Kate T. Anderson

Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Identities: Theorizing and Constructing Opportunities and Risks in Education

ion, a bridge back to social science literatures and public debate, one among a number of potential resources for answering ‘so what?’” (p. 1). Implications for the study of identity cannot be easily realized methodologically owing to the use of inappropriate or insufficient methods (Omoniyi & White, 2006). These criticisms not only reflect the multifaceted and complex nature of the construct of identity but create room for further development of identity as a conceptual component of research on education, the ontological and epistemological discussions framing its use, and the methodologies by which it is operationalized. Ontological Debates About the Nature of Identity What has been termed the discursive turn (Harré, 2001), the crisis of late modernity (Giddens, 1991), and the information age (Castells, 2004) generally refers to a paradigm shift in how the “reality” of human communication and understanding has come to be characterized in social theory. This shift reflects epochal social changes in culture and systems of communication related to globalization, technological advances, new capitalism, and various post’s (e.g., postindustrial, poststate, postmodern) that characterize the last century. In their introduction to a recent volume on discourse and contested identities, Iedema and Caldas-Couthard (2008) characterize the various fragmentations that trouble earlier notions of identity through rapidly changing communities, commitments, politics, and hierarchies. Thus, the supposed grounding of one’s identity is less about how and where you belong and more about how transitions across contexts in the here and now render identities as boundary objects that index salient kinds of identities through behavior over time. Though far from over, this paradigm shift brings to light two heuristics that can be characterized as being ontologically distinct in their theoretical assumptions about the nature of mind and society—essentialist views of identity and social constructionist views of identity.1 Essentialist views are often associated with the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s; with psychological definitions of identity (e.g., Erikson, 1968); and with structuralist/mentalist constructions of the nature and development of the self (i.e., that there exists a unified or coherent sense of self internal to an individual). Essentialist views assume that identity is relatively stable and grounded in shared, self-evidently meaningful experiences that are unproblematically accepted (Rouse, 1995). As a result, such essentializing trends obscure the heterogeneity of individuals in identity discourses (Lemke, 2008). Criticisms of the essentialist/Eriksonian/psychological approach hail largely from those sympathetic to social constructionist views of identity, which generally characterize identity as a process embodied in social practice and not as a given or a product (deFina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006). Identity is a fluid, socially constituted achievement that is multiply constructed across micro-social (individual) and macrosocial (cultural/institutional) timescales (Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Chuang, 2004; 186 Review of Research in Education, 33 Grossberg, 1996; Hall, 1989, 1990, 1996; Lemke, 2008; McCarthey & Moje, 2002; Nasir & Saxe, 2003; Rampton, in press). Social constructionist views are associated with the discursive revolution of the 1980s and 1990s; with the anthropological approaches to identity that grew out of George Herbert Mead’s earlier work (e.g., 1934) in symbolic interactionism in the early 20th century; with Vygotsky’s sociocultural work (e.g., 1978) on how meaning is achieved through symbolic, socially constituted resources; and with sociocultural views of selves that are reflexively situated in social and cultural contexts (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007; Holland et al., 1998). In fact, social constructionism can be defined in terms of what it is not (i.e., anti-essentialist; Fenton, 1999). Furthermore, as the aforementioned global reconfigurations continue to offer new ways for people at the intersections of fragmenting social structures and relationships to articulate their identities (as well as offer new ways for analysts to conceptualize them), how people position themselves will differ, depending on the interactions that they have (Davies & Harré, 1990) and from context to context (Hall, 2000). Whereas describing the theoretical differences between these two views of identity as a dichotomy is convenient for the sake of discussion, these theoretical camps are by no means airtight or even agreed on in some respects. However, a general understanding of essentialist and social constructionist views of identity places them at opposite ends of an ontological continuum, with identity being (a) fixed, internal, and in direct correlation with measurable characteristics at the essentialist end and (b) fluid, social, and variably related to contestable and constructed categories and contexts at the social constructionist end. As with any ontological discussion, attendant ideologies influence how the object of study is specified, relative to what one is looking for, how, and to what analytic ends, and how such ideologies are or are not taken into account in analysis, which we now discuss further. Ideological Considerations The acknowledgment of ideological influences on how identity is construed and studied is often excluded from essentialist treatments of identity, where the stability of self is unproblematically assumed to exist and be studiable. Social constructionist views, however, provide a critical lens to understand identity. Writ large, such views position the nexus of identity construction in social interaction. A subset of these views, poststructuralist approaches to identity, further highlight the ideological components to identity discourses (both public and academic) concerning interfaces between and among power, social structure, agency, and the immediate and longerscale practices and events therein that compose the negotiation of available identity categories (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Rampton, in press). Poststructuralist views position ideological connections within the larger sociopolitical discourse, unlike essentialist treatments, which form an implicit ideological link between categories or actions (e.g., racial label and language practices) and identity, without acknowledging the value-laden-ness of this connection (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004). When discussing issues of risk and opportunity, as is the charge of this volume, educational Lee, Anderson: Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Identities 187 researchers who are concerned with the social negotiation of identities are increasingly considering issues of language ideology (e.g., Corson, 1993; Hornberger, 1988); the deconstruction of received categories, such as race, gender, nationality, social class, and sexual orientation (e.g., Cavanagh, 2008; Kumashiro, 2001; Moya & Hames-Garcia, 2000; Orellana & Bowman, 2003; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004); multiple and new literacies (e.g., Jewitt, 2008; Luke, 1999; Street, 2003); globalization (e.g., Burbules & Torres, 2000; Castells, 2004); and other agencyand power-related issues in the examination of identity. The complexity of social processes in the study of identity has led to other subfields of social constructionist orientations that attempt to capture the fluidity of identity constructions. For example, hybridity theory enables an understanding of how integrations and interactions based on mutual or forced influence, convergence, and mixing between cultures, language, and peoples disrupt understandings of identities, boundaries, and worldviews (e.g., Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1996). It provides a framework to understand the experiences and identity work of multilingual/multicultural persons who may cross multiple linguistic and cultural borders in their daily interactions. Hybridity is also associated with third spaces wherein the negotiation between identities can occur (Bhabha, 1994, 1996) and the “in-between-ness,” or interconnectedness, that characterizes hybridity affords exploration of identities’ fluidity and intentionality (Bhabha, 1996; Turner, 1990). With the ambivalence and contradictions that are inherent when the familiar and foreign clash, the third space offers a fertile ground for translation and negotiation of identities to happen. However, as Lemke (2008) points out, the notion of hybridity can reify categories as cultural ideals, even when individuals are positioned as crossing them, so long as the categories being crossed are presupposed. We live across categories consistently, Lemke contends, and the notion of identity as being multiple requires consideration of how identity is a construct that mediates embodied phenomena (e.g., relationships, affiliations, and lifetimes) and characterized kinds or categories (e.g., enduring structures and semiotic abstractions). This contention leads us to consider some of the epistemological issues surrounding the study of identity negotiation. Epistemological Divides in the Treatment of Identity We now turn to epistemological considerations that such ontological debates about the nature and reality of identity raise regarding the construction, development, and negotiation of identities across the institutional landscape of formal public education in the United States. There is a general implication that we draw from the somewhat dichotomous relationship between essentialist and social constructionist views of identity—namely, that how one defines the nature of identity affects the way that one chooses to study it and the techniques one uses to study it, with the definition encapsulating where it lies (in the self or in interaction), how it develops (cognitively or socially), and how is it mediated (psychic struggle or cultural power

Classroom Discourse as a Tool to Enhance Formative Assessment and Practise in Science

This study details an innovative approach to coordinating and enhancing multiple levels of assessment and discursive feedback around an existing multi‐media curricular environment called Astronomy Village®. As part of a broader design‐based research programme, the study analysed small group interactions in feedback activities across two design cycles. The goal of this analysis is to develop an understanding of the ways that a situative approach to assessment and practise supports learning. Findings demonstrate ways that student and teacher engagement in collaborative activities support and constrain meaningful understanding, which we consider in terms of a trajectory of participation in and across conversations and written assessments, as well as individual learning gains on formal classroom examinations and standards‐oriented external tests. Analyses of complementary formulations of domain concepts—discourse practises and assessment performance—suggest that participation in social forms of scientific engagement supports both learning and subsequent performance in more formal contexts. We suggest design principles for integrating the formative functions of discursive feedback with the summative functions of traditional assessment, through participation in different forms of science discourse(s).

Methodology brut Philosophy, Ecstatic Thinking, and Some Other (Unfinished) Things

A reminder: This text has been created as a series of brut and raw responses representing a collective of “impossible” imaginings. Our collective writing is not about the vision or about insights into the future of qualitative inquiry per se, but it is about ways in which some qualitative researchers wish to stay methodologically and theoretically in flux and motion. We desire to face this uncertainty, rawness, and creative chaos by engaging in collective thinking without constant and continuous purification and “cleaning” efforts. The future of qualitative inquiry is not one but multiple; thus, there cannot be one “vision” but all visions; visions on top of other visions, visions continuing other visions, visions contradicting others, visions lacking and desiring something that cannot be described, understood, or had.

Contrasting Systemic Functional Linguistic and Situated Literacies Approaches to Multimodality in Literacy and Writing Studies

Against the backdrop of proliferating research on multimodality in the fields of literacy and writing studies, this article considers the contributions of two prominent theoretical perspectives—Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Situated Literacies—and the methodological tensions they raise for the study of multimodality. To delineate these two perspectives’ methodological tensions, I present an analysis of selected recent literature from both approaches and then analyze these tensions further as they emerge in two empirical studies published in this journal illustrating each approach. Despite the fact that SFL and Situated Literacies share some underlying theoretical assumptions and are sometimes drawn upon in concert by scholars, I illustrate how they differ in their treatment of multimodal texts and practices—as well as their methodologies—research design, data collected, analytic methods, and possible implications. This article thus seeks to outline the respective contributions of SFL and Situated Literacies to ongoing research on multimodality in literacy and writing studies and to encourage a conversation across theoretical and methodological borders.

Performative Identity as a Resource for Classroom Participation: Scientific Shane vs. Jimmy Neutron.

This study introduces performative identity as a lens for understanding student participation in discursive classroom routines and potentials for fostering student agency and enhanced learning. We argue that student negotiation of performative identities can facilitate productive transformations of individual and group trajectories. This study illustrates the transitions that one student group makes as they engage a conventional classroom reflection activity across four weeks. The group leverages this recurring activity to enact a range of positions relative to each other and the normative discourses invoked by the activity. Using interactional evidence, we demonstrate how performative identities lead to the group engaging routine activities in authoritative and agentive ways. We further argue that examining group participation in light of performative identity productively frames opportunities to learn relative to institutional genres of schooling and what counts as knowledge.

Seeing Academically Marginalized Students’ Multimodal Designs From a Position of Strength:

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students’ multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices traditionally not available to lower tracked students. Findings examine the authorial stances and rhetorical force that students enacted in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author complex texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We extend arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus counters deficit views of academically marginalized students’ literacy practices by demonstrating their authoritative stance taking and enacting of layered positionalities through multimodal designs in which they renegotiated ways of knowing and doing in their classroom.

Leveraging Researcher Reflexivity to Consider a Classroom Event over Time: Reflexive Discourse Analysis of "What Counts".

Abstract This article presents a reflexive and critical discourse analysis of classroom events that grew out of a cross-cultural partnership with a secondary school teacher in Singapore. I aim to illuminate how differences between researcher and teacher assumptions about what participation in classroom activities should look like came into high relief when put into practice. To better understand these differences, I consider the sources and outcomes of what I initially experienced as a visceral tension while observing a series of classroom events as part of a unit that our research team co-designed with a partner teacher. I consider my researcher assumptions, both initial and retrospective, and their role in shaping and sometimes clouding my analytic lens. This article considers multiple vantage points on what comes to be valued, and how, in educational research contexts. By tracing analyses across stages of research, I illustrate how observable moments in time are not phenomena unto themselves but rather are part of the ongoing, developing interpretive process. Implications speak to the importance of reflexively engaging close discourse analyses of classroom events and researchers’ roles in shaping them, during and after the fact, through transparency about the recontextualization that analysis entails.

If Mobilizing Educational Research Is the Answer, Who Can Afford to Ask the Question? An Analysis of Faculty Perspectives on Knowledge Mobilization for Scholarship in Education:

This article explores faculty perspectives at three colleges of education regarding strategies of knowledge mobilization for scholarship in education (KMSE), with consideration for the opportunities and challenges that accompany individual and organizational capacities for change. Faculty surveys (n = 66) and follow-up interviews (n = 22) suggest two important trends: First, KMSE presents both a complementary agenda and a competing demand; second, barriers and uncertainties characterize the relevance of knowledge mobilization for faculty careers in colleges of education. This study empirically illuminates the persistence of long-standing challenges regarding the relevance, accessibility, and usability of research in colleges of education housed in research-intensive universities. While KMSE holds promise for expanding the reach and impact of educational research, scholarly tensions underlying these trends suggest that individual and organizational efforts will suffice only with modifications to university procedures for identifying what counts as recognizable, assessable, and rewardable scholarly products and activities for faculty careers.

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