What is “identity?” How do youth in today U.S. society express their identity in public versus private settings? How do institutional contexts like public education create multiple youth performances of identity?
These are questions of interest to me lately as I begin to explore data I collected over the last year as a teacher researcher. Identity is typically defined as a series of qualities that distinguish one individual from another. In psychological terms, identity reflects a series of mental features such as beliefs, memories, preferences, and the capacity for rational thought. However, society and culture impress upon individuals many different characteristics and pressures and create complex relations between sociocultural groups. Thus, sociocultural identity, as marked by ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, race, gender, heritage, or combinations of these, creates a particular type youth discourse in the public school classroom.
I propose that youth identity in the public school classroom transcends individual manifestations of psychological phenomenon and emerges through the accumulation of social and cultural capital. While psychological, social, and cultural structures may overlap, the relation of self to sociocultural structures creates students’ negotiation between peers and teachers in a dance of similarity, indifference, difference, compliance, acquiescence, and opposition.
Individuals’ sense of self is certainly an important element of identity. However, students’ identity is more significantly dependent on ways that students position themselves and are positioned through roles dependent on hierarchies within the social and cultural structures of the institution of education. Bourdieu (1977) argues that the role of education is to reproduce “the structure of power relationships and symbolic relationships between classes” (p. 487). Interactional student negotiations are constructions of others’ perceptions and representations and are byproducts of larger ideological processes and structures. Students’ self-conceptions surface in the social world of the classroom through discourse.
Discourse comprises the ways that people communicate in verbal and non-verbal ways: spoken, written, signed, and body language and through multimodal and multigenre forms of communication. Discourse is a dynamic that creates tensions between language, structure, and agency. The relationship between discourse and social practices is dialectical in that elements are internalized by other elements. Students’ past practices and imaginative futures become embedded in social practices and networks.
Buckholtz and Hall state that identity is emergent in discourse, does not precede it, and is an intersubjectively achieved social and cultural phenomenon (2005). Students’ experiences can be deeply felt yet unnamed, even unnamable, within discourse, as dominant ideologies drive and deepen discoursal tentions. Fairclough (2003) says that ideologies are representations that “contribute to establishing, maintaining, and changing social relations of power, domination, and exploitation” (p. 9). Such a definition of identity as a construct of dominant ideologies challenges essentialist definitions of identity, or definitions in which identity is viewed as fixed, singular, or binary, or in which concepts of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation exclusively create self-concepts. Addressing sociocultural identity is part of the work of critical pedagogy, in that critical pedagogy explores new identity categories and the development of relatively new discourses for addressing sociocultural identity, difference, and diversity. Discourse within contexts of social and global justice advocates equity in representation for marginalized groups locally, nationally and internationally.
Fairclough (1995; 2001) outlines a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse, moving from analysis of language texts, to analysis of discourse practices, and, finally, to analysis of discursive events as sociocultural practice. In the public school classroom, critical discourse analysis can help to unveil the culture of student voice and silence, of advocacy and resistance. For example, how do youth negotiate difference and come to understand democracy? To what degree do youth today understand themselves to be citizens who participate altruistically in community-based duties and responsibilities? How are youth today developing national and political identifications? What does it mean for a new generation of U.S. citizens to share common democratic values? How does identity play into definitions of national, regional, and group identifications?
Use this forum to respond, either as a teacher, youth, or interested observer. And keep peeking in on this blog as my data analysis takes on life through my own reflection.
Resources
Bourdieu. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Karable & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buckholtz, & Hall. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.
Fairclough. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2001). Language and power. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York, NY: Routledge.
