Critical Memoir and Identity Formation: Being, Belonging, Becoming.” In Critical Expressivist Practices in the College Writing Classroom. Eds. Roseanne Gatto and Tara Roeder. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2014, 55-68. (original) (raw)

Critical Memoir and Identity Formation

Critique can function as more than a scholarly pursuit; it can become a valued skill for surviving as an outsider within an academic context. Because universities are complex, largely reproductive systems, being a hard worker and following the rules does not necessarily lead to reward or even much notice. Increasing demands and multiple layers of political machinations foster disillusionment and alienation. Participating in programs, grants, and other initiatives only increases the perils, not to mention running the gauntlet of publishing and tenure. As egotistical as I may be, it is best to remember that the academic universe is not the only place fraught with crushing hegemonic pressures. Being a parent, teenager, or restaurant server all necessitate the ability to analyze the forces that impose limitations and subvert one's agency to author ethical, answerable acts. Fortunately, critique has long been expressed through many productive means such as music, cartoons, jokes, parodies, postings on social media, clothes, hair styles, body art, gestures, and of course, various types of composing and writing.

Critical Memoir and Identity Formation: Being, Belonging, Becoming

2014

Critique can function as more than a scholarly pursuit; it can become a valued skill for surviving as an outsider within an academic context. Because universities are complex, largely reproductive systems, being a hard worker and following the rules does not necessarily lead to reward or even much notice. Increasing demands and multiple layers of political machinations foster disillusionment and alienation. Participating in programs, grants, and other initiatives only increases the perils, not to mention running the gauntlet of publishing and tenure. As egotistical as I may be, it is best to remember that the academic universe is not the only place fraught with crushing hegemonic pressures. Being a parent, teenager, or restaurant server all necessitate the ability to analyze the forces that impose limitations and subvert one’s agency to author ethical, answerable acts. Fortunately, critique has long been expressed through many productive means such as music, cartoons, jokes, parodie...

Revisiting Writer Identities in Discomforting Spaces:The Envisioned Self in Writing

Alternation - Interdisciplianry Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa

This paper explores shifts in students' writer identities in a tumultuous South African higher education context. Within the Humanities Extended Curriculum Programme, our transformation agenda triggers tensions between assimilationist and disruptive approaches to teaching writing. On our course, attempts are made to ease student's acquisition of discipline-specific writing norms, while encouraging them to draw on their brought-along resources, a negotiation causing discomfort. We invite such discomfort as productive, and ask: How do discomforting spaces inflect on our understanding of writing and writer identities? We invite students to write reflectively about how the course may or may not have influenced their identities and worldviews. Drawing on Foucault, we see the reflective essay as confessional writing, and an enactment of our writing pedagogies in discomforting spaces. We argue that in such spaces, writing can create possibilities for change, particularly as students adopt an ethical stand in their writing, calling us to reconceptualise writer identities. We apply Biko's (2017) 'envisioned self' concept to capture the ethical dimension in students' writing, by introducing a new layer of Clark and Ivanic's (1997) clover model of writer identity. Our paper contributes conceptually to existing views of writer identities, with implications for writing pedagogies in the current context.

Options of identity in a academic writing

ELT Journal , 2002

Students often see academic writing as an alien form of literacy designed to disguise the au-thor and deal directly with facts. Style guides and textbooks commonly portray scholarly writing as a kind of impersonal, faceless discourse and EAP teachers direct students to re-move themselves from their texts. But how realistic is this advice? In this article I briefly ex-plore the most visible expression of a writer’s presence in a text: the use of exclusive first person pronouns. I show that not all disciplines follow the same conventions of impersonality and that there is actually considerable scope for the negotiation of identity in academic writ-ing. I argue that by treating academic discourse as uniformly impersonal we actually do a dis-service to our students and, as teachers, we might better assist them by raising their awareness of the options available to them as writers.

Options of identity in academic writing

Elt Journal, 2002

Students often see academic writing as an alien form of literacy designed to disguise the author and deal directly with facts. Style guides and textbooks commonly portray scholarly writing as a kind of impersonal, faceless discourse and EAP teachers direct students to remove themselves from their texts. But how realistic is this advice? In this article I briefly explore the most visible expression of a writer's presence in a text: the use of exclusive first person pronouns. I show that not all disciplines follow the same conventions of impersonality and that there is actually considerable scope for the negotiation of identity in academic writing. I argue that by treating academic discourse as uniformly impersonal we actually do a disservice to our students and, as teachers, we might better assist them by raising their awareness of the options available to them as writers.

The Role of Counter Narratives in the Renegotiation of Identity: A Curricular Perspective

Teacher identity resides in the foundational beliefs and assumptions educators have about teaching and learning. These beliefs and assumptions develop both inside and outside of the classroom, blurring the lines between the professional and the personal. Locating identity in autobiographical inquiry, and attentive to the centrality of narrative within this framework, I employ writing as a way of knowing to explore identity as a narrative construct and to examine the role of counter narratives in the re/negotiation of identity.

Researching Identity Through Narrative Approaches

2014

This chapter discusses the development of narrative approaches in the study of identity formation and change in educational linguistics. Narrative approaches are promising for examining identity because they allow researchers to study how people position themselves in relation to larger societal structures and macrolevel discourses. Narratives can be analyzed to study identities as they relate to ideological topics such as beliefs and attitudes, and they are especially well suited for identifying the discursive positions that individuals take up in the stories they tell when making sense of their own and others’ lives. In educational linguistics, narratives have become increasingly used to understand how people negotiate their identities in classrooms and in their everyday life. The analysis of narrative encompasses both life history autobiographic narratives as well as more interactionally contextualized narratives that take place in educational contexts. Those who are interested i...