AustLit

Nixon and Comber co-edit a column entitled 'Books for Adolescents' in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and discuss the process they have devised to make the column a 'potentially pedagogical text' (p.56). They believe that literacy education journals have an important function in schools and universities as literary reviews can operate as a form of pedagogy by educating young adults on how 'reading may be productively read and used within the curriculum' (p.57). Their purpose is to highlight how multiple reviews of a text promote discussion about '... what is educative, the context of reading practices, and the politics of publishing and book consumption' (p.58). The consequence of critical pedagogical practice, they claim, is to 'encourage people to question and challenge the status-quo and to envisage how things might be different as well as reflecting on their own practices from this point of view' (p.63).