“I Am the Rock Goddess of Lyrics”: Writerly Identities of Adolescents Returning to School

Abstract

While a long tradition of sociocultural literacy research suggests that out‐of‐school youth engage in a range of meaningful literacy practices, we know little about how programs for returning students foster or constrain students’ literate identities. Drawing on data from a qualitative study conducted in a community college‐based program for out‐of‐school youth, this paper explores the literacy practices and identities of adolescents returning to school. The data indicate that participants have active out‐of‐school writing lives and robust writerly identities enacted in relationship with peers and literacy mentors. However, for most students, the return to school resulted in a disruption to those writerly identities as they struggled to meet the program's expectations for academic literacy. This paper suggests opportunities for educators to capitalize on students’ out‐of‐school literacy practices and the fullness of their identities as shaped by their experiences in and out of high school.

Conceptualizing Scholarship on Adolescent Out‐of‐School Writing Toward More Equitable Teaching and Learning: A Literature Review

“…As illustrated earlier, students who appear to be struggling may have robust writerly identities outside of school. Bickerstaff () noted that conferencing and autobiographical writing prompts can give teachers opportunities to learn more about their students’ out‐of‐school lives, what their students are writing outside of school, whether students might feel comfortable bringing these kinds of writing into the classroom, and how school itself might support these endeavors. The caveat is that these kinds of activities cannot be merely performative; rather, they must be accompanied by a teacher's genuine commitment to learn about the students and respond meaningfully via the curriculum.…”

Språk i skola, på fritid och i arbetsliv: Aktuella arenor för svensk forskning inom tillämpad språkvetenskap

“…Ett liknande mönster kan man se i internationella studier av ungdomars skrivande på fritiden (se översikt av Vaughan, 2020). Ungdomar skriver bland annat i sociala medier (Warner, 2016), sms (Grover m.fl., 2016;Mesch m.fl., 2012), lyrik och låttexter (Bickerstaff, 2012;Padgett & Curwood, 2016) Ett flertal studier tyder även på att ungdomar i en svensk kontext alltmer läser och skriver på engelska på sin fritid när de exempelvis använder internet och spelar online (Holm m.fl., 2021;Morris, 2022; se även översikt av Sundqvist, 2020). Några studier i åk 9 visar också att mängden tid som eleverna ägnar åt att interagera på engelska i spel online eller i andra fritidsaktiviteter samvarierar positivt med den språkliga kvaliteten i elevernas skrivna texter på engelska (Olsson, 2012;Sundqvist & Wikström, 2015).…”

Authoring Selves in School: Adolescent Writing Identity

“…Many adolescents do not have strong personal connections to the writing they are asked to do in schools, a phenomenon documented across time in empirical research (Jeffery & Wilcox, 2014; Murillo, 2010; Scherff & Piazza, 2005), despite students’ desires for connections to their academic writing. Youth who identify as writers in out-of-school contexts tend to be alienated by the writing tasks assigned to them in classroom contexts (Brandt, 2015), particularly young people who write in genres historically marginalized by schools, such as songwriting (Bickerstaff, 2012), spoken word poetry (Fisher, 2003), blogging and fan fiction (Roozen, 2009), as well as political opinion and how-to texts (Brandt, 2015).…”