Something like Indiana Jones but she's a girl and it's real good.
And Fred
talks about why he like Zelda:
‘The
video game, like Zelda, that causes you to think a lot. . . .’
The fact
that video games contain different levels means that the level of challenge
will always be appropriate. That, Chris explains, is what makes them so
compelling:
James
Bond, when you first play, um it's OK and then I think the thing that
really sucks you into it is there is a lot of hard levels and there are
a lot of things that you can do. Um, in terms of finding cheat codes,
um to make yourself invincible. Therefore, you feel the urge to keep playing.
Without that
sort of challenge, the games lose their luster, as Barnabas, the most
passionate devotee of video games, acknowledged. The best games, he said
are:
games
that take a long time to beat. Where you can finally beat it? Like fighting
games, like they are okay but they get really old. Like if you play with
every character it is like five times and it gets old. I mean if you can
do all of the finishing moves, you do them all like ten times and it gets
pretty old.
The importance
of an appropriate level of challenge extended into schooling. As we noted
earlier, Johnny loved to cook. So he tried to sign up for his school’s
cooking elective. He was unsuccessful, but thought that was okay:
Yeah,
I cook good. I never took the cooking class here. I mean, I signed up
for it every year, but I never got it. So, but the things they cook are
like, so easy to cook, I think it just wouldn't be any fun. It's just
the fundamentals they're probably teaching in there.
The emphasis
on an appropriate level of challenge extended beyond their sports and
the hobbies. It also marked their discussions of reading in interesting
ways. Some of the boys wistfully recalled reading Goosebumps books
that they had found interesting but that now were too easy. But more often
the boys talked about feeling overmatched by reading. Grant put it this
way:
Ah,
well I like a book that isn't, isn't easy but it not so difficult that
you don't understand what is going on. Ah, because if you are reading
a book that doesn't make sense to you then you just, you know, ‘Well
I don't know how to read this’ and then you have negative attitude
and you don't concentrate and you don't really gain anything from the
experience.
Justin provided
a specific example:
Ah,
I don't like reading plays because it's hard, it's just everything is
talking and you have to, you don't have to, I mean when you've done a
page you have to look back and say OK this person is talking to that person.
Recalling
the comments we cited when we discussed the importance of competence and
control, makes potential impact of this feeling of being overmatched clear.
The young men in our study wanted to be challenged, but they wanted to
be challenged in contexts in which they felt confident of, if not success,
at least improvement. If the challenge seemed too great, they tended to
avoid it and return to a domain in which they felt more competent
Maybe this
should not be surprising. After all, it jibes with a very established
research literature on self-efficacy. Psychologist Albert Bandura is a
leader in that field. He critiques psychology for its ‘austere cognitivism,’
for its neglect of the impact of motivation and affect. Bandura is especially
interested in the ways that people’s perceptions of their capabilities
affect their courses of action. He puts it simply: ‘It is difficult
to achieve much while fighting self-doubt’.
Hundreds
of studies have concurred. In fact, when we did an ERIC search on self-efficacy,
calling for journal articles published after 1995, we found 619 entries
exploring the impact of self-efficacy in a myriad of arenas: from performance
in various school subjects, to health, to career choice, and on and on.
As Pajares points out, the area of research is abundant and thriving.
In his review, Pajares also makes what we think is a significant point:
‘particularized judgments of capability are better predictors of
related outcomes than are more generalized self-beliefs’. What this
means is that self-efficacy beliefs don’t extend from one context
to another, especially if those contexts aren’t clearly related.
Grant’s self-efficacy beliefs about basketball seem to have transferred
to his beliefs about his ability in football and lacrosse, but they didn’t
extend to his reading. Our findings suggest that there may not be a generalized
self-esteem that teachers can mine. Rather the boys in our study developed
self-efficacy beliefs that emerged from experiencing success in particular
domains.
Clear
goals and feedback
The importance
of clear goals and feedback is intimately associated with the two characteristics
of flow experiences that we have discussed so far. Without a clear sense
of a goal, it seems impossible to have a sense of competence and to identify
an appropriate level of challenge. As Csikszentmihalyi points out, sports
and games provide these goals and feedback by their very nature: a tennis
player wins a point, a lacrosse player scores (or prevents) a goal, a
video game player moves up to a new level.
Though the
activities the boys most enjoyed were different, they tended to have clear
goals and feedback in common. Gohan talked about his love for taking photographs
of sunsets. Marcel writes poems. Hasan mixed raps. Michael was learning
to play bass guitar. Ben plays Dungeons and Dragons. Nathan creates hyperstudio
stacks. Terry has taken up painting. In every case, the activity provides
the kind of feedback of which Csikszentmihalyi speaks. Gohan, for example,
need only look at his photograph to see what he has accomplished. Johnny,
who we cited above talking about his love for cooking provided perhaps
the most succinct statement of the importance of clear goals and feedback
when he talked about another of his loves - weightlifting:
Yeah,
like, I mean, no pain, no gain. There has been times when I work out so
hard that I can barely pick up an apple to eat. I'm in so much pain, but
I like the way I look at the end. I look all pumped up and everything,
and uh, I feel good. And actually, I feel, I look bigger. I like that.
This emphasis
on immediate feedback has important consequences for reading, for reading
extended texts such as novels is not likely to provide that kind of feedback.
But reading short informational texts such as magazines and newspapers
does. We want to stress that we are not denigrating that kind of reading;
however, we recognize that it is not the kind of reading that’s privileged
in schools.
Virtually
all of the boys talked about reading playing a part of their out of school
lives. We’ll explore the details of what and why they read in a later
chapter. But before we move on, we think it’s important to consider
that in the activity interviews when boys spoke of their enjoyment of
reading, most spoke about how they valued it as a tool that they used
to address an immediate interest or need. As such reading provided immediate
feedback.
Here’s
Anthony talking about what he reads on the internet:
Well
I like to go on the sports and stuff cause I like to see, I like sports
a lot so. I like to see what is going on and what's, like who won the
games and so. I like to go to Nascar and I like Nascar a lot so. I like
to see what is happening and they are like (mumble) it is just fun to
ah, find out.
And Joseph
talking about reading a golfing magazine:
Cause
ah, it's probably the best golf magazine out there and it, I mean it just
tells you ways and shows you pictures on how you can improve your swing
and if you slice the ball, it teaches you how to hook the ball so it goes
straight and it ah shows you what new balls come out that are fit for
you and new clubs that would fit you and just different things like that.
And Bam on
reading the newspaper:
Like,
if you find something that happened around your neighborhood, ‘Oh,
I didn't know that happened. I should read it.’ Stuff like that.
I didn't know my friend went to jail because he tried to rob somebody.
I didn't know that until I read the paper. They put his name there in
the paper.
And Maurice
of reading his driver’s education book:
That
was something that I thought was interesting because it helps me. It helps
me to put my seatbelt on because, before, if they see me without a seatbelt
on, they couldn't do anything about it unless you were actually stopped
and they saw you without a seatbelt on. But now, if they see you, they
can just stop you like that. So that's helping me put my seatbelt on at
all times, and it's keeping me out of ticket trouble, keeping points off
my license.
And Stephen
on reading about video games:
Yeah,
but I mean, some of the stuff be frustrating. All the magazines I read,
they say how they made the game too hard. It's true. They made the game
too hard. And, sometimes, I beat the game already and I want to see what
all the secret stuff was. I mean, it tells you where all the secret stuff
is, but I still got to find them myself. That's all. I'm just asking for
a little map.
The boys
we cite above could be described as taking an efferent stance in their
reading. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they choose texts
that reward an efferent reading. Csikszentmihalyi provides a lens through
which to understand that choice. Efferent reading by its nature provides
an opportunity for clear and immediate feedback that aesthetic reading
does not. If you’re looking for information and you find it, you
know that your reading is successful: you can beat the game or hit the
ball straighter. Aesthetic reading, the kind that most teachers (us included)
want to cultivate, is a much more nebulous thing. The focus in aesthetic
reading is not what can be learned but is rather what is experienced.
As such it is consonant with the final characteristic of flow experience
that we’ll discuss. But it is at odds with the way most of the boys
in our study spoke about reading.
Perhaps that’s
why Brandon’s comment that we cited earlier stayed with us. Our activity
interviews comprised hundreds and hundreds of pages of data, and, frankly,
without the power of the QSR NUD*IST program for qualitative data analysis,
we couldn’t have kept track of it all. But we would have remembered
Brandon’s saying how his teacher’s ‘been kinda showing
me the road and the path. I kinda thought reading was dumb, but now I'm
kinda getting more into it,’ both because of the inspiration it provides
and because it was the only comment of its sort that appeared in the interviews.
Our reading of Csikszentmihalyi helps us understand the experience Brandon’s
teacher provided him. Brandon developed a feeling of control and competence
in his reading because he wasn’t overmatched by the challenge of
school reading, in part because his teacher made the road to reading visible.
What Brandon helps us understand is that there is a social dimension to
competence, a point most famously made by Vygotsky in his discussion of
the zone of proximal development. The importance of competence and of
providing achievable challenges that provide immediate feedback coupled
with the fact that the reason most of the boys valued reading seems at
odds with the reason most English teachers value it suggests that we have
work to do if we want our students to speak of reading the way they speak
of the activities that they love.
A
focus on the immediate experience
The implications
of the way that boys valued reading become even clearer when one considers
the final characteristic of flow experiences. The sine qua non
of flow experiences is that people are so focused on what they are doing
that they lose awareness of anything outside the activity. Csikszentmihalyi
speaks of this quality in a number of ways: the merging of action and
awareness, concentration on the task at hand, the loss of self-consciousness,
and the transformation of time. A young basketball player provides testimony:
‘Kids my age, they think a lot . . . but when you are playing basketball,
that’s all there is on your mind–just basketball. . . . Everything
seems to follow right along’ (p. 58).
The young
men in our study spoke in ways that resonate with this basketball player.
They valued the activities they most liked for the enjoyment they took
from the immediate engagement in those activities, not for their instrumental
value. The boys played sports because they enjoyed them, not to win a
scholarship or to impress others. They played music or rapped because
they enjoyed being engaged in that way. And when they engaged with other
media, they did so because it made them laugh or kept them on the edge
of their seats. Unlike their reading, their focus was on the moment, not
on the instrumental value of the activity. Terry developed this idea when
we talked about listening to music:
Lately
I've been listening to a couple hard core bands, Vision of Disorder, and
um Machine Head and stuff like that. I like listening to Vision of Disorder
when I'm really mad because it helps me just like feel what I'm actually
feeling.
Maurice explained
his enjoyment of video games in terms of the way they made him focus on
the moment:
Say
you're having a problem with someone or whatever. You play a video game
or it's like a shooting game or airplane flying game. You have to take
the mission. That helps you take your mind off the stuff that's going
on in your life, and you just, for that ten or twenty - for however long
you play the game… it helps you forget that. It helps you relieve
your mind from that and focus yourself on the game.
When the
boys talked about the activities they most enjoyed, the immediate experience
was key. And as we’ll see later, when the boys who were readers talked
about reading, they had the same emphasis.
The
importance of the social
Although
Csikszentmihalyi’s work helped us understand our participants’
activity rankings, it wasn’t fully explanatory. Csikszentmihalyi
notes that ‘Another universally enjoyable activity is being with
other people’ (p. 50), yet as he admits socializing appears to be
an exception to the rules for flow that he posits. What wasn’t an
exception was how important socializing was to the young men in our study.
Michael provided
what could be a mantra for the whole group. ‘It's
always better with friends, always.’ One of the most striking
findings of our study was that virtually all of the boys in the study
report having a small close-knit group of male friends. Only 4 boys reported
having girls in that friendship circle. These friendships were absolutely
central to the boys’ lives. That centrality was manifested in a number
of behaviors that challenge conventional images. The boys talked about
needing a place where they could be themselves. And all of them had that
place. In short, the boys’ spoke of having intimate connections with
others.
Chris and
Brandon shared a sentiment echoed by many:
I
don't know. I guess just because it's the most fun, and it's easy to relax
around friends. And, you can be yourself. That's why I put it first.
There's
only like a couple good friends you know I really have. Um, one good friend
- it's just fun to you know go places. One friend I go over to his house
pretty much every day or whatnot, we're with each other and um but yeah
I like hanging out. Usually we talk about what's going on with our life
and stuff. Usually once you can find a best friend, you can talk to him
and stuff, it's usually how you want to spend your time I guess, that's
what I do. We always do stuff together which makes it more fun. Watch
a movie or just sit around watch TV, play basketball or swim or do something.
As Brandon
suggests, the emphasis on the social extended to the boys’ discussion
of other activities. Chris, who was in a wheelchair because of a battle
with a childhood illness, was one of the few boys who watched much television.
But when he did, he often did so with others. He would arrange with friends
to watch a show and to be on the phone together as they watched so they
could talk about what they were seeing.
Music, too,
was a point of contact, as Zach explains:
That's
another thing. Like all the friends we kinda listen to all the same music
and we go to the concerts together and we go in the mosh pits and we do
all that. And it's hard for adults comprehend sometimes.
The friendships
occasionally affected the boys’ literate lives. Gohan had two friends
with whom he shared poetry. Mark checked the internet or the newspaper
to keep up with the hockey scores not because of his interest but because
his friends would expect him to know. Neil’s friendship circle was
characterized by long discussions of movies by favorite directors.
The importance
of the closely knit friendship circle also affected the way that the boys
engaged with technology, especially the emailing and messaging that they
did. Although some boys spoke of how they enjoyed meeting people from
different areas through the internet, many more talked about how they
used the internet to continue conversations with the same friends that
they hung out with at school.
Not only
did the boys have friendships circles to which they were closely tied,
they also spoke of their strong relationships to their families. We did
not see the alienation from family that is often depicted in the popular
press. Fred, for example, talked of a family connection through sports:
I
like to [watch football] because that gives me time to sit down with my
step father and we like spend time, we sit there, cheer on the team, like
if we're on opposite teams, we still have fun. A family thing in my house
is like the Superbowl, he'll cook up some chicken wings, and some stuff,
and I'm allowed to stay up and watch the entire game, and like we all
sit there and cheer on the team we want to win. And it's just a fun night.
We recognize
that our population is likely skewed in the opposite direction from the
psychologists whose works dominate the discussion in the popular press.
Participants drawn from boys in therapy are likely to talk more about
alienation than those who feel sufficiently comfortable with adults to
volunteer for a project that would require them to meet with a strange
adult for six interview sessions.
The
importance of getting away
One way that
our data do relate to those that argue that boys are in trouble is the
number of young men in our study who reported feeling stress and needing
to get way from it somehow. Seventeen boys made comments of this sort
in their activity interviews. School was a source of pressure for some,
as Bubba explained:
I
watch comedies, like The Simpsons, Malcolm in
the Middle, Married With Children, those kind of sitcom programs.
Seinfeld is another one of my favorites. I just feel after a long
day of school, I really try hard at school, I really bust my hump, and
after I finish all my homework and take a shower, to relax, TV is the
best thing to go to. I got a nice large TV up in my room, so I crawl in
my bed and just put it on sleep timer and watch that until I fall asleep.
Patrick seeks
his escape by being with friends:
Ah,
I just enjoy really relaxing with my friends, getting out of the whole
school mindset and just kicking back. I go over to their houses, watch
movies, um, other activities, I play lacrosse with my friends, I play
sports with my friends, ah, but mainly just stuff that's relaxing that
I like to do. I do it to just relieve stress.
Bam was among
those who used music to escape stress:
That’s
when I like to just come home from school, I just want to sit down, just
be myself. I'll go in my room and turn on the radio.
Even those
activities that brought boys joy occasionally brought pressure as well.
Geo was an accomplished athlete, and he felt pressure to do what was necessary
to continue his accomplishment:
Because
they don't like - after that class, I go to a different class and then
you know I do whatever, then after school I got [my sport] and then I
got to concentrate on that, then after that I got to take a shower and
try to unwind a little and I'm a little tired and I got to still look
over all my work. Usually I don't do my homework at home, but if I got
something important then I'm gonna look over it, but once I get home,
I usually just watch the TV and unwind because you know sports is like
real pressure like. I don't want all that pressure to get to my head so
I think about it too much. I'll just watch a little TV.
All of the
boys we’ve cited in this section were successful, yet they felt a
kind of pressure that neither of us remembers feeling. Not all of the
boys spoke about such a feeling, but the number and intensity of those
who did surprised us.
The
importance of activity
Other themes
that emerged in our analysis were less salient but, we think, worthy of
attention. Over half the boys in the study talked about the importance
of physical activity, the drive to be doing something at all times. None
were as adamant as Robert. Here he is talking about watching a movie:
No.
I can't really sit down and watch no movie, just sit there and watch it.
I got to be up, walking around or moving or talking or something. I can't
really sit down and watch no movie for a long period of time.
And playing
a video game:
I
just can't sit down and play no video games. I'll play, like, every once
in a while. I can't play it on a regular basis.
Joseph voiced
a similar understanding:
Ah,
one, I can't sit down to a board game. Either my attention span isn't
long enough or I don't have enough patience. I can't sit still, I'm always
on the go, I mean my parents can't understand how I can always keep going
cause I mean I'll go to bed at 1AM and I'll have to get up and ref a hockey
game a 7AM don't go back to sleep after I get done with that, go right
to a friend’s house after that and go to the movies and then go sledding
or skiing and then go out somewhere that night and then wake up early
again. I'm always on the go.
Though the
majority of the boys in the study were less insistent on the need to always
be moving, many talked about their desire to avoid having nothing to do,
a much dreaded occurrence. In fact, many of the boys talked about the
lower ranked activities on their lists as activities of last resort, picked
up only to ward off boredom. For some of the boys this meant browsing
to see what was on television. On occasion it meant picking up a book,
as we’ll explore in greater detail later.
The
importance of avoiding the routine
A number
of the boys spoke of a related idea: their desire to avoid routines. As
we’ll see in a later chapter, one of the fundamental criticism boys
had of school was its sameness. Ten of the boys spoke of their enjoyment
of variety. BG, for example, enjoys snorkeling for just that reason:
When
I started snorkeling when I was probably in 4th grade or 5th grade in
the Bahamas, um, I just thought --I just had so much fun and thought it
was really cool. Like I've been to Cancun snorkeling, uh, Hawaii, um,
like scuba diving and snorkeling and different stuff, like probably every
island, British Virgin Island. I've been to the Bahamas. I've been to
Florida. I've just been to different places where I can and I'm able to
scuba dive and snorkel and like each time is different. Like here is never
two things that are the same. So I mean every time you go down a coral
is going to be different.
Charles enjoyed
camp for a similar reason:
Well,
what I like to do is see, when I'm here like now I know what time lunch
is, I know what time I'm going to go home, I know what time I have to
wake up. Up there at camp, let’s say, I have no idea what time I'm
going to go to bed, I have no idea what time I'm going to wake up, I have
no idea what I'm going to do the next day, if it's going to be hunting,
if it's going to be snowshoeing or if its going to be staying inside playing
cards and that's I think what I like, and that's what I like to feel you
know once a year.
Of course,
not all of the boys were able to get away from their routines is such
dramatic fashion. Ben offered a related view of a more quotidian activity:
game playing: ‘I play anything that's not really repetitive.’
School means routine activity for many of the boys, and some of them emphasized
the importance of the unexpected as an antidote to that routine.
Summary
Thus far,
we’ve argued that our data resonate with the work of Csikszentmihalyi.
The young men in our study sought out flow experiences and described them
in ways similar to the participants in Csikszentmihalyi’s work. Though
we found these similarities compelling, we realize our discussing them
to characterize the young men in our study is problematic for two reasons.
The first is that if Csikszentmihalyi is right, then what we are saying
about boys would be equally true of girls. That is, we realize that our
analysis cannot be used to make a comparison. We are also wary of overgeneralizing,
for we also identified important differences among our participants. We
discussed some of these differences when we explored the range of the
boys’ interests.
Csikszentmihalyi,
M (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York:
Harper Collins.
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