A letter to a student: Repose, regroup, reframe

Dear Sophia,

I hope that I am not overstepping my bounds, as I share some thoughts on this frigid day - January 20, 2025. Thank you for entrusting me with your thoughts - your writing.

It is fascinating to me how ideas converge, lives intersect, and connections continue developing across people, places, and time. While reading your writing, “The Urgent Need for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in K-12 Education”, I was inspired by your passion and courage to pursue a topic that has been squashed in the limelight of today’s political leaders and climate.

 

After responding to your piece, I turned my attention to the book I had just begun reading, Pose, Wobble, Flow: A Liberatory Approach to Literacy Learning in All Classrooms (Garcia & O’Donnell-Allen, 2024), which I had recently been given to consider for this summer’s NWPNET Writing Institute. Although I am still just reading the introduction, I am excited about the promise of this book may offer as a text to support our work as advocates for equity and justice in our schools.

 

This morning, as I set out to start the day, I found an article in my emails as a New York Times subscriber. In the article, Tressie McMillian Cottom (2025) talks about Michelle Obama’s intentional absence from the inaugural ceremonies in relationship to Inauguration Day also occurring on a national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. legacy. Her opinion piece, “Left Unresolved, the Inherent Conflicts of Democracy will Produce its Extremes”, made me think about convergence and complexity thinking.

 

Is it coincidence that I am reading these works in a short 24 hour span of time? Perhaps it is a message - a message to stay the course - to applaud your courage and pursuit for vision for equity in education, for me to continue teaching about cultural relevancy in my courses, and that despite this country’s current turn toward anti-equity despotism, I still believe that because we are not alone in the pursuit of equity for all students in our schools; there is hope. The scholarship exists. Research and writing must continue. Cottom writes about anomie and self-care. The dream to eradicate poverty and provide equitable education for Black and other underserved student groups will endure as long as we stay the course. 

 

I don’t suppose that it is a coincidence that these three reading moments converged. The main ideas overlap and resonate because we live in a complex adaptive system. The agents in this system may be unpredictable and turbulence in the system innately seeks coherence. In a definition I found online, Plesk (2001) writes that “A complex adaptive system (CAS) is a collection of individual agents that have the freedom to act in ways that are not always predictable and whose actions are interconnected such that one agent's actions changes”. Therefore, setbacks in the system may occur. Yet, in the natural course of turbulence, implosion of faulty networks will inspire new directions in the system. It would be overly trite to simply say, this too shall pass, as I’ve often been told. Instead, let us stay the course, repose, regroup, and reframe our thinking to reconsider the next wise action (Eoyang & Hollday, 2013; HSD).

 

Cottom discusses anomie which is our network of like-minded people. We must exercise self-care if we are to find our flow. Sophie, you write about the urgent need for culturally relevant teaching (which isn’t new), but the fact that you define it as urgent, suggests that little has changed, in spite of scholarship documenting the problem and resolutions. To draw from Garcia and O’Donnell-Allen’s book, I believe that we may be experiencing a temporary state of wobble. Perhaps Obama’s absence from at Inauguration Day today is more than a protest, but a reminder to us to identify our next wise action; to reposition ourselves to continue the work that Martin Luther King Jr. stood and died for. This reminds me of the title of my blog that I started while I was a doctoral student, “Imperfect Inquiry” which I should consider reviving. A former professor once told me that “imperfect means unfinished or incomplete” - So I wonder what powerful questions should we ask to inform our next wise action? 

 

Thank you for your inspiration. Stay warm and stay the course,

Dr. Slay

Is there an "I" in exposItory?

Effective expository writing seems to challenge both students and teachers today. Common Core Standards and many state literacy standards have garnered new interest in developing effective expository writers in schools.

But why such a conundrum?  Hasn’t expository writing been around for as long as the story or the narrative? Hmmm, which came first, the narrative or the exposition, the exposé or the expressive? People have been telling stories since the beginning of time, but so have people been seeking information and explaining to others how to do it. I don’t think that editorials or opinions are necessarily new forms of expression to mankind; rather it’s the formula that has been imposed on ways of thinking that has stilted expository writing today. 

Furthermore, perhaps we, or is it just teachers and assessors who are confused about what expository writing really is. Should expository writing have an opinion? Some authorities would claim that expository writing should be neutral. Really? Maybe this opens up the conversation about what it means to be neutral. It is possible to look at both sides of the neutrality issue; and regardless of how you feel about how strong the personal “I” should appear in expository texts, suffice it to say that, if the writing does not mean anything to you, or the reader, then that piece could well be bland, void, empty, flat, and possibly even voiceless. It may well be a beautifully constructed piece of writing, a grammatically, and structurally sound composition, but without the presence of even the slightest hint of a personal stance or experience, I would agree, that expository writing is indeed stupid.

And if it is stupid, I might even venture to say that such writing may even be unworthy of expending the effort it takes to write, but that would violate everything I believe to be true about writing and composing. The act of writing is one of the most beneficial ways of developing thinking. So, if writing is thinking, then maybe it is just the tool required to work through the stupid or boring parts about expository texts. After all, it won’t become interesting until it connects, with the author and with the reader. And to do that the piece will need an audience, a purpose, and a voice. 

So teachers, how do you make it happen? How do you go from flat to fabulous? How do you balance creating voice and neutrality in the expository writing you teach?  How do you find the real “I” in expository while hiding the first person “I” that turns expository into a personal narrative. How do you keep expository from becoming just another stupid essay?

What did you notice?

There is a general question I like to ask my students, particularly after they have been reading for a while. – What did you notice? – It’s a simple question, but one that often challenges my students. You see something that I have noticed about my seventh graders at the beginning of the year is that they know how to do sustained silent reading. They can sit still and appear to read for at least 15 minutes. Then when I ask what they noticed, they may tell me what the book is about, retell interesting plot related passages, and how much they like what they are reading. What I noticed is a general tendency toward glib over-generalizations, and story retellings. Therefore, what I noticed is a general propensity to read across the top as opposed to reading between or below the lines.

I adopted this question from Jeff Anderson, who writes about ways to teach grammar and editing as an integrated and daily element of the writing workshop. In Everyday Editing (2007), he explains his approach to teaching writing as an invitational process  (p. 14). In reference to teaching rules of grammar and punctuation he writes, “I invite students to notice, to read like writers, to come into the world of editing – a friendly place rather than a punishing place, a creational facility rather than a correctional one” (p. 15).

Although Anderson has made an invitation to notice popular through his books containing memorable techniques for teaching editing to mid-level students, the notion about reading like a writer originated in the works of psycholinguist, Frank Smith (1988), who is best known for literacy learning theories involving reading and writing instruction through holistic processes. Paraphrasing Smith’s ideas, he claims that writing is best learned in the supportive environment of a writer’s club, where students and teachers collaboratively study author’s craft by emulating mentor texts. A key idea in this concept, however, is that student’s see themselves as writers, which puts the onus on teachers to create that friendly and invitational classroom atmosphere that Anderson alluded to.

Smith’s language and literacy development theories have influence writing instruction across the grade levels. Using literature written for children and young adults as mentor texts to inspire literacy habits of mind in reading and writing workshops can be considered standard practice today. But, invitations, via a supportive atmosphere or interesting texts are only the basic elements of sound literacy instruction. Although, former classroom teacher, Katie (Anderson, 2007; Atwell, 1998; Dorfman & Cappelli, 2007; Dorfman & Cappelli, 2009; Fletcher & Portalupi, 2007; Lattimer, 2003; Portalupi & Fletcher, 2001; Wood Ray, 1999) Wood Ray attributes her writing workshop methods directly to Frank Smith’s legacy, she takes this notion of apprenticeship a step further. In Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom (1999), she claims that “Writing well involves learning to attend to the craft of writing, learning to do the sophisticated work of separating what it’s about from how it is written” (p. 10).  Ray is certainly not alone in calling for explicit craft lessons. Numerous articles and publications document how teachers use authentic literature to teach craft lessons from K – 12 grades. See for example, works by Nancie Atwell (1998), Lynn Dorfmann & Rose Capelli (2007, 2009), Ralph Fletcher & JoAnn Portalupi (2001, 2008), Kelly Gallagher (2011), and Heather Lattimer (2003), to name only a few.

This leads me back to my seventh graders. Asking my students to discuss what they notice when they read is both a practice and a mindset I try to develop among my students when they are reading. Within the first days of school, I explain to them that this year they will learn to read in an entirely new way from what they are accustomed to doing. This year, I exclaim, they will learn to read from the inside out. I tell them that they will learn to read like writers, in order to become better writers themselves.

What I haven’t told them is that reading like a writer will also improves their reading comprehension. But then, I have discovered, that I don’t need to tell them that. They have discovered it for themselves. This became evident the day that one of my students realized that the thinking charts, close readings, annotations, and conversations we were having about how authors write reflects the choices authors make about what to write. My day was made, when that student realized that the tools, whether they involve punctuation, sentence structure, parts of speech, imagery, or other literary devices, make all the difference in how well the writer’s message is delivered. The charts we compile during guided and independent reading merely help students to see patterns in an author’s style and technique. It makes the implicit explicit. Thus, reading from the inside out, from the perspective of a writer improves both reading and writing skills. And it all begins with an invitation to notice.

How do you get your students to make connections between their reading and writing and the texts they read?

References

Anderson, J. (2007). Everyday editing: Inviting students to develop skill and craft in writer's workshop. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle: New understandings about writing, reading, and learning (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Dorfman, L. R., & Cappelli, R. (2007). Mentor texts: Teaching writing through children's literature, K-6. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Dorfman, L. R., & Cappelli, R. (2009). Nonfiction mentor texts: Teaching informational writing through children's literature, K-8. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Fletcher, R. J., & Portalupi, J. (2007). Craft lessons: Teaching writing K-8 (2nd ed.). Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Gallagher, K. (2011). Write like this: Teaching real-world writing  through modeling & mentor texts. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Lattimer, H. (2003). Thinking through genre: Units of study in reading and writing workshops 4-12. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Portalupi, J., & Fletcher, R. J. (2001). Nonfiction craft lessons: Teaching information writing K -8. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Wood Ray, K. (1999). Wondrous words: Writers and writing in the elementary classroom. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Thank You, Louise

Dear Louise,

I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. This may seem a bit odd, since I haven’t ever met you in person, however, I certainly know of you because your name or at least a reference to reader response theory appears in so many of the books I read these days. So much so, that I decided it was time for me to read exactly what you had to say, as opposed to what others have been saying about your thoughts about reading.

And so now, only a third of the way into the latest reprint of your seminal work, Literature as Exploration, I am compelled to thank you for the inspiration you have offered me in relationship to my role as a middle school English language arts teacher and as graduate student preparing to take qualifying exams for a Ph.D. in language and literacy education.

Several ideas have been ruminating in my head concerning reading and writing instruction and cultural identity. My primary interests in my doctoral work concern new literacies and critical literacy pedagogies, with an emphasis on writing instruction. Although I think that these areas relate very nicely, I think that I’ve been subliminally looking for a thread to hang my thesis and ultimately weave my precepts together. I think I’ve been looking for the balance between the ideology concerning cultural identity among adolescent students and literacy instruction. You see, I believe that when my students are able to discover and embrace their own cultural identities, they will ultimately be better prepared to contribute to a more socially just and equitable world. I believe that when students know themselves well, they are better prepared to know and serve others. Regardless of the kind of work my students will chose in their futures, I believe, that the notion of service to others is central to society in communities across our globe, particularly if we are to survive the eradiation of history and the blurring boundaries facilitated by globalization and digital technologies, as we are experiencing them today.

Well, Louise, I think you have helped me find it. The magic word is humanity. You helped me realize that all of literature is about humanity; it’s about the human condition. In the first chapter of the book I mentioned earlier, you talk about finding a balance in the “many complex elements that make up the literary experience” (p. 23), and you claim that reading is a transaction between the reader and the text that “have social origins and social effects” (p. 27). You said it well when you wrote,

We can communicate because of a common core of experience even though there may be infinite personal variations. Human beings participate in particular social systems and fall into groups by age, sex, occupation, nation. These, too, offer general patterns on which individual variations can be played. The forces of social conditioning are also pervasive in the formation of specific emotional drives and intellectual concepts (p. 28).

You are talking about culture and society, and that the reading experience hinges upon the ability to share common experiences as human beings. You go on to say that,

Just as the personality and concerns of the reader are largely socially patterned, so the literary work, like language itself, is a social product. The genesis of literary techniques occurs in a social matrix. Both the creation and reception of literary works are influenced by literary tradition. Yet ultimately any literary work gains its significance from the way in which the minds and emotions of particular readers respond to the linguistic stimuli offered by the text  (p. 28).

Thus, even literary techniques, the tools that authors use, are uniquely human as well. Therefore, all of reading essentially pivots around the human condition. How silly of me not to realize this before. If people write texts, then of course, such authors are essentially writing about what it means to be human, regardless of the genre.

Now I recognize that when you first wrote this, you were attempting to persuade traditional English teachers to expand their views about teaching literary interpretation, and the importance of understanding literature with a broader scope than isolated critical correctness (p. 29). You beg for a balanced approach to reading, and I’m not talking about balanced literacy in the sense of a balance between phonics and whole language instruction. The balance you refer to lies somewhere in the continuum, as you call it, between an aesthetic and efferent reading experience. As you well know, the standards movement you witnessed in the latter half of your life has nearly sabotaged your work as teachers scramble and succumb to the suffocating test preparations that focus on correct answers and often times diminished reading experiences.

Yet I say, nearly because you have left such an indelible mark on the field of reading that, I believe, the best literacy teachers today scramble less to meet the demands of the test, and more to find inviting ways to engage their students in reading as a pleasurable and educational experience within literature classrooms as well as across the curriculum. Numerous scholars have written volumes (Beach, 1993; Ferrell, 2005; Hancock, 2008; Kern, 2010), for example, about ways that your transactional theory has transformed literacy instruction through reader response practices.  In fact, your influence has been pervasive enough to inspire scholars to invent instructional approaches around your theory without ever calling it reader response. Keen & Zimmermann (1997) in Mosaic of Thought and Beers and Probst (2013), in Notice and Note write about reading comprehension without mentioning the reading response strategies, yet their systems of getting students to look at literature closely for deeper meaning require that readers find themselves somewhere on the continuum of aesthetic and efferent reading experiences. I read and value these authors as much as your work because their ideology aligns so nicely with yours. I just wish they would have at least given you credit in these books in their list of references.

Nevertheless, reading and writing standards and standardized assessment does influence the decisions teachers make about teaching English language arts today. I worry that in our effort to help students find the right answer on the reading test or include particular literary techniques on their essay exams, that we forget to teach the humanity involved in all of literature. Realizing this helped me identify, or maybe label the core of my beliefs about literacy instruction. When I told my students the other day that all of reading and writing is about the human condition, and then after we brainstormed what that means, I believe we made a giant leap toward bridging understanding literary elements and author’s purpose, theme and of course characterization. By the way, by author’s purpose I mean more than simply identifying what students exclaim with rote memory: to entertain, to persuade, or to inform.

And so now that I have my students living in the balance of the aesthetic and efferent continuum, I hope to gain more meaningful reading responses that reflect not only connections to their lives as readers and citizens, but also as writers who strive to find their own voices in the texts they encounter and in the texts they create in the likeness of their own human condition. When they can do that, then I believe they will have discovered their own cultural identity and its place in their lives. Thank you, Louise, for helping me find my way.

References

Beach, R. (1993). A teacher's introduction to reader-response theories. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Beers, K., & Probst, R. (2013). Notice and note: Strategies for close reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Farrell, E. J. (2005). A tribute to Louise. Voices from the Middle, 12(3), 68-69.

Hancock, M. R. (2008). A celebration of literature and response: Children, books, and teachers in K-8 classrooms. Columbus: Merrill Prentice-Hall.

Keene, E. O., & Zimmermann, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought. Heinemann Portsmouth, NH.

Kern, D. (2010). Reading and responding in the 21st century. New England Reading Association Journal, 46(1), 96-99.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1995). Literature as Exploration. New York, NY: Modern Language Association.

Interrogating Identity: Emergence and Transformation in Action

“It is imitation…when the child holds the newspaper like his father. It is identification when the child learns to read” (Annie Reich in Bhahba, 2004, p. 87).

Annie Reich’s distinction between imitation and identification seems a perfect place to begin my response to Bhahba’s (2004) treatise about the nature of cultural identity. In “Interrogating Identity”, the second chapter of his book, The Location of Culture, Bhabha introduces many concepts that are central to his theories about identity explicated throughout the twelve chapters of his book. Born in Mumbai, India and the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and Director of he Humanities Center at Harvard University, Bhabha is a notable scholar in the field of post-colonial studies. His writing style is verbose and dense with complex ideas about the conflicting and shifting nature of power and resistance among historically subjugated and marginalized populations since the period of Western colonization. Throughout his work, and particularly in this chapter, he makes allusions to other literary works and scholars, which are at times intimidating to a novice scholar, or reader that may be unfamiliar with the literary elements he incorporates throughout his writing. The ability to successfully read and comprehend The Location of Culture requires not only a vast command of English vocabulary, but also advanced knowledge of English literature, and familiarity with post-colonialism. Key concepts usually associated with Bhabha presented in the chapter, “Interrogating Identity”, include the terms: enunciation, ambivalence, hybridity, mimicry, and liminality. I aim to adequately use these terms to describe myself, and my positionality as a cultural being with many identities, who has spent most of my life negotiating variable liminal spaces within multiple contexts over at least the last fifty years. 

As a woman, a mother, a sister, a daughter, an aunt, an educator, a researcher, a doctoral student, a Catholic, a divorcée, White, Latina, American, trilingual, and a budding scholar, I realize that I inhabit multiple spaces that have evolved over time, many years before I was born even, and as I once heard the critical theorist and educator, Maxine Greene say about herself in a taped interview, I am an existentialist, because I am still evolving. Throughout the evolution of these various persona, I have come to realize that during each step of the way, I have often sought to imitate someone else as a means of finding myself or in the process of defining personal identity, but that the realization of any of my multiple identities hasn’t really become me, or been fully actualized until I could claim ownership of the roles I have created or aspired to play throughout my lifetime. For this reason, Annie Reich’s analogy speaks loudly to me: “It is imitation…when the child holds the newspaper like his father. It is identification when the child learns to read”. Yet, identity, as culture, according to Bhabha and other scholars is complex.

Identity is culture: an object manifested through action

Identity creation begins with imitation and becomes identification in the same way that objects can be transformed into actions, or nouns into verbs. As a noun it involves labels, and as a verb it involves activity. Therefore, culture as identity can be defined as a verb (Heath & Street, 2008). It is an emergent process, that sometimes appears to be intermittent, possibly even static, when one rests in limbo, or in a neutral state of feeling stuck. Regardless of the pace or the path involved in identity creation, the process is fluid and dialogic (Bakhtin & Holquist, 1981). This relationship between object and action is intrinsic to identification. In other words, many people would say that identity creation is an ongoing process of defining oneself through a set of objects, such as values and ideals that can be both adopted and/or imposed upon a person or group of people. In this way, identity, very much a label, regardless of how well warranted, is often used to categorize people. The labels I used to identify the many roles I have played throughout my lifetime, i.e., mother, daughter, sister, teacher, and student, for example, can be used to classify my identity as objects. However, it is important to note that these self-imposed, personal identity labels, are also created through the attitudes and dispositions I adopt concerning them.

In that sense, identity is an inhabitance, as in Bourdieu’s (1977) notions of habitus and capital. I have a family; therefore, I am a mother. I have a job or students; therefore, I am a teacher.  These concepts are interesting because in one sense they suggest that culture and identity may be thought of as a tangible product or entity, as in the sense of capital goods. By contrast, habitus infers that culture and identity are ways of being tied to one’s environment or lived in space and how one lives in or creates that world.  I view Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as both a noun and a verb. In other words, habitus “as systems of dispositions, are effectively realized only in relation to a determinate structure of positions socially marked by the social properties of their occupants, through which they manifest themselves” (Bourdieu & Johnson, 1993).  Further examination of Bourdieu’s ideas would reveal strong socio-historical ties to the ways in which identities or cultures are created and carried out in society.

For this reason, I prefer to consider identity in terms of activity, and synonymous to culture in the ways that they are both associated with transactions. Although During (2005) seems to disagree with Bourdieu, when he says that culture is not a system, I believe that habitus is very much bound by activities that define it.

Culture is not a thing or even a system: it ‘s a set of transactions, processes, mutations, practices, technologies, institutions, out of which things and events (such as movies, poems or world wrestling bouts) are produced, to be experienced, lived out and given meaning and value to in different ways within the unsystematic network of differences and mutations from which they emerged to start with (During, p. 6).

Indeed, I believe that culture and identity do emerge from what Bhabha refers to as interstitial places created in and by historical transactions that are manifested in the present, and which can be projected into the future. For this reason, identity is fluid and dialectical. Identity is situated in time and place, and informed by the relationships people have with others. My identity, for example, as a United States born citizen, reared as a child in California, Connecticut, Chile and Mexico help to define my cultural identity through some of the significant places where I have lived while growing up. The values of the family and social communities I lived in during those early years influence my attitudes and ways of being today, in part because the people and places I have interacted with are part of a history that I cannot deny, and also because I choose to embrace my heritage. Therefore, to borrow, Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, I am mixture of multiple cultures. The attitudes and stances I carry out in my daily life today, have been shaped, and continue to be shaped by the combined influences I have experienced throughout my life.

Identity as liminal reality

More significantly, my identity from whatever perspective is continually emerging from the in-between spaces that position me in the frays of perpetual transition. Some identity attributes about me are not typically contested. I look like and am in fact, a White woman, for example. My race and gender will not change. However, how I perceive and enact my womanhood can change and has evolved over my lifetime. Some of the social ideologies that I was exposed to as a child led me to believe in and aspire to a patriarchal middle-class White American hegemony. June and Ward Cleaver, of the Leave it to Beaver television show popular in the 1960s when I was a child, taught me that mothers should stay home to rear the family in a perfect harmony, and that fathers make the important decisions related to family. Yet, the reality of that cultural dogma did not fit my experience.

I was born in 1957 to an unwed mother and given a fictitious last name at birth in order to protect my mother and me from social scrutiny.  My mother married twice during my childhood, bore three more children, and provided all of us with the security and love expected of any “normal” family.  Although I was eventually adopted by the man I call my father, my history and the age difference between my siblings and me has kept me in a liminal state of in-betweenness throughout my life. My place in the family has always moved between various states of belonging and not belonging. This is not to suggest that my experience has been a negative one. I have always had that “special” place in the family, affectionately known as the Wa. My brother defined this particular aspect of my family identity best when he was toddler, when he told his teacher that he has a mother, a father, two sisters and a Wawa. Clearly I did not fit the category of sister or mother, therefore, he defined me as an other by calling me Wawa because he couldn’t at the time pronounce my first name properly. This is just one example of several experiences where I haven’t always completely fit in, or have had to negotiate juxtaposing identities between two different worlds. Yet my life’s story doesn’t necessarily contain the kind of anguish and hardship often experienced by people who have lived in the margins of racial or gender discrimination. Although I never realized it until recently, I believe this is the case because I have been shrouded in the protective cover of Whiteness (Wise, 2005). Yes, I am White, but I am also Latina in heart, soul, and biological heritage. Yet, I don’t look “Hispanic” as the government classifies people of Spanish speaking origin, and to some people, I am not really Latina because I have lived most of my life in the United States and have for the most part lived a rather privileged life. 

Therefore, do I really understand what it is to live in marginality? Many would claim not. I certainly haven’t experienced the kind of prejudice people of color have experienced. Perhaps I could conjure up stories of invisibility or discrimination because I am an independent woman, or because I am divorced and Catholic. I think it is important to note that liminality is a temporary space, usually defined by centers of social power and its grand narrative. Yet, at other times it can be defined by the decisions people make about how they lead their lives. Feminist scholar, bell hooks, has demonstrated that one can move in and out of liminal spaces by choice. As a Black female, she rose above the plight and stigma of the racialized poverty she knew as a child growing up in Tennessee, and then chose to return to her birthplace after becoming an accomplished adult. I don’t mean to compare myself, in the least, to bell hooks. We have lived different lives and experienced different realities of cultural identity.

Identity is relative, relational and repetitive

For this reason, cultural scholars would claim that cultural identity is relative and ambivalent, particularly as a construct of hegemonic status quo. Bhabha describes identity as “the representation of a time that is always elsewhere, a repetition” (p. 73). Identity is relative to current value systems and ideologies, but also steeped in the history that preceded it. In that way identities are recursive and become significant only in relationship to what has been, what is and what is to come. Human existence is in a state of perpetual flux and therefore some form of liminal reality. Beech defines liminality (2011) as fluid movement between self-constructed and social-constructed identities, at it is this process that leads to the construction of new identities.

Certainly as a graduate student, I have been redefining both my professional and personal identities over the course of the last several years. When my last child left home to go to college, I was left alone to redefine my role as an empty-nested divorced woman and mother. Then during the course of acquiring new knowledge in graduate school, I discovered new agency as an advocate for education reform in light of the neoliberal education policies that I had for so many years endured as a passive bystander. Although I am at times made to feel a little insecure with each new idea and philosophy I encounter in my studies, I feel both empowered and humbled by the intellectual transition I am experiencing. Yet, being more knowledgeable doesn’t always equate with being more accepted or better placed in society. Suddenly I sometimes feel a bit out of place in both my new and old worlds. Colleagues and friends from my day job as a middle school teacher aren’t interested in my experiences in higher education. I feel as though I represent a threat to them, and that our worlds are slowly growing further and further distant from each other. Although we can relate on the same grounds of the daily routines and grunge of daily teaching activities, I find myself sometimes slipping away from my old world as a classroom teacher and sliding into my new role as a budding scholar.  And yet, I am not yet a scholar. I do not teach in at the university, therefore, I do not have a collegial relationship with other doctoral students who live the daily life as a graduate fellow. Our class discussions are invigorating as we share the same mental space of new learning and frustrating queries. But the fact that is, I am in between professional identities and the struggle to redefine my identity as an academic scholar is part of my own process of enunciation (Bhabha, 2004) which commands me to reshape preconceived notions about education as I negotiate new relationships among circles of friends and colleagues. I equate the enunciation process as a form of separation anxiety between the old and the new, which in Bhabha’s view is a necessary part of the process of recognizing power, domination and consequently eliminating racism.

The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for a model, a traditional, a community, a stable system of reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance (p. 49).

Identity as emergence and transformation

As a literacy researcher and educator, I am keenly interested in the relationship between cultural identity literacy pedagogy. As a student of critical theory, I am interested in activist and agentic ways educators can embrace identity theory to create equitable and culturally responsive learning environments for students. At least, within the last twenty years, sociocultural scholars in the fields of literacy and teacher education have widely acknowledged an important relationship between identity and literacy. Numerous studies have documented the important role that agency and voice have in successful reading and writing experiences, all of which involve a process of transformation. Effective literacy and advocacy are emergent processes. Each begins with the simple imitation of those who we observe and possibly even admire. I have grown to appreciate the work and wisdom of critical education scholars I have studied, such as Giroux, Gee, Luke, Street, Bomer and Bomer, Christiansen, Harste, Gutierriez, Enciso, Mosely, and Rogers, among others. As a buddying literacy scholar, perhaps I am a bit like the young toddler who watches and imitates his father holding the newspaper. I have discovered that I am slowly finding my voice and learning how to break the code of scholarship. Precisely because I am an existentialist, my identity as a literacy scholar and advocate for social justice is emerging and transforming across the multiple layers that define the dynamical nature of critical literacy and pedagogy in the 21^st century. Whether I become a published writer, and/or continue as a teacher, I am unequivocally poised to helping students and educators find their voices by better understanding the nature of power and cultural identity.

References

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