Disrupting Storylines: A Case Study of One Adolescent’s Identity, Agency, and Positioning During Literacy Tutoring (original) (raw)

Narrating and Performing Identity: Literacy Specialists' Writing Identities

Journal of Literacy Research, 2009

In this study, we explored ways that four literacy specialists who worked in three schools that were part of one state's Reading Excellence Act (REA) grant constructed their identities as writers and as teachers of writing. We also explored how they negotiated the performance of those identities in different contexts over a two-year period. Literacy specialists' writer's autobiographies composed during the first year and interviews conducted near the end of the second year comprised the major data sources that were analyzed through narrative analysis. Using Wortham's (2001) process of recording events and characters associated with those events allowed us to examine not only identity construction but also the performative nature of the telling of narratives through interactional positioning. The analysis explored complicated ways in which identities and contexts associated with schooled literacies aligned and conflicted, uncovering layers and intricacies of identity ...

Ethical Readings of Student Texts: Attending to Process and the Production of Identity in Classroom-Based Literacy Research

Language and Literacy, 2011

This paper highlights multimodal literacy activities that invited the social re/positioning of learners as creators of meaning and experience rather than passive readers of text. Elaborating two cases, the paper describes the ways in which newcomer students’ identities were negotiated and enacted during the project, and how their identities were read and constructed by teachers in the classroom. The paper recommends an analytic approach to literacy studies research that accounts for the ways in which literate identities are materialized in classrooms, and the value in documenting both the product and process of students’ literacy work.

Ethical readings of student texts: Attending to the process and production of identity in classroom-based literacy research

This paper highlights multimodal literacy activities that invited the social re/positioning of learners as creators of meaning and experience rather than passive readers of text. Elaborating two cases, the paper describes the ways in which newcomer students’ identities were negotiated and enacted during the project, and how their identities were read and constructed by teachers in the classroom. The paper recommends an analytic approach to literacy studies research that accounts for the ways in which literate identities are materialized in classrooms, and articulates the value in documenting both the product and process of students’ literacy work.

Positioning Students as Readers and Writers through Talk in a High School Classroom

This 5-month qualitative study investigates how one high school English teacher situated students as readers and writers within daily, spontaneous classroom interactions. Specifically, I draw on positioning theory (van Langenhove & Harré, 1999) as a lens to analyze how the teacher navigated improvised responses during three separate literacy events to position students as engaged read- ers, capable writers, and members of a writing community. This approach construes that literacy learning is an identity process in which language is a powerful medium. Results from the study suggest that teachers must be sophisticated navigators of improvised interactions to facilitate the process of literacy learning. I offer suggestions to teacher educators about how to implement criti- cal analysis of classroom interactions and improvised responses to improve literacy instruction.

Positioning Adolescents in Literacy Teaching and Learning

Journal of Literacy Research, 2018

Secondary literacy instruction often happens to adolescents rather than with them. To disrupt this trend, we collaborated with 12th-grade “literacy mentors” to reimagine literacy teaching and learning with 10th-grade mentees in a public high school classroom. We used positioning theory as an analytic tool to (a) understand how mentors positioned themselves and how we positioned them and (b) examine the literacy practices that enabled and constrained the mentor position. We found that our positioning of mentors as collaborators was taken up in different and sometimes unexpected ways as a result of the multiple positions available to them and institutional-level factors that shaped what literacy practices were and were not negotiable. We argue that future collaborations with youth must account for the rights and duties of all members of a classroom community, including how those rights and duties intersect, merge, or come into conflict within and across practices.

Just listen: Toward a pluralistic understanding of literacy learning and student narrative performance in schools and society

This paper explores some of the key theoretical issues in literacy learning and narrative performance for racially and socio-economically stratified youth. The paper opens by reviewing the work of scholars who interrogate notions of literacy as homogeneous, singular, and ideologically narrow. The paper continues with a review of scholars who analyze the importance of narrative acquisition and performance in out-of-school settings as the foundation of literacy learning. In particular, the scholars featured in this paper investigate the primary socialization groups from which marginalized youth acquire narrative. In so doing, three strands of scholarly narrative inquiry are explicated, including: (1) how scholars of narrative have defined the sociolinguistic and formalist elements of narrative. (2) The importance of narrative in relation to the making of self-identity (particularly in Western cultural contexts), and (3) The role of family structures in the construction of social reality. This paper contributes to the field of literacy and narrative research in two ways. First, by considering the acquisition of narrative as essential to literacy acquisition, and second, by understanding the multiple ways youth acquire narrative and make meaning of themselves and the world in out-of-school contexts. An understanding of both of these strands of scholarly inquiry may ease the clashes of culture and ideology that exist between students and public school teachers and administrators, thereby improving student academic performance.

Rumenapp, J. C. (December, 2014). Constructing literacy practices: Teachers researching student identities. Literacy Research Association, Marco Island, Florida. doi: 10.13140/2.1.3878.0489

Urban educational contexts are often seen as the epicenter of discussions of identity in education. Due to large--scale immigration, segregation, and clashing of teacher/student identities, literacy research in urban settings seeks to address these wider sociocultural issues. However, little attention is given to the teachers' sense making of multifaceted student identities. The purpose of this study is to understand how four teachers develop understandings of student identity through dialogic interaction. Thus, the conference theme "Dialogic Construction of Literacy" inherently frames this study as I look at teachers' construction of particular types of literacy practices, particularly those in which teachers "read the world" and "read the word" . Introduction