Becoming an ‘honours student’: the interplay of literacies and identities in a high‐track class

Abstract

This paper examines some intersections among school literacy events and practices, identity formation, and the institutional practice known in the US as tracking. During a year-long, critical ethnographic study to examine how a team-taught, interdisciplinary curriculum impacted the development of students' literacies, it was found that not only the literacies, but also identities, were being shaped and developed. Particular literacy events led the students to perceive that they were being encouraged to think of and comport themselves in distinct ways, based on their status as 'honours students'. Classroom practices created a culture of privileged performativity for the students through which they came to perceive that recognition as an 'honours student' had less to do with deep, intellectual, and critical understanding and communication of important ideas than with the ability to perform in specific, rather superficial ways. For the participants, 'honours' identity was tied discursively and materially to a set of constructs that stemmed from competing and contradictory views about how one becomes an 'honours student'. Key literacy events and practices through which 'honours' identity was recruited and enacted were inherently undemocratic, despite the teachers' stated commitment to democratic pedagogies.

The Role of School in Adolescents’ Identity Development. A Literature Review

“…Then, two ethnographic studies in which no particular perspective on identity development is explicitly mentioned (Seaton 2007;Smith 2008) were not so much concerned with how (perceived) teacher expectations are reflected in adolescents' self-understandings but with whether adolescents do or do not identify with the expectations that teachers explicitly express. In these two studies, teacher expectations appeared to be understood as making available fixed identity positions that adolescents may or may not endorse.…”

Constructing reading proficiency and struggle through tracked contexts

“…Classroom contexts can mediate literacy identities and positionings (Glenn and Ginsberg, 2016; Learned, 2018). For example, in a qualitative study, Smith (2008) examined the intersection between school literacy events and practices and identity formation in a tracked honors English class. Smith found that classroom practices produced a culture of privileged performativity and that being an honors student had less to do with intellectual and critical understanding and communication of important ideas than with the ability to act in particular ways.…”

"It teaches them to have a conversation in the real world" : an analysis of how identity performances shape classroom discussions.

“…While student beliefs do shape their classroom identities, engagement, student choice, and teachers are all heavy influences suggested throughout the literature (Compton-Lilly, 2006;Smith, 2008;Faircloth, 2009Faircloth, , 2012Skerrett, 2012). One area of education that teacher identities can particularly shape is students' academic identities.…”

“…For example, Skerrett (2012) found that student's identities were shaped by teachers positioning them either by the labels they were given in their educational experiences, or by rejecting the label in favor of more positive identities labels. On the other hand, researchers have also found that when teachers placed identities on their students based on the context of the class, students rejected or manipulated those identities when they did not feel aligned with them (Smith, 2008;Wortham, 2004). Yet, Skerrett's results indicated that when students were given the opportunity to explore their academic identities through what they believed to be relative literacy practices (i.e.…”