Disciplinary Literacy, Disciplining Identity: Possibilities and Constraints for Identity Instantiation Across Content Areas

• In Event: Humanizing Literacy Research: Mapping Exchanges in Adolescent Reading and Writing Spaces

Abstract

What is a discipline? The term can connote people’s work on a related set of problems using particular representational tools as they draw from particular types of evidence to make particular types of claims (Siskin, 1994; Moje, 2008). Standards documents (e.g., American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007; Common Core Standards, 2010) not only outline bodies of knowledge that are essential to each discipline, but they also outline specific dispositions, habits of mind, and practices that are required for the construction and legitimization of that knowledge (cf. McDiarmid, Ball, & Anderson, 1989). The telos, or set of end goals, for each discipline calls for a rigorous process through which a particular kind of (apparently improved) person is produced—if not a mathematician or historian, at least a person who is inclined to reason mathematically or engage in historical thinking, for example (e.g., National Research Council, 2001; Wineburg, 1991).

What happens when the teloi of different disciplines conflict with the teloi of individual students? In other words, what happens when students’ identities—encompassing their desired life trajectories, current aspirations and affiliations, and beliefs about how to arrive at legitimate and valued forms of knowledge—do not align with the goals of disciplines in ways that are evident to students or to teachers? What happens when the representational tools and dispositions preferred by students do not align with disciplinary standards? Oftentimes, students refuse to be “disciplined,” opting instead to use the ways of thinking and representing that they perceive to be more relevant to who they want to become and who they want to be known as (e.g., Author 4, in press; Cobb, 2004).

This paper addresses these questions in the context of data collected during a nine-month case study (Author 4, 2011) following a student who identified himself as Native and who wanted to be known as such by the people in his classes. Framed in theories of social semiotics (Halliday, 1978; Kress, 2010), which assert that disciplines and identities are recreated in and through texts, this paper draws from a constant comparative analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) of the texts produced by the adolescent (e.g., MySpace pages, 90% of assignments from each class) to discuss how the teloi of some disciplines seemed to allow more opportunities for the student to explicitly identify himself as a Native American. Specifically, the author begins with a description of the goals of each discipline—as expressed by the teachers and relevant standards documents—to speculate about why it was relatively easy for the student to be known as a Native in his language arts, history, and woods classes but not in his science and mathematics classes. Finally, the author identifies untapped points of connection between the student’s identity as a Native and his work in science and mathematics (e.g., making geometric designs for grass dancing regalia), suggesting ways that these latter disciplines may have provided more sustained opportunities for Native identity expression (Weaver, 2001) in ways that were still authentic to each discipline.

Author

• Amy Alexandra Wilson, Utah State University