Embodying the Language of Generations: Language and Identity in a First-Year Course

• In Event: Metaphors of Identity and Literacy: What Do They Say About the Questions We Ask?

Abstract

Purposes
This paper draws on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of a first-year undergraduate sociolinguistics course in an education programme. At its heart is an approach to teaching in which reading and writing narratives about personal language histories and practices are central to the learning process. The pedagogy operationalises narrative as a tool for learning about language, the self and others in critically and socially contextualised ways. In this paper we draw on the metaphors of identity-as-narrative, identity-as-position, and then consider the potential of identity-as-assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; De Freitas & Cuizinga 2015), Author 1 introduces, to re-read identity in student narratives.

Theoretical Framework
There is often little acknowledgement of multicultural and multilingual students’ identities and ways of knowing and being as they are apprenticed into Western universities. The writing tasks students completed were designed to value multilingual repertoires and everyday experiences. Moje and Luke (2009) argue that the identity-as-narrative metaphor and identity-as-position metaphor can be integrated. The identity-as-narrative metaphor is applied to student writing to show how these metaphors can ‘clarify the "what" of identity’ and the role of literacy practices ‘in building that what’ (2009, p. 432). Identity-as-position metaphors can clarify the processes of building identities (2009, p. 432). The identity-as-assemblage metaphor considers language as a material practice, and challenges post-structural relativism, instead seeing a ‘posthuman subjectivity’ as materialist, vitalist, embodied and embedded’ (Braidotti 2013, p. 51).

Methods
This study draws on a longitudinal study from 2005-2020 of a first-year undergraduate course. The longitudinal nature of the study charted continuities and shifts in curriculum development, the refinement of pedagogical practices, course materials, lecturers’ materials and reflective notes in response to students oral and written engagement in the course.

Data Sources
Data for this project includes multiple data sets. Student narrative writing takes the form of language narratives or dialogues and critical commentaries, short texts written in class. In addition, focus group interviews were conducted with students.

Data Analysis
Text were coded to show the relationships between language(s) and identity; language(s) and culture; language prejudice. In applying the identity-as-assemblage metaphor, one text is returned to, to move beyond discourse to the material, haptic encounters that result in learning assemblages (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015, p.230).

Results
Reading samples of student writing with the identity-as-narrative and identity-as-position metaphors reveals ongoing identity constructions and reconstructions through the stories students tell about themselves. In addition to vibrant, complex identities that emerge, seeing-identity as assemblage draws attention to the ways in which our language education course has comprised an ‘unmarked’ Euro-centric knowledge that erases experiences, histories, bodies, and knowledges of the ‘marked’ other (Menezes de Sousa, 2021).

Significance
This study highlights the ways in which our own notions of identity and pedagogical practices positioned students to tell particular kinds of stories, and erased others. Seeing language as material and identity-as-assemblage requires a more care-ful questioning of the ways in which we teach about and research identity.

Author

• Kerryn Dixon, University of Nottingham