Literacy Assessment and the Politics of Identities

Murphy, Sharon

doi:10.1080/1057356970130305

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Other researchers have questioned the social construction of disabilities (Johnston 1998;McDermott 1987McDermott ,1996Murphy 1997;Swadner and Lubeck 1995;Taylor 1990), pointing out that disability is a cultural institution through which people acquire disabilities through ideologies-or sets of assumptions about what counts as learning, achievement, and ability. There has been related work on the construction of identities through a process of "entextualization," where student identities move from the classroom to a label through a process of being "textualized" (Silverstein and Urban 1996).…”

Section: The Discourse Of Disabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Through the Eyes of the Institution: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Decision Making in Two Special Education Meetings

Rogers

2002

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis of two Committee on Special Education meetings for one adolescent girl. Drawing on two years of ethnographic data, I look across the two meetings and demonstrate that the secondyear CSE meeting is wrought with three contradictions. This article suggests the need to look to institutional discourses and cases of subjective experiences in order to understand the process of social reproduction in the anthropology of disability.Anthropology & Education Quarterly 33(2):213-237.

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Section: The Discourse Of Disabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Through the Eyes of the Institution: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Decision Making in Two Special Education Meetings

Rogers

2002

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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“…Many concerns about identity and standardized testing have been framed in terms of race and social class and have been well documented and well argued by others (McNeil, 2000;Murphy, 1997;Ohanian, 1999;Orfield & Kornhaber, 2001). These teachers and researchers have argued that standardized testing works not from a set of objective standards somehow as constant as the North Star but from a set of cultural conceptions about literacy that are neither objective nor static.…”

Section: Testing As Punishmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standardized Students: The Problems With Writing for Tests Instead of People

Williams

2005

Journal of Adolescent &Amp; Adult Literacy

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The author questions whether literacy assessment is best undertaken in the form of standardized tests given to huge groups of students in high‐stakes situations. There is a growing sense that the point of literacy education—of all education—is to administer standardized assessments and provide rankings rather than learning. However, concerns about increasing reliance on standardized testing in literacy education are about more than questionable methods of assessment and measurement: What effect does the unrelenting emphasis on standardized literacy testing have on students' perception of the purposes and possibilities of literacy? By extension, what effect does such testing have on their perception of the possibilities for themselves as readers and writers?

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“…Teachers often responded to students based on qualities other than demonstrated reading and writing ability (e.g., Good, 1987;Rist, 2000;Rosenthal, 1974), tended to have lower expectations for students belonging to marginalized groups or students for whom English was not a first language (e.g., Bloome, Katz, Solsken, Willett, & Wilson-Keenan, 2000; Murphy, 1997;Panofsky, 2003), and tended to treat boys and girls differently (e.g., Compton-Lilly, 2006;Lewis, 2001;Renold, 2001aRenold, , 2001b. The relationships that were formed between teachers and students appeared to affect the student's access to writing practices in terms of topic, support, and opportunities for practice.…”

Section: Peersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although most students experience standardized testing in their early years of schooling, there has been little research that directly studies what happens when beginning writers are assessed in formal ways. Students may begin to equate school writing with the kind of writing that happens for tests (Murphy, 1997). Formal, standardized testing situations tend to narrow teaching practice (Linn, 2007;Valli & Chambliss, 2007).…”

Section: Standardized Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Murphy (1997) argues that school assessment has a particular impact on identities because it not only deals with identities revealed through the acts of reading or writing, it also creates them. Any assessment situation, such as the assessment of reading and writing, can lead to such unwanted identities as giftedness, average, illiterateness, and learning disabledness, identities that intersect with already held visions of self, system, and state (p. 261).…”

Section: Labels and Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Journey to Becoming a Writer: Review of Research about Children’s Identities as Writers

Collier¹

2010

L & L

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In the early years of schooling, children represent themselves as writers in diverse ways. Writers write to communicate with audiences but they also construct their social and literate identities as they write; writers write their lives (Richardson, 2000). I maintain that writers write to learn and to learn about themselves. They also learn to write as they write. In this way, writing practices, which include social and discursive practices, have transformative potential. Writing at school can be preparation for future academic writing but it also can be a site for dialogue with oneself (John-Steiner, Panofsky & Smith, 1994;Street, 1984). The goal of this review of research is to examine how children's identities as beginning writers are constructed through writing practices, as represented in empirical studies of writer identities.Literacy and identity are inextricably linked (Bourne, 2002, Lewis & Fabos, 2005Moje & Luke, 2009). Through literate practices (i.e., reading, writing, drawing, and other forms of interaction with multimodal texts), one draws on identities and constructs new ones. Through the making of texts, writers are able to remake themselves and their relations with the world. Writing is a dialogic process wherein one takes up the words of others and creates new hybrid texts. One's utterances always reflect traces of other utterances. Our texts borrow elements from and speak to one another and we -live in a world of others' words‖ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 143).Building on the crucial and interdependent relationships between literacy (here, writing) and identity, and the implications for young children's journeys as beginning writers, this paper is an investigation into empirical literature on writer identities, focusing on research that explored the literate identities of children, as they began to learn to write and to think of themselves as writers. The literate identities of youth have been explored in much more depth (e.g., Bulfin & North, 2007;Gilbert, 1992, Lewis & Fabos, 2005 but we know less about literate identities at the time that they are first being constructed, when children are beginning writers. The importance of writing, and how writing practices play out in the construction of literate identities, especially in the face of increasingly standardized writing assessment practices, is addressed here.In this review, I begin with a theoretical discussion of how literacy (with a focus on writing) and identity work together and consider Moje and Luke's (2009) question: -How does one know identity when one sees it?‖ (p. 419). I follow with a review of key research studies about children's writer identities and relevant findings. The questions I pose are: How do writing practices, including daily practices as well as both formative and summative assessment, operate to construct children's writer identities within classroom settings? Do conceptions of writer identities allow for change and development across contexts and time? How might one re-imagine literacy settings in classrooms, in order t...

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Literacy Assessment and the Politics of Identities

Cited by 6 publications

References 38 publications

Through the Eyes of the Institution: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Decision Making in Two Special Education Meetings

Through the Eyes of the Institution: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Decision Making in Two Special Education Meetings

Standardized Students: The Problems With Writing for Tests Instead of People

Journey to Becoming a Writer: Review of Research about Children’s Identities as Writers

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