Cynthia Lewis

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Social Identities and Literacy Implications for
Research and Practice

• Cynthia Lewis
• University of Minnesota

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• Identities are positions that we take up,
  temporarily, as though they are stable and
  cohesive.  Identity represents ways of being and
  performing as members of certain groups as well
  as the way our selfhood is recognized by others.

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Why Identity Should Matter to Literacy
Researchers

• Institutions tend to privilege a view of identity
  as a fixed, stable set of characteristics. When
  identity is viewed as fixed, then those
  individuals who do not possess the expected set
  of characteristics are often marginalized. 
• When the experiences, perceptions, and
  relationships students value and the codes they
  know are not acknowledged, they often learn that
  literacy, including reading comprehension, is an
  exclusive, limiting activity that diminishes
  their efforts to construct expanded identities

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My Central Concern

• Im interested in how literacy practices are
  legitimated, according to whose codes and
  conventions, and with what consequences.

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Constructs of Identity in Literacy Research 35
Years

• First Wave 1970s-80s
• Identity as Stable and Unified ? Learner
  experiences cultural conflict
• Second Wave 1990s-2000s
• Identity as Negotiated and Performative ?Learner
  as resourceful and positional
• Third Wave 2000s-Present
• Identity as Hybrid, Meta-discursive, Spatial ?
  Learner as multimodal bricoleur and spatial
  navigator

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First Wave Identity through the Lens of Cultural
Conflict

• Identity as cultural affiliation with stable
  characteristics
• Importance Move away from deficit model
• Mismatch between home and school

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Key Studies

• McDermott (1977)
• Rodriguez (1982)
• Heath (1983)
• Delpit (1988)
• Hull Rose (1989)

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Why Identity Matters (revisited)

• Readers and writers are constructed through
  linguistic and social codes that shape their
  identities and their relationships to texts.

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Second Wave Identity as Negotiated and
Performative

• People employ literacy practices to resourcefully
  mediate their identities in social settings.
• These negotiated or performed identities shape
  and are shaped by literacy practices that serve a
  social function, positioning the individual in
  relation to peers, family or institutional
  authority.

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Second Wave Identity and Out-of-School Literacies

• Establishes literacy for powerful purposes and
  identity representation
• Expands what counts as literacy
• Illuminates how youth are positioned differently,
  in terms of skill capacity, agency, and power, in
  different contexts

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Key Studies

• Finders (1996)
• Mahiri Sablo (1997)
• Noll (1998)
• Alvermann (2001)
• Thomas (2004)
• Lewis Fabos (2005)
• Moje 2000)

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IM Study Lewis Fabos (2005)

• Sam This girl, she thinks Im somebody else.
  She thinks Im one of her friends, and shes
  like Hey! and Im like Hi! and I start
  playing along with her. She thinks that Im one
  of her school friends. She doesnt know its me.
  She wrote to me twice now.
• Interviewer So, shes this person that youre
  lying to, almost.
• Sam Yeah, you just play along. Its fun
  sometimes. Its comical. Because shell say
  something like, Oh a boy did this, and were
  going to the ski house, or whatever, and Im
  like Oh God!, and like Ill just respond to
  her. Ill use the same exclamations where she
  uses them and Ill try to talk like they do!

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Implications of Out-of-School Literacy Practices

• Classrooms should offer a space to build on
  out-of-school literacy practices to negotiate and
  critically examine systems and structures that
  students deal with in their everyday lives but
  that too often serve to marginalize students at
  school and in other institutional contexts.

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Second Wave Identity and In-School Literacies

• Contesting institutional authority as readers
• Performing identities that resist, appropriate,
  or transform ascribed ways of being in the world
  (e.g. gender, class, and race) and social and
  interpretive norms related to texts/contexts

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• Speakers, readers, and writers take up
  positions in relation to the expectations of
  others and the social and discursive codes
  available within a given context. Individual and
  group identities are defined through repeated
  performances (ways of talking, listening,
  writing, using one's body) as participants
  perform the self, which is always in relation
  to the group

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Critical Engagement

• A stance that combines immersion and critical
  distance to develop an understanding of the
  following
• How readers position texts
• How texts position readers
• How texts and readers are situation in
  sociopolitical contexts
• (Lewis, Ketter, Fabos, 2001 Lewis, 2001)

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Critical Engagement in High-Poverty Urban High
School Classrooms

• Based on classroom responses to reviews and
  scholarly articles about the film Pocahontas
• The article discusses the concept of dominant
  culture. The teacher asks what that means.
  Vanessa, an African American student, responds
  that its the white culture and that they
  meaning native people in this case take on what
  they white people do and how they act. As the
  teacher reads on, Vanessa says Thats a lie.

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Second Wave Identity, In-School Example, Continued

• Vanessa asks what the article means by sexually
  free. The author was critiquing the films
  representation of native women as sexually free
  in contrast to white women The teacher says it
  means they are not as bound by rules and Vanessa
  quickly adds white women are holier than holy.
  Vanessa says she doesnt agree with that, but the
  teacher asks if she agrees that the movie shows
  that. Annie, who is a white student, points out
  that in the film, Pocahontas wears something
  off-the-shoulder, but that in England, with the
  white people, her dress covers her neck. Shantia,
  who is African American, says That is NOT true
  and adds, as a side comment, that white girls are
  not so pure. The teacher makes the distinction
  that this is not about whats true but about
  whether movies reinforce stereotypes. Vanessa
  says movies make stereotypes worse.

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Second Wave Identity, In-School Example, Continued

• The white students are disturbed that the author
  of the article and the students in class (the
  African American, Latina, and Native students,
  most of whom agree with the author) are ruining
  an innocent movie for little kids. Annie also
  says that if the movie addressed issues of racism
  and genocide, it would not be suitable for kids.

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Alvermann, Hinchman, Moore, and Phelps, in
describing changes in the 2nd edition (2006)

• First a substantially greater number of students
  voices are included in the second edition,
  primarily to make visible their identity-making
  practices, that is, the things they tell each
  other and themselves about who they are as
  literate beings and the actions such tellings
  induce (p. xxii).

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Third Wave Identity asHybrid, Meta-discursive,
and Spatial

• Indentities are intertextual storylines that
  intermingle, overlap, and sometimes conflict.
• Identities are networked within global and local
  flows of activity
• Identities are produced through participatory
  culture (Jenkins, 2006)
• Identities are self-constructed in uncertain
  times (Bean Moni, 2003 Gee, 2002 Wyn, 2005)
• Identities have spatial and temporal
  trajectories. They are not constituted in
  moment-to-moment interaction. (Leander, 2002,
  2004)

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Third-Wave Identity Edited Volumes

• Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World
  (Alvermann, 2002
• Spatializing Literacy and Practice (Leander
  Sheehy, 2004)
• What They Dont Learn In School Literacy in the
  Lives of Urban Youth (Mahiri, 2004)
• Reconstructing the Adolescent Sign, Symbol, and
  Body (Vandeboncoeur Stevens, 2005
• Reframing Sociocultural Research on Literacy
  Identity, Agency, and Power (Lewis, Enciso,
  Moje, 2007

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Key Studies Digital and Transnational Spaces

• Blackburn (2003, 2005)
• Knobel Lankshear (2004)
• Leander (2004)
• Sarroub (2005)
• Leander Lovvorn (2006)
• Lam (2006)
• Moje Lewis (2007)
• Guerra (2007)

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Discussion and Implications

• Analytic rather than evaluative purposes.
• Goal To understand overarching movements and
  that have shaped research and practice.
• Not unidirectional, but loosely chronological and
  recursive.
• e.g. charter schools continue to to address
  issues of cultural conflict.
• Each identity construct suggests particular
  research possibilities.
• Larger social and cultural spheres determine, to
  some degree, the identity constructs that are
  most needed and most often taken up at a given
  time.

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Zygmunt Bauman (2007). Liquid Times Living in an
Age of Uncertainty

• A life so fragmented stimulates lateral rather
  than verticalorientations.
• Each next step needs to be a response to a
  different set of opportunities
• and a different distribution of odds, and so it
  calls for a different set of
• skills and a different arrangement of assets.
  Past successes do not necessarily
• increase the probability of future victories, let
  alone guarantee them while
• means successfully tested in the past need to be
  constantly inspected and
• revised since they may prove useless or downright
  counterproductive once
• circumstances change. (p. 3)

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• Identity as an analytic tool in adolescent
  literacy research typically has served to
  challenge limited, one-dimensional definitions of
  literacy and highlight the complex contextual
  factors that enhance or restrict literacy
  practices and capacities.

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• Thanks to Antillana del Valle, University of
  Minnesota for her help on this project.