Traversing the “In-Between”: Developing Writing Practices and Literate Identities Across Contexts

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

Abstract

Shifts in understandings of “publics,” including interactive, potential and collateral audiences, communities with online/offline presence, and new avenues for the circulation of products and identities, complicate the study of writing and identities as performed in contexts (Moje & Luke, 2009). This paper presents findings from a two-year study that examined four young men’s writing development and negotiated literate identities as they traversed school, out-of-school and online contexts.
Designed to capture the interrelationship between the contexts in which we learn and the agentive activity of individuals moving within and across contexts, I framed this study using the concept ‘practices,’ or ideologically-framed (Street, 1984), patterned ways of using technology, knowledge and skill (Scribner & Cole, 1999) that are, in turn, producers and products of sociocultural contexts (Bourdieu, 1977). Further, youth are not merely “situated” in one single context after another, but rather, youth are mobile, (re)formulating their practices as they move across contexts and time (Leander et al., 2010). Similarly, contexts are nexuses of human interaction in which the “configurations of shared practices themselves develop” (Dyson, 2007, p. 116).
The dynamism of developing writers on the move in and between contexts, necessitated dual focus on individuals and contexts through ethnographic observation and interviews—in addition to evidence from written products—to glean the tacit ways practices develop within and across contexts. Two layers of interpretive data analysis were employed. The first drew upon discourse analysis to establish participants’ writing practices, and the second mapped the dynamics of change in those practices within and across contexts over the course of the study (Saldana, 2008).
The young men’s developing writing practices were tightly bound with their developing literate identities—identities the young men negotiated (Lewis & del Valle, 2009) as they daily crossed contexts with differing configurations of people, composing practices, and social power. Each of the young men experienced social tension in regards to their desired literate identities and how their bodies—ethnicities, gender, and life circumstances—were interpreted by others in literal performances of their compositions. The young men used composition to make sense of these tensions and their multifarious identities by developing a writing practice. Using literary tropes, i.e. metaphors and emblems, to signify and explore their present concerns, the young men crafted products which circulated in multiple contexts. Recursively shaping practices, these tensions and the young men’s reactions to them proved to be fertile ground for reshaping literate identities. For instance, the public’s circulation of products in online spaces proved particularly permeable, affording in-roads to written forms, genres and experimentation in the literate identities embodied in offline contexts.
This paper gives an accounting of the agentive, creative and critical negotiations young men made in responding to how tightly bound their identities—and the interpretations made by audiences of their bodies in performances—were to their developmental pathways as writers. Being mindful of the ways the young men weighed necessities, tensions, and resources surfacing in multiple contexts simultaneously illuminates how people shape their writing development and desired literate identities over time.

Author

• Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign