Showing Myself: Identity and Writing in a Classroom Workshop

• In Event: Public Writing: Performing Writing Identities Across Contexts

Abstract

Perspectives and Objectives
Literacy researchers have renewed calls for new design in classroom writing pedagogy. Current secondary classrooms often employ summary-based writing genres (Applebee & Langer, 2009) and curricula that focus on reading (Yancey, 2009) and conventions (Dyson, 2006). Such teaching does little to develop complex 21st-century skills such as communication, collaboration, and creativity. Thus, new curricula seek to disrupt the typical "vertical" model of teachers calling on students to create opportunities for "horizontal" peer-to-peer collaborative work (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012).

Such shifts transform classroom writing assignments into public documents, but little research has considered how this change affects students’ sense of their writerly identities, available audiences, and writing goals. Introducing "horizontal" writing highlights how young writers build viable social writerly identities (Côté & Levine, 2002) by sharing writing and critique. This paper considers how young writers see themselves and their readers, how their readers see them, and how these self-images lead them to align with or distrust classroom writing communities.

Methods
This analysis examines students’ descriptions of themselves as writers and their writing as "public" during their classroom writing workshop. Data, first analyzed through provisional coding and then consolidated into major themes (Boyatzis, 1998; Miles & Huberman, 1994), are drawn from a larger study (Author, 2010, 2013) that follows ten 11th grade students (all names are pseudonyms) through an extended ELA creative writing project at a K-12 college preparatory school. Participant observations totaled ~15 hours over ten weeks. This piece focuses on the young writers’ semi-structured interview reflections, although limited observational and writing draft data will contextualize participants’ comments.

Findings
Observations and analyses indicate from the beginning of the project, “identity” and “public writing” became central classroom themes because many students wrote about personal experiences. Mr. Caswell, their teacher, urged them to consider how much information they wanted to share with classmates in an essentially public setting, but many persisted. This paper will highlight four young writers who wrote personal pieces and the intersection of this sharing and developing writerly identities. In short, writing that communicated about emotional topics was fraught. Students who wrote emotional pieces described writing to understand their feelings and experiences, but often sought to minimize uncomfortable details that their teacher and schoolmates might question. The young writers’ reactions to these experiences varied from backing away from writing to avoid showing too much, to embracing writing—and seeing themselves as writers—to better communicate experiences for readers.

Significance
This study examines how adolescents build cohesive social identities intertextually and across settings and relationships (Côté & Levine, 2002). The young writers in this classroom workshop engaged in several key tasks: writing development, collaboration, creativity, and personal reflection. Teachers and curriculum designers can support these processes by creating “horizontal” opportunities (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) for students to communicate with readers through writing, but the public nature of classrooms and critique raises questions about personal identity and how to help adolescents think critically about sharing information with an audience.

Author

• Alecia Marie Magnifico, University of New Hampshire