“Nothing in the world like me”: Adolescent identities and critical literacy in linguistic schoolscapes

This paper investigates how adolescent identities are constructed through verbal and visual resources in schoolscape texts, focusing on student-produced desk inscriptions in a Greek secondary school. By utilizing a synthetic framework for the discursive analysis of identity in combination with tools from the Grammar of Visual Design, the analysis shows how students mobilize youth cultural resources, such as rap discourse, football fandom, and graffiti aesthetics, to construct collective identities, express affect, and position themselves in relation to institutional and social norms. Building on these findings, the study demonstrates how schoolscape analysis can inform the design of a critical literacy programme for the teaching of Modern Greek Language, implemented during the 2020–2021 school year, and grounded in the pedagogy of multiliteracies. Insights from the analysis were translated into pedagogical choices, including the use of familiar multimodal texts, the critical examination of intertextual and ideological meanings, and the production of students’ own verbal and visual designs. Evidence from the teaching implementation indicates that students engaged critically with how identities and ideologies are constructed in multimodal texts and with broader social issues, while participating in collaborative meaning-making practices. Overall, it is shown how the analysis of informal, student-generated texts can serve as a concrete basis for critical literacy pedagogy, bridging everyday meaning-making practices and formal curriculum design.