Drawing on scholarship in critical youth studies (CYS), students in the author's young adult literature (YAL) course for English teacher candidates critically analyze popular culture and YAL texts in ways that make visible dominant and deficit ideas about adolescents/ce and help teacher candidates imagine alternative expectations for their future students, as well as for themselves as future teachers. In this article, the author describes activities and assignments that have worked well. Although the course is designed for the college level, the activities and assignments described could also be used or adapted for secondary English classrooms. Critiquing dominant images of adolescence with secondary students is important for its potential to empower students to question underlying ideologies of texts, reflecting on--and perhaps resisting--ways they, as adolescents themselves, experience limiting notions of adolescents/ce in their own lives.