Reading and Writing Sites of Resistance: Narratives of Identity and Experience in Diverse Academic Contexts

• In Event: Multiple Literacies, Multiple Contexts: Leveraging Urban Students’ Literacies in Schools and Beyond

Abstract

Students construct perceptions of themselves and others in relation to power/knowledge hierarchies implicit in curriculum (Kumashiro, 2000), and their curricular experiences are embedded in multiple raced, classed, and gendered identities. This paper examines how three students of color experienced the academic curriculum and negotiated such hierarchies in the context of their racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse urban public middle school. The purpose of this work is to challenge conceptions of curriculum and achievement that perpetuate coercive learning environments for minoritized students by examining students’ construction and negotiation of multiple literacies and identities in academic contexts.

McCarthey and Moje (2002) propose that identities shape people’s textual and literate practices as well as “that literate practices play a role in identifications and positionings” (p. 229). According to Holland and colleagues’ (1998) identities-in-practice theory, these identifications and positionings are constructed in light of the sociohistorical, contextual, situated nature of identities through their conceptualization of cultural worlds as “figured worlds” (p. 49). One such figured world is the classroom in the current high-stakes context of NCLB, where discourses of achievement become more overt. Students are characterized as achievers when they pass standardized tests, learn “mainstream academic knowledge,” (Banks, 1993) and master the dominant “culture of power” (Delpit, 2006) implicit in the curriculum. In this paper, I examine students’ consumption and creation of texts as they negotiate the space between their home/cultural communities and the classroom figured world of achievement.

Drawing from a larger study, I focus on three eighth graders’ journals, portfolios, and interviews and use narrative analysis (Richardson, 2000) to: 1) explore liminal spaces between students’ home/cultural and academic contexts and 2) document the ways in which students resist the discursive regulation of their academic identities.

Themes emerging from the data indicate that students constantly negotiate intersectional identities and positionalities grounded in the context of practice among teachers and peers. Students continuously construct identities around intersections between their experiences in and out of the classroom--a process that is both evident in and informed by the texts that students consume and produce in academic contexts. For example, Jason, who negotiated multiple identities as a Latino male and a “borderline” good student, wrote a journal entry critiquing his teachers’ requirement that students use assigned vocabulary words in freewriting assignments as “hypocritical.” Jason’s “reading” of the assigned writing prompt starkly contrasts his teacher’s intended use of “open” prompts as opportunities for students to draw upon their own experiences in the midst of standardized test-driven curricula.

The sites of resistance staked by participants in this study complicate current best practice approaches attempting to address the needs of “all students” and demonstrate the intentionality with which students are leveraging multiple identities and literacies in academic contexts.  By promoting challenging, relevant learning experiences and pedagogical practices that are situated in students’ social realities, this paper incites educators, as agents of change, to lead the reconceptualization of traditional notions of curriculum and achievement while simultaneously working toward increased opportunities for minoritized students.

Author

• Limarys Caraballo, Queens College - CUNY