Helping and Being Helped: Negotiating Agentive Identities Across Contexts of Work

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Latinx Youth at Work: Negotiating Identity, Agency, and Communication in Professional, Community, and Academic Spaces

Abstract

Identity negotiations are a significant part of adolescence for all youth. These negotiations may be more complex for youth from minoritized groups, who are often positioned as deficient or low-status in many institutions that are supposed to support their learning and future success. Contextual factors may influence the degree to which Latinx youth negotiate identities that promote agency with regard to knowledge and expertise. The Integrating Literacies Project included data across contexts of workplace, home, and school, providing a unique opportunity to examine the intersections of identity, work, and agency. Especially salient in our data were instances related to youth negotiating identities of “helping” and “being helped” as they engaged in domain-specific responsibilities, or “work.”

In this paper, we consider the identity positions of Latinx youth as they give and receive help while engaging in work in their homes/communities, in school classrooms, and in professional workplaces. We examine the conditions in which identities of “helper” and “helped” reflected opportunities for self-authoring agentive identities related to (a) work and (b) knowledge or expertise. By identifying factors that support Latinx youths’ development of knowledgeable identities through participation in work, we aim to inform future strategies to promote agentive identities for youth, especially in institutions that have historically underserved them. The following questions guided our analysis:

1. How are youths’ identity positions of helper and helped mediated by their discursive interactions, work activities and responsibilities, and other factors within and across contexts (home, school, and work)?
2. What affordances in these environments supported youths’ self-authoring of identities related to knowledge and expertise?

Data from 10 youth included (a) workplace and classroom observations (ethnographic fieldnotes, audio recordings, work-study journal entries, work and school assignments, and informal interviews); (b) journal entries and semi-structured interviews about youth experiences at home, school, and work; and (c) open-ended survey responses.

These analytical questions resulted from emergent themes in workplace communication data and survey data about experiences at home and in work study. We engaged in content analysis to code all data for instances of youth engaged in “helping” or “being helped” within and across contexts, and discourse analysis to identify positioning and markers of agency. We used an analytic frame based on the conception of self-authoring and identities in action developed by Holland et al. (1998).

Our findings indicate that the identity positions of both “helper” and “helped” could serve an agentive function around negotiation of responsibility in shared activities, depending on mediating factors in the setting and activity structures. We present case examples and survey data to illustrate instances in which these identity positions were dynamically negotiated by youth and instances in which they were imposed by others. We note the factors that supported youths in negotiating authoritative identities related to knowledge and expertise in their homes, schools, and work-study sites, as well as obstacles to youth agency in each context. We present pedagogical implications of “helping” identities and potential directions for future research related to identity and work of Latinx youth across contexts.

Authors

• Ciara Thomas Murphy, University of California - Davis

• Kerry A. Enright, University of California - Davis