College-Ready Profiles: Supporting Student Literacies With Online Profile Authorship

• In Event: Plugged In: The Potential of Technological Innovations to Improve College Readiness, Access, and Success

Abstract

This paper suggests that the profile management tools used to participate in an online social network can also support college writing readiness. The work is framed by a new literacies perspective that expounds an essential connection between academic literacy and student identity (Gee, 1996). By implication, college readiness is an identity. To become a college-ready writer is to learn and to practice how, where and when to adopt the authorial voice – the print-based persona as it were – of an undergraduate and to wield the trappings of this identity – thesis statements, supporting evidence, concluding sentences – effectively. With this in mind, instructional and pedagogical approaches to improving writing that encourage identity development may be more efficacious than the traditional model that teaches discreet, decontextualized skills, including – not incidentally – thesis statements, supporting evidence, and concluding sentences.

By way of a study with 85 first generation incoming college students, this paper describes an identity approach to writing preparation aided by online profile authorship. Two assumptions guide the logic of this research. First, online profiles – and all their embedded text, hypertext, image and video data – are intrinsically tied to real life identity formation and development (James et al., 2009; Jenkins, 2006). Second, the disembodied nature of online profiles enables students to enact identities that blend self-reflection with aspiration (Murphy, 2004, p. 225). The primary research question which guides inquiry is: How can online profile authorship support the preparation of students for college writing?

The study took place in the context of a summerbridge program that provided academic and social support to assist students’ transition to college. All program participants (N=85) had been accepted to four-year institutions with intended matriculation in the Fall semester, 2011. For the study, students used a web-based platform to imagine and perform their college-going selves using the profile functions associated with social networking. The data suggest that composing online profiles supported both psychosocial and academic writing outcomes. The activity of profile authorship made it possible for each student to play “with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving” (Jenkins, 2009, p. 4). Profile authorship allowed students to externalize the personal identity struggles that inevitably occur in the context of transitioning to college. The literacy tasks associated with profile authorship also served as online analogues to the college writing skills targeted by classroom instruction. The themes which emerge from the data moreover offer valuable information about first generation student experience and the developmental processes associated with preparing this population to write for college.

Because vast numbers of students are entering higher education unprepared to write at a college-level (Attewell et al., 2006), the opportunity to support college readiness using online social network functions represents an alternative to traditional remediation strategies that can stigmatize students and delay degree progress (Bettinger & Long, 2009). Ultimately, the information presented in this paper may be valuable to the cause of increasing the efficacy of college writing preparation strategies prior to and subsequent to postsecondary matriculation.

Author

• Stefani Robin Relles, University of Southern California