Just Girls

Just Girls is essential reading for teaching, teacher educators, parents, and anyone else interested in literacy learning and the social lives of adolescent girls.

“An informative book that would be most useful to junior high and middle school adminstrators and language arts teachers.”

—Roeper Review

“Signing yearbooks, writing notes and bathroom graffiti, reading ‘teen zines,’ and doing homework together are literacy events just as important as reading novels and short stories and writing in classroom response journals.... Just Girls breaks new ground by indicating how self and relationships are constituted and reconstituted through friendship, family, school networks, and the role of literacy.”
—From the Foreword by Linda Christian-Smith

“Rarely does a book make the kind of positive and lasting impression on me that
Just Girls...has succeeded in doing. In it I recognize the young adolescent girls I taught as a middle level educator in upstate New York some years ago.... In a word, Margaret Finders’ work is superb. It rings true for so many of the troubling,
but intriguing, issues of growing up female in the United States.”
—Donna E. Alvermann, University of Georgia

“Just Girls focuses on the real worlds of adolescents as they seize on reading and writing as forms of connection, disguise, conformity, defiance, and especially growth and endurance in complicated times. This book does not idealize the powers of literacy in the lives of students but examines, with honesty and insight, the capacities of literacy to help and hurt. With this book Margaret Finders complicates the formula for genuinely student-centered teaching. This is a welcome contribution to understandings about language and social life in America, a study that provides directions for smarter and fairer ways to help young people learn and mature.”
—Deborah Brandt, University of Wisconsin