"I Imagine Their Bodies Writing All That I Am": Developing Writing and Identities Across Contexts

• In Event: Revisiting Literacies and Identities: Agency, Intertextuality, and Positioning in Learning Spaces

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a two-year study that examined four young men’s writing development as they traversed school, out-of-school and online contexts. Across the time of the study, the young men were actively engaged in shaping their writing development through thoughtfully weighing the necessities, social tensions, and resources, which surfaced in multiple contexts simultaneously, with their anticipated and desired literate identities.
Designed to capture the interrelationship between contexts in which the youth learned and the activity of individuals moving within and across contexts, I focused on the young men’s ‘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, Phillips & Taylor, 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 observed contexts (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 of employing literary tropes, i.e. metaphors and emblems, to signify and explore their present concerns. These tropes surfaced in products that circulated in multiple contexts. Recursively shaping their writing practices, social tensions and the young men’s use of tropes in reaction to tensions proved to be fertile ground for reshaping literate identities. This self-work (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010) proved influential in what was learned about writing within particular educational contexts, as well as instrumental in the practices used, taken up, resisted and modified across contexts.
This paper will give an accounting of the 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 young men weigh necessities, tensions, and resources surfacing in multiple contexts simultaneously illuminates how young men shape their writing development and desired literate identities over time.

Author

• Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign