Abstract
Disenfranchised students often develop identity systems that are incompatible with their sense of academic competence and growth, undermining engagement with and persistence in secondary education. This chapter describes a classroom-based approach to enhancing literacy-related task engagement through students' identity exploration and development. The program was designed to address the unique needs of high school students from historically marginalized backgrounds but can be modified for other grade levels and populations. The program presented here guides practitioners and education specialists to integrate a sociocultural approach to identity negotiation within existing curricula. Beyond enhancing task engagement, identity work in classroom settings has the potential to build student agency and wellbeing and increase the likelihood that students will develop academic identities such as reader and writer.
TopIntroduction
Students’ positionality within the education system often plays a significant role in their inclination to engage with (or disengage from) daily learning events. One important construct that helps shape this positionality is the student’s interconnected network of identities. For example, a student may be simultaneously negotiating the interrelationship of identities like son, street smart, math whiz, Black, and loyal friend (Vignoles et al., 2011). A student’s system of identities is connected to their academic motivation in the learning context, with certain identities becoming more salient as the student experiences and responds to stimuli within the setting (Oyserman, 2015). This chapter addresses issues of literacy motivation through an identity-based approach that acknowledges and values students’ lived realities in and out of school. Research points to a steady decrease in reading motivation as United States students ascend in grade level, a phenomenon that appears to be more pronounced in students from historically marginalized populations (NAEP, 2019; Wigfield, et al., 2016). Although researchers have identified contextual and motivational factors as critical to addressing low literacy (Wigfield, et al., 2016), effective classroom-based approaches that address motivation remain limited, and often fail to resonate with the students who need them most.
The chapter first considers why identity work is important for students who experience alienation in academic contexts. Next, it examines identity negotiation in the context of literacy focused settings, giving particular attention to the role that developing students’ writing voice can play in identity construction, a formative engagement factor. It then describes the design and scope of an ongoing program within one 11th and one 12th grade English course in a North Philadelphia public school. The author positions her curricular design within a set of conceptual principles that informed its creation: the PRESS for Exploration model (Kaplan et al., 2014), and within the conceptual framework that guides her analysis: the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI; Kaplan & Garner, 2017). The chapter ends by providing recommendations for the design and implementation of identity development programs in educational settings, and discusses directions for future identity research in literacy focused settings. Throughout the chapter the author applies a sociocultural lens to the construct of literacy engagement within historically marginalized populations.
Key Terms in this Chapter
System of Identities: An overarching term for the dynamic and emergent plurality of identities held by an individual at any given time.
Identity Exploration: The process of, or evidence of self-reflective processes likely to precede identity development.
Authentic Writing Voice: A voice cultivated by a writer or emerging writer; is developed over time productive struggle to achieve written discourse characterized by clarity and purpose, and is grounded in what the individual is familiar with.
Identity: The pliant but governable system of interrelated notions of self held by an individual.
Identity Development: The process of, or evidence of change within a person’s system of identities such as an increased level of integration among two identities.
Identity Congruence: A state of connection or alignment among otherwise separate identities within a system of identities (e.g., school identity and home identity).
Voice: An emergent and situated quality of written discourse that helps signify the agency, intentions, perceived competence, and ethos of a writer or emerging writer.