Ideological Becoming and the Negotiation of Academic and Personal Identities as Students Read and Write

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

Abstract

In this study, I examine how two ninth grade students position and negotiate their academic and personal identities as they read and respond in writing to an autobiographical literary narrative and a history excerpt on Reconstruction. When reading-to-write (Flower, Stein, Ackerman, Kantz, McCormick, & Peck, 1990), students often grapple with how to position themselves while signifying their relationship to the subject matter and their belonging to particular kinds of discourse communities (Gee, 2001; Ivanic, 1998; McCarthey & Moje, 2002; van Langenhove & Harre, 1999). While attending to how students express their identity positioning through the uptake of intertextual connections during reading and writing (Egan-Robertson, 1998; Hartman, 1995; Kristeva, 1986; Shuart-Faris & Bloome, 2004; Spivey, 1997), I draw upon Bakhtin’s notion of “ideological becoming” to consider how students negotiate their uses of authoritative and internally persuasive kinds of discourse (1981).
I investigate how students’ positioning, identity, and ideological becoming are revealed in the intertextual links made during reading-to-write by asking the following questions in this comparative case study (Yin, 2014):
• How are students’ personal and academic identities positioned across their reading-to-write about a literary narrative and a historical text?
• What is reflected about students’ ideological becoming, including how they position their academic and personal identities in relation to internally persuasive and authoritative discourses?
Two focal students engaged in reading and responding to two source texts through their participation in task sets, which included a reading think aloud protocol (see Afflerbach & Cho, 2009; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995), writing in response to a prompt that was modeled after a typical school assignment, and a writing retrospective interview (Greene & Higgins, 1994). Using a cross-case analysis approach (Yin, 2014), I did a side-by-side comparison of the data. First, I compared the data within each case, locating intertextual references across the different “texts”, read, written, and discussed. Secondly, I compared the data sources across the two students. Invoking an intertextual lens for engaging in discourse analysis, I located how ideas, words, and traces from the source texts were taken up in the data from the students’ task sets (Gee, 2014).
Findings indicate that students often draw upon multiple personal identities, including those related to familial, cultural, and racial/ethnic backgrounds, as they read and process a source text. However, when students write about this text, they privilege their academic identities and the use of authoritative discourse—especially in relation to audience expectations, taking on a moral stance, and relying upon texts as authoritative sources. While students may grapple with complex ideas that may be internally persuasive for them during and after reading, only sparse traces of what is internally persuasive make it into students’ writing.
This study provides insight into how tensions between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses affect the positioning of students’ academic and personal identities during the reading-to-write process. Furthermore, it raises questions regarding how educators might encourage students’ exploration of what is internally persuasive in as they write about texts.

Author

• Monica S. Yoo, University of Colorado - Colorado Springs