In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Writing from the Outside: Representations of the Outsider in Recent Canadian Fiction for Adolescents
  • Damian Tryon (bio), Gurleen Khosa (bio), Ryan Klimchuk (bio), Lovejot Mann (bio), Kieran McVicker (bio), Sol Moon (bio), and Will Stewart (bio)
Crook, Connie Brummel. No Small Victory. Markham: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010. 320 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 9781554551699. Print.
Foon, Dennis. Double or Nothing. Rev. ed. Richmond Hill: Annick, 2011. 214 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 9781554513482. Print.
Rainfield, Cheryl. Hunted. Markham: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2012. 320 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 9781554552269. Print.
Ravel, Edeet. Held. Richmond Hill: Annick, 2011. 248 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 9781554512829. Print.
Yee, Paul. The Secret Keepers. Vancouver: Tradewind, 2011. 128 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 9781896580968. Print.

Introduction

This collaborative review represents many firsts: this is the first time that I have co-authored a text with my students; this is the first time that my students have co-authored a text with their teacher; this is the first time that my students have undertaken an academic endeavour of this scope without receiving a formal grade; and this is the first time that my students or I have [End Page 127] been published in an academic journal.

I teach Grade 11 and 12 English Language Arts at Kildonan-East Collegiate in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Kildonan-East Collegiate is a vocational high school that offers academic and vocational courses to its diverse student body. The Grade 12 students with whom I am co-authoring this review—Ryan, Gurleen, Kieran, Lovejot, Sol, and Will—participate in unique and specialized learning experiences that are both academic and vocational. Some take first-year university Calculus, some train in specific trades in which they may earn Level I apprenticeship, some participate in an advanced chemistry and biology program that combines academics with work experience related to medicine and/or science, and they all study Advanced Placement Literature and Composition with me.

The following review combines seven voices that have been fused together to achieve two goals. First, we aim to communicate our experience of choosing, reading, discussing, and writing about recent young adult novels. Second, we aim to review these novels through the lens of a theme relevant to adolescent experience: we decided to unpack how these recent novels conceptualize, construct, and represent the notion of the outsider. What follows from this point in our writing is our attempt to present a collective, collaborative, and unified voice. This is not an easy feat. For the remainder of the review, we use the plural pronoun “we” to represent our multiple voices. Initially, our repeated use of “we” felt awkward and somewhat artificial, but as the pronoun grew on us we decided to move forward. In terms of our individual work, we read the novels and wrote literary essays in which we developed and argued a thesis relating to the outsider. Collectively and over a longer period of time than our individual work lasted, we made two trips to the University of Winnipeg, where we selected novels and determined the focus for both our essays and the final review through informal and planned discussions, including discussions responding to critical theory excerpts and a variety of questions about reading young adult novels in the classroom. Finally, we participated in various editing processes, both individually and collectively, and as we then assembled our words, slowly, the review began to emerge.

Entering (This Project) from the Outside

The experience of writing for an academic and professorial audience is pressure-filled. Simply put, we have never (yet) written for the kind of audience that we imagine makes up the intended audience of Jeunesse, and it is, appropriately, the discourse of imagination that became a central focus of our thinking about the bigger questions for this review. Interestingly, while this project offered us a unique degree of autonomy, especially compared to the scope and feel of some of our high-school work, in many ways this project reaffirmed our position in the relationship between [End Page 128] adult and adolescent. Our work on this review (still) situates us (back) in the role where the adult sets the expectations and shapes the parameters. It is akin to what we will...

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