Heroes, rebels, and victims: Student Identities in literacy narratives – Bronwyn T. Williams
Understanding-
Quote: “If we begin to make students aware of the kinds of identities they adopt when writing these narratives and how they might be able to change them in print as well as in their lives, we offer several important opportunities for student writers”.
Understanding: Making students consciously aware of the common writing techniques (or identities) could benefit them by enhancing their writing skills by being able to think more “outside of the box”.
Questioning-
Quote: “This awareness of the more complex and social nature of literacy “gained as a result of working with their peers causes not just a shift in identity, but, at least initially, an identity crisis”.
Question: Do peers have more influence on a students performance/”identity’, or do bad experiences with teachers have more of an impact on student identity?
Relating-
Quote: “These scholars are finding that any students, when writing such assignments, tend to adopt one of several recurring narrative structures. To adopt a particular structure, then, requires that students adopt a particular identity within that narrative”.
Relation: This quote directly correlates to Kara Poe Alexander’s idea of the eight literacy narrative themes found in students papers: Success, Victim, Hero, Child Prodigy, Literacy Winner, Rebel, Outsider and Other. (Alexander, Kara Poe. “Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre.” College Composition and Communication,
vol. 62, no. 4, June 2011, pp. 608-622)
Challenging-
Quote: “In these narratives it is the traditional individualistic heroic attributes – perseverance, self-reliance, self-confidence- that allow them to triumph”.
Challenge: Couldn’t these “successful” writers have had low self-confidence but one day decided to have the courage and motivation to be a “hero” in their own stories
Rhetorical-
Quote: “For example, Paterson noted that many students who are confident in their abilities write what she calls “rise-to-success” narratives where much as Carpenter and Falbo pointed out, the writer is the hero of the narrative”.
Rhetoric: Williams is using evidence from Paterson to signal the idea of the hero identy in literacy narrative’s presented in students papers. This idea can also be found in another scholarly article written by Kara Poe Alexander where she herself also talks about the hero literacy narrative identity in students.
Williams, Bronwyn T. “Heroes, rebels, and victims: Student identities in literacy narratives.”
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 47, no. 4, Dec. 2003 – Jan. 2004, pp. 342-345.
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