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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Research in past decades has documented the significant role identity plays in literacy, highlighting the production and reception of a wide variety of texts within situated lives and meanings. This symposium revisits the tensions left unaddressed in past approaches to literacy and identity work by theorizing how literacies serve as tools for youths’ agentive (re)positionings. Papers in it document specific instances of youth negotiating identities in ways that facilitate or constrain particular writing practices; they also attend to the resources and positions available in different learning contexts. These empirical projects aim to create a more public, accessible series of arguments about the importance of the roles of identity and literacy studies in meeting the challenges of education in a diverse democracy.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Jessica Zacher Pandya, California State University - Long Beach

Papers

• A Framework for Understanding the Roles of Literacy in the Identity Enactments of Marginalized Youth - Noah Asher Golden, Chapman University; Jessica Zacher Pandya, California State University - Long Beach

• "I Imagine Their Bodies Writing All That I Am": Developing Writing and Identities Across Contexts - Anna Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• "Serious Talking": Metapragmatic Catholic Identities in Literacy Practice - Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania

• Imagination and Improvisation as Tools Toward Human Schooling - Tracey Pyscher, Metropolitan State University; Anne Crampton, University of Minnesota

• Ideological Becoming and the Negotiation of Academic and Personal Identities as Students Read and Write - Monica S. Yoo, University of Colorado - Colorado Springs

Discussant

• Cynthia J. Lewis, University of Minnesota