Being and Becoming: Memory as a Discourse of Writerly Identity

• In Event: 73.061 - Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: 73.061-1 - Negotiating Multiple Literacies Across Social Contexts

Abstract

This longitudinal research study in a multiage classroom explored time as a contextual factor in young children’s collectively held beliefs about writing as well as the identities claimed by individual writers. The research question guiding the work was: How do classroom discourses about temporality and writing discursively construct possibilities for writerly identities? Mediated discourse analysis was used to analyze the ethnographic data augmented by tools borrowed from timescale analysis. Findings suggest that temporality plays a fundamental—and often hidden—role in how children construct writerly identities in relation to three main themes: 1) writing as a mirror that concretizes “growing up”; 2) writing as an act of mental time travel; and 3) writing as a cultural tool for collective memory.

Author

• Beth A. Buchholz, Appalachian State University