ANN ARBOR—Elizabeth Birr Moje has spent more than eight years following around children in low-income, heavily Latino southwest Detroit?learning how they read, write and interact.

The University of Michigan professor has studied what motivates and what bores students in an effort to help teachers connect with them on their own level. So far, she’s found they love popular novels like the Harry Potter series and” The Outsiders,” while their enthusiasm often shrivels up and turns to frustration when most look at textbooks.

“We?re looking at this on cultural terms, norms and values,” said Moje, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in Educational Studies at the U-M School of Education.” How do we connect those interests and values? Because that’s where real learning occurs.”

The urban students she studied, primarily Latino but also white and African American, tended to be most interested in books that reflected an urban sensibility, a racial/ethnic connection to their lives, and/or examined relationships and how people interact. The youths in the sample also nominated books that had some level of suspense, she found.

“As teachers, we need to re-think our rules about telling students ?go look it up? when they don?t understand a word because it’s interfering with their fluency when they have to look up every other word,” Moje said.” What’s the bigger goal here?”

Textbooks” need to be written differently. They?re often not well structured and they can be difficult for any kid to read. Textbooks are often written for a mass market so they are very general when they need to be more specific,” she said.

Before coming to Michigan in 1997, Moje studied kids in street gangs and similarly found they had their own sophisticated, and even manipulative, mastery of language in their own world that didn?t come across in the classroom. Her latest work has followed groups of students from ages 11 to 18.

“As I have followed these youth, I?ve documented changes in their reading practices. The young women have started reading more and more novels,” she said.” They?ll come to me and say, ?I got this book on Saturday and finished it by Tuesday,? a common refrain because to them, how quickly they made it through a book is an indication of how much they liked it.

“They might have a favorite book, perhaps one their mother introduced them to, that they just love. But do they like their biology book? No. Some will say they hate it, that they read one passage four times and don?t understand it and that it gave them a headache. Consistently, we?ve found prior knowledge of a subject matters when you ask someone to understand something they read.”

A former high school teacher, Moje said she found that many people go into teaching because they love the subject area; kids are sometimes secondary.

She has tried to figure out what motivates the pre-teens and teens to persevere or to give up in the face of constant literacy challenges. Her studies, financed by the National Institutes of Child Health and Development/Office of Vocational and Adult Education/Institute for Education Sciences, the William T. Grant Foundation, and by the National Science Foundation, examine the influence of peers, family, community and cultural factors on the development skills for both struggling and successful students.

Among her findings:

? Despite popular assumptions that youths don?t read books, 77 percent of this group said they have a favorite book, could name the title, and could describe the book.

? The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling topped the list of favorites. The next most popular books cited were” The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton,” Holes” by Louis Sachar, and” Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen.

? When asked,” do you consider yourself a writer,” 86 percent said yes and described their writing as poetry, journal entries and stories.

? Cell phones, rather than computers, provided the biggest source of technology for the predominately low-income group, with text messaging a popular alternative to e-mail and instant messaging.

? Their families often had some form of cell phone, often ones with pre-paid minutes, but if they had computers, they were older ones with limited ability to go online.

? Instant messaging, a common mode of communication for middle class adolescents, was rare for low-income students primarily because they didn?t have the hardware or, when they did have the hardware, their older computers often lacked the speed to use IM technology effectively.

? When asked about out-of-school activities, those youths who were most highly engaged in a wide variety of activities were also the ones most likely to read newspapers and most likely to read and write for pleasure. While many had seen Spanish language newspapers, only the highest engaged students has read papers like the Detroit Free Press and New York Times.

? All of the kids surveyed watched a great amount of TV but the highly engaged youths also read and wrote for pleasure and participated in school clubs, religious activities, sports and other organized social groups, suggesting that although all youths watch television, television itself is not necessarily the distraction from other activity that it is often assumed to be.

Many of these themes will be discussed in a daylong symposium Moje has organized on improving secondary school teaching and learning by focusing on integrating literacy and subject matter learning. The symposium will be held on March 6, at the Michigan Union. For more details, visit: http://www.soe.umich.edu/events/als/index.html.

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