Revised Selves: Teachers' Identity Performances in Compositional Feedback

• In Event: Reconsidering Writing Assessment

Abstract

This study takes to the margins of the page to explore how young teachers make sense of compositional feedback in the process of establishing, positioning, and understanding their own performances of identity. Drawing on Gee’s (2000) notion of Discursive combinations, I contemplate feedback as a pedagogical move that bestrides a relationship of expression in tension with one of authority and expectation. Through a discourse analysis of four teachers’ think-aloud interviews, the study explores two questions: a) How do teachers demonstrate their own identity through the process of composing feedback? and b) In what ways does teachers’ written feedback align with and subvert intended relational identity performances? Findings suggest the inevitability of textual authority, wobble in identity performances, and constrained feedback.

Author

• Michael Cody McLane, Michigan State University