Identity-Focused ELA Teaching

A Curriculum Framework for Diverse Learners and Contexts

Richard Beach, Anthony Johnston, Amanda Haertling Thein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317607908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Alphabétisation

Countering the increased standardization of English language arts instruction requires recognizing and fostering students' unique identity construction across different social and cultural contexts. Drawing on current sociocultural theories of identity construction, this book posits that students construct multiple identities through use of five identity practices: adopting alternative perspectives, exploring connections across people and texts, negotiating identities across social worlds, developing agency through critical analysis, and reflecting on long-term identity trajectories.

Identity-Focused ELA Teaching features classroom activities teachers can use to put these practices into action in ways that re-center implementing the Common Core State Standards; case-study profiles of students and classrooms from urban, suburban, and rural schools adopting these practices; and descriptions of how teachers both support students with this instructional approach and share their own identity-construction experiences with their students. It demonstrates how, as students acquire identity-focused practices through engagements with literature, writing, drama, and digital texts, they gain awareness of the ways exposure to different narratives, beliefs, and perspectives serves to mediate their own and others' identities, leading to different ways of being and becoming over time.

1
Introduction

What Is Identity-Focused ELA Teaching?

The Trouble With Tre

Tre, an African American, 17-year-old junior, is having a difficult day. Early in class, Tre lays down across two seats and loudly states, “Man, this is too much, I ain’t doing this shit.” Rose, his teacher, has just distributed a two-page document explaining the final essay assignment responding to Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya, 1995), a coming-of-age novel set in New Mexico about a young boy’s crisis of faith between his Catholic upbringing and the indigenous beliefs his ancestors held. Tre pushes aside the directions and the outline template and does not look at them again. Later, he joins a circle of chairs for a Socratic Seminar along with nine other students. To prepare for the discussion, students were given a handout with quotes from the book. For each quote, students were asked to write both a comprehension and an analytical response. Tre promptly tosses his handout with the quotes, his journal, and the book on the floor in front of him with a loud smack. He then buries his head in his hands with his face directed toward the floor. The hood on his black North Face jacket is tightly closed with the string drawn. He stays very still like this; it is unclear if he is listening at all.

Six minutes into the Socratic Seminar, the student discussion leader sharply says, “Tre!” hoping to get his view on the quote under discussion. Tre jerks his head up as if he has been awoken, leading to some stifled laughter by the other students. The teacher steps in for the first time in the seminar and calmly asks Tre for his thoughts on a quote related to tensions between believing in a Catholic God while also believing in an indigenous god, the Golden Carp. After some prompting by the teacher, Tre asks a few questions that help him grasp the content of the quote—questions that are essential because he has not read the book. Tre hesitantly begins to provide analysis of the Golden Carp and the Catholic God as being “like the two fishies, the black and the white one, that like, need to be floating around each other?” A young woman named Cat, sitting next to him, says, “Yeah, like the yin-yang thing.” Quickly, another African American male student named Amari interjects, saying, “That’s just a joke. Tre is just joking.” In that moment, Tre’s face seems to quickly change twice—first to disappointment, then to resignation. With all eyes on him, Tre quickly elects to acquiesce, giving his “who me?” smile, then he laughs and the class laughs with him. Rose then moves on to get perspectives from other students.

But it was not a joke. It was Tre’s one thoughtful, analytic connection he would attempt to make in the twenty-five-minute Socratic, and one of the few he would make that semester. The yin-yang concept could have been a promising line of inquiry, given that the main character finds balance in his life by learning to embrace both belief systems. Since students viewed Tre’s comment as a joke, this idea was not pursued. Tre put his head back in his hands and, for the rest of the seminar, was silent.

Tre’s story brings to light a number of pedagogical questions. For instance, teachers might wonder how they can convince students like Tre to engage in school reading. Teachers might also wonder how writing tasks like the essay assigned to Tre’s class could be constructed in such a way that they excite students rather than create resistance. Finally, teachers might wonder how they can foster safe and generative discussion spaces in which a range of ideas and perspectives are taken seriously and explored. In this book we will suggest that explorations of and answers to of all of these questions—and others—begin with a pedagogical focus on identity work as central to ELA teaching and learning.

Returning to Tre’s story, a focus on identity work allows a bigger picture of what was happening in the classroom to come into focus. Within the context of this classroom, Tre’s repeated resistance to academic work and his use of jokes and laughter to distract from his lack of preparation positioned him as a “jokester.” As Tre repeated this positioning, and as his peers came to recognize and reinforce this positioning, his identity as a “jokester” in this class became “sedimented” or stuck (Holland et al., 1998). The strength of this identity is what kept Tre from succeeding in trying on a new, more academic identity. Further, it kept Tre and his peers from fully exploring a new literary interpretation—one that might have generated rich discussion, engaged writing, and genuine excitement about reading and learning.

In this book we argue that a pedagogical focus on identity can both help students gain a conscious and critical awareness of how they and others are positioned in a range of social situations in the many diverse contexts of their lives and help them transform identities that limit and constrain their learning and their lives. And we argue that, because identities are constructed, performed, and negotiated through language, narrative, discourse, and text, identity work is at the heart of the teaching of ELA.

In the remainder of this chapter we a) define and explain the theory of identity that guides the pedagogical framework we forward in this book, b) provide a detailed discussion of why identity work is central to ELA pedagogy, and c) introduce the five key identity practices that provide the basis for our pedagogical framework.

What Is Identity and Why Does It Matter in Teaching Adolescents? A Traditional “Individual” View of Identity

The very notion of identity is a relatively recent phenomenon beginning with Greek drama and reflected in Shakespearean characters such as Hamlet, pontificating on his role and purpose in life. From this period to the 20th century, identity was often defined in terms of the metaphor of the “inner” versus “outer” self. In this view, one has a true “inner” self that may or may not align with one’s visible, public, “outer” self (Lawler, 2008). In the first part of the 20th century, the Modernist movement in art and literature also promoted an autonomous, stable, individual view of identity and a true inner self that was understood to be continually in opposition to the conforming forces of “outer” society. Remnants of this stable and individual view of identity are still evident in many self-help books as well as in literature units on the “individual versus society” that focus on the dangers of conformity and the search for the true self. This emphasis on individualism also reflects a Western rejection of Eastern values related to the collective, interdependent nature of society. Such differences are reflected in contrasts between the archetypes of the rugged individual found in Hollywood Westerns, for instance, and Japanese samurai film heroes who always operated as a collective group.

What is important to notice in this individual view of identity is that each person is understood as having one true, stable identity that does not shift or change even as one’s life circumstances and experiences shift and change. In this view, the authenticity of the identity one projects to the outer world depends on how well one resists societal pressures and how closely that projection matches one’s true inner self.

The notion of the autonomous, individual identity is problematic, especially as we consider how it positions adolescents in school contexts. If we imagine each of our students as having just one true, fixed identity, then we are unlikely to pay much attention to the ways in which classroom, school, community, and other sociocultural contexts shape who students are in our classrooms. We might conclude, for instance, that a student “lacks motivation” simply because of her own internal attitudes, applying deficit thinking to fail to notice how cultural expectations have shaped how that student came to see herself at school. Returning to our story of Tre, an individual view of identity might lead his teacher to think that he has always been and will always be an “unmotivated jokester” by nature.

Notions of identity as fixed and predetermined undergird problematic labeling and categorizing of students in schools. For instance, schools routinely label students as “struggling readers” and “behaviorally disabled.” Once categorized this way, these labels are difficult to shake. The persistence of these labels reifies two assumptions—first, that students’ labels represent intrinsic, permanent qualities; and second, that changing such qualities can only be accomplished through motivation—which students are perceived as lacking. If a student like Tre is not engaged in school or is violating school rules, these actions are attributed solely to the student himself as intrinsically flawed, deeply unmotivated, or both. In the section that follows, we explain how an alternative, sociocultural view of identity can provide a more nuanced view of adolescents’ school experiences.

A Sociocultural View of Identity

In this book we draw on an alternative, sociocultural view of identity that emerged from the postmodern movement. The postmodern movement led to questions about a view of identity as individual, singular, and stable and to arguments that such a view ignores the ways in which people and their identities are shaped by social and cultural forces of society. Sociologists like Bourdieu (1984) posited that identities are sometimes collectively shaped by social and cultural constructs such as race, class, and gender. Similarly, Foucault (1994) saw identities as shaped by discourses, or institutionalized ways of knowing and thinking. For example, a person’s identity as a lawyer is constructed in part through her ability to use legal discourses. Social psychologists focused on how allegiances to certain groups influenced identities. Sociolinguists examined how language uses and categories—themselves social constructions—shape identities. This phenomenon is evidenced in social class, racial, and regional identities that are marked by dialect difference.

In questioning identity as idiosyncratic and autonomous, and in coming to see identity as shaped by “outer” forces, this “sociocultural” view conceptualizes identity as fluid and multiple. In this view, the binary between “inner” and “outer” identity collapses. People are not born with one stable, findable, “inner” identity. Instead, people construct, perform, and “improvise” identities in light of their cultural histories and in response to current social situations (Holland et al., 1998). Ken Hyland (2012) explains this well. He perceived:

Identity not as belonging within the individual person but between persons and within social relations; as constituted socially and historically (Vygotsky, 1978). Identity is not the state of being a particular person but a process, something which is assembled and changes over time throughout interactions with others… who we are, or rather who we present ourselves to be, is an outcome of how we routinely and repeatedly engage in interactions with others on an everyday basis.

(Hyland, 2012, pp. 2–3)

People take up “artist,” “jokester,” “parent,” or “teacher” identities through their social relationships with others. As Hull and Katz (2006) note:

We enact the selves we want to become in relation to others—sometimes in concert with them, sometimes in opposition to them, but always in relation to them. Our sense of self-determination at any given moment is tempered by the constraints of specific social, cultural, and historical contexts, and especially for children and adults who are members of oppressed or disadvantaged groups, these constraints can seem, and can be, overpowering.

(p. 46)

And, rather than the notion of the single, unitary self, Richard Precht (2011) describes how people may adopt different states of the self:

My corporal self makes me aware that the body in which I am living is really my own body; my locational self tells me where I am at a given time; my perspectivist self tells me that I am the center of the world experienced by me; my “I” as experiential subject tells me that my sensory impressions and feelings are really my own and not those of others; my authorship and supervisory self makes it clear to me that I am the person who has to accept responsibility for my thoughts and actions; my autobiographical self makes sure that I do not step out of my own role and that I experience myself throughout as one and the same person; my self-reflexive self enables me to think about myself and play the psychological game of “I” and “me”; and my moral self works as conscience to tell me what is good and what is bad.

(pp. 38–39)

He also notes that there are no clear, clean distinctions between these different selves, only that the fact that we shift between these states suggests that there is no single “self.”

In sum, a sociocultural view suggests that identities shift and change as we move through our lives. Further, this view suggests that we perform different identities in response to different social situations. Drawing on this sociocultural view of identity, we define identity in this book as the performance of practices grounded in a social and cultural history and improvised upon in particular social situations through the positioning of the self and others.

Our definition highlights the fact that adolescents’ identities cannot be defined solely by what we see of them in our classrooms on a day-to-day basis, but instead must be conceptualized as far more complex and nuanced. Viewing identities as performative, fluid, and shaped by previous social and cultural experiences requires us to question why a student may struggle with reading an esoteric poem in an ELA class but have no trouble reading a manual for a complicated video game. We might ask how the task of reading the poem is inaccessible to this student given his lack of knowledge of poetic conventions or the thematic issue at hand, or how the poem challenges his beliefs and assumptions given an unfamiliar cultural context. We might be less quick to assume that this student is simply a “struggling reader,” and instead acknowledge that his performance of another equally literate identity outside of the classroom may provide insights into how this student might be more fully engaged in the ELA classroom.

Our definition of identity also poses a challenge related to some of the dominant means by which adolescents are identified and understood by adults and society at large. Although adolescence is commonly thought of as a developmental and biological phase that everyone must pass through on the way to adulthood, it is important to recognize that adolescence is in fact a culturally constructed category that was—in essence—coined by developmental psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1904/2012) in the early 20th century. Since that time, common assumptions about who adolescents are and what they experience have solidified into a set of monolithic and static beliefs about adolescents’ identities. For ins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: What Is Identity-Focused ELA Teaching?
• 2 How Can Identity-Focused ELA Work in My Classroom?
• 3 Adopting Alternative Perspectives
• 4 Making Connections Across People and Texts
• 5 Negotiating Identities Across Different Social Worlds
• 6 Engaging in Critical Analysis of Texts and the World
• 7 Reflecting on Identity Development Over Time
• 8 Changing Classroom Spaces and Schools to Foster Identity Development
• Index