Shifting Positions: (Re)constructing Identity While Reading-to-Write

• In Event: Literacy, Positioning, and Agency: Multiple Perspectives From Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners and Families

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore how two ninth grade students—Tyrone, an African American male, and Marisol, a Latino female—position their identities in relation to the process of reading-to-write (Flower, Stein, Ackerman, Kantz, McCormick, & Peck, 1990) in school.

The study is informed by perspectives related to how language and literacy can powerfully shape how students negotiate and understand their identities (Dutro, Kazemi, Balf, & Lin, 2008; McCarthey & Moje, 2002). Furthermore, reading and writing are intertextual acts that take place within a sociocultural context (Egan-Robertson, 1998; Shuart-Faris & Bloome, 2004). Through intertextual links, which connect the “known” background knowledge from previously read texts and experiences to the “unknown” new text either being read or formed, a reader-writer negotiates their understanding, positioning, and identity (Bahktin, 1986; Ivanic, 1998; van Langenhove & Harre, 1999).

Drawing upon the method of a comparative case study (Yin, 2014), the primary research question that guides this study is:
How do students position and shift their personal, cultural, and academic identities during the process of reading-to-write?
I first employed think aloud protocols in order to capture how the students made sense of a source text during reading (see Afflerbach & Cho, 2009; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). Next, students were given a writing prompt modeled after a typical school assignment. Afterward, I conducted a writing retrospective interview (Greene & Higgins, 1994) in which I asked the students to describe what they were thinking as they wrote their responses. Together, these data sources allowed me to examine how students shifted their positioning across the process of reading-to-write.

In my data analysis, I closely attended to a number of intertextual intersections. I examined how students processed the text, prompt, and connections between ideas in their reading and writing. I explored intertextual similarities and differences by doing side-by-side comparisons of the students’ reading think aloud protocols, writing retrospective interviews, and written responses.

Findings reveal that students’ negotiations of identity and positioning (Harre & Moghaddam, 2003) could be seen in the intertextual (dis)connections made between texts during reading-to-write. The intertextual (dis)connections illustrate how nuanced changes in positioning during reading and writing reveal various facets of identity, such as being a student, having a particular ethnic background, or taking a moral stance, at different times. Furthermore, students’ personal, cultural, and background knowledge can influence their reading and writing in ways that might be unexpected. While both students had strong opinions about racism--implied as a theme in the source text--in their think aloud protocols and their writing retrospective interviews, these opinions were either not evident or downplayed in their writing, despite the openness of the prompt.

This work is significant in that it can assist educators in understanding students’ meaning making in the intertextual spaces and how what is personal is transformed into students’ notions of what is academic. Helping students to unpack their thinking in these spaces can aid them in strengthening their reading and writing in ways that are simultaneously personal, relevant, and academic.

Author

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