Table 2B: Empirical studies
Theoretical
concepts
Empirical
Studies
Holland
Figured worlds Positional Identities Children, Power and Schooling (Devine, 2003) Leaving Middle Childhood and Moving into Teenhood (Hall, 2008)Rogoff
Personal Apprenticeship Interpersonal Guided participation Community Participatory Appropriation To be part of the story (Moje,2000)Wenger
Participation Reification The negotiation of meaning/Identity Children, Power and Schooling (Devine, 2003) Literacies And Masculinities In the life Of a young Working class Boy (Hick’s, 2001)Lave
Agent/ Activity/ World To be part of the story (Moje, 2000)I will now examine empirical studies that exemplify how authors and researchers have used and extended the complex ideas discussed. These studies highlight how the literature is applied to the everyday social spaces where identity is occasioned.
The first of these empirical studies that I find insightful is Kathy Hall’s work – Leaving middle childhood and moving into teen hood (Hall, 2008). This study reveals the figured worlds that are made available and relevant to a teenage boy called Daniel. It illustrates the kind of figured worlds that gather Daniel up and allow him to negotiate his way from childhood to teen hood.
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Hall’s work, funded by the British Academy, illustrates how one boy Daniel transforms himself as he moves into adolescence (Hall, 2008). This work is of great relevance to my study as the participants in my research are also navigating from primary school to secondary school. This journey involves much change as they move from childhood to teen hood. The story of my research strives to capture this new life as it unfolds for newcomers to a new place. When Daniel is in primary school, he engages in a range of cultural pursuits that are personally meaningful to him. These range from pop music to football.
The pivotal media associated with the world which Daniel so desires include pop music, clothes, especially tracksuits and trainers, mobile phones, computers, computer games, TV programmes, football, and above all friends and now night clubs (Hall, 2008, p.12).
These are highly relevant to the type of self he strives to enact. He attends a rural primary school and has the same teacher for three years. He dislikes school and his teacher. He positions himself and is positioned by others as not being able and not successful in school.
For most of the period of this research Daniel was in primary school. He hated his teacher who has a reputation of being strict and rather traditional in her teaching approach. He spent much of his time in his final year in primary school sitting apart from others in the classroom as he was perceived by his teacher as a talker and a disruptive influence (Hall, 2008, p.12).
Daniel leaves childhood behind and moves into a version of teen-hood and adolescence which for him includes being cool and popular. School seemed to contribute little to his world or connect with his family, his community or the pop culture with which he identified. The salient identity of coolness and popularity gave him a perspective on the world that resulted in him tending to interpret events and others actions in particular ways (Hall, 2014, p. 92). Opportunity to learn and hence identity transformation is a key message in this story. In primary school teaching was very much the traditional didactic model. Classroom life was spent doing individual writing assignments, answering questions posed by the teacher,
completing worksheets and studying the textbook. Daniel is often put sitting apart from his peers. He is viewed as having a problem due to talking too much.
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His mother frequently affirms his dislike of school by admitting that she too hated it. They also talk about school subjects at home and she pointed out to me in his presence that she was always hopeless at maths and how Daniel is hopeless. School is not a place where Daniel can author himself. Primary school is a place where he was literally silenced (Hall, 2008, p.12).
Daniel would benefit from practices that would involve him more centrally in learning tasks. This would enhance his sense of belonging, engagement and his ability to author a learned self-identity. When he moved to secondary school this mismatch between his school
experience and his lived experience was lessened. Daniel was able to renegotiate the tension that had previously existed between doing cool teenager and successful school learner. His secondary school afforded him new opportunities in terms of new peers, teachers, curricula and activities. All of these helped significantly to disrupt and challenge existing conceptions of him as a person and as learner. He was able to author a new self, and became agentive in his new environment.
Since moving into secondary school in September 2005 Daniel has tempered his dread of teachers, class work, and school subjects. In conversation, he has initiated the possibility of being successful in school, occasioned by his evaluation of his new school as cool insofar as: talk in class is allowed, some teachers don’t object to note passing, school trips (to Alton Towers and Old Trafford this year) are exciting, discos are organised by the school at weekends, subjects are far more interesting than primary school, especially science and other subjects (Hall, 2008, p.15).
Clearly the wider social milieu that Daniel finds himself embedded in is a central part of his transformation and in the creation of a renewed identity. This story also illustrates how pupils can transform in the move from primary to secondary school if they are given the opportunity to participate. By the end of Daniel’s first year in secondary school there is a hint of an emerging new identity, a turning point.
He transforms himself to go to the secondary school disco in the local town. Moreover, both his parents have a tradition themselves of dressing up, going out on week-end nights to meet friends (Hall, 2008, p.13).
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When participants were not bounded by the absence of opportunities to participate in practice that would extend and enhance their human agency and therefore their identities by this opportunity to participate. This work illustrates how identity is occasioned in the everyday moment-by-moment encounters. Identities are performed and lived in the everyday (Lave, 1999). It is evident that the self that Daniel can negotiate is dependent on others around him. He is figured by the world (Holland and Lave, 2001; Holland et al, 1998) of the cool teenager and this world grants him the semblance of the cool teenager.
Daniel has found a salient identity by which he can negotiate his way out of childhood and into teen hood. In agentively evolving a particular identity and making it dominant and central to his display of self, he has sacrificed other ways to grow and other potentially liberating ways to live a life. For example, we saw how he will not commit to learning how to play a musical instrument, this activity being perceived to conflict with his current identity (Hall, 2008, p.15)
Identity or self is jointly constructed and can only be given legitimacy in interaction with others. The self is relational and dynamic. It is socially distributed. This paper illustrates the hard work that goes into identity making. Identity is granted but never guaranteed. In this study, Hall is interested in the figured worlds that are made relevant to Daniel and his friends and family as well as the markers of identity in those particular worlds. As my research looks at first year newcomers to Coláiste Fionn, they are walking in Daniel’s footsteps. Certain identities can be salient and held out to them, whilst others can be held back or denied. The first years will strive like Daniel to author a self in this new space. They too are at the crossroads between childhood and teen hood. There will be identity making opportunities presented to them and this is central to a sociocultural understanding of learning and identity building. The extension of the pupil’s agency will occur through the very practices that they participate in. These practices will build a bridge between the old and new selves. These practices are nested in new webs of social relations and participation patterns that spawn endless possibilities for creating and recreating identities anew. The people like teachers and
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fellow pupils around them are the brokers and the participants act as pawns in the exchanges. Daniel adopted the salient identity of the cool teenager and this gave him a perspective on his world that resulted in him interpreting events and others’ actions in a particular way. He grew through his membership of the figured world of the cool teenager. There was an opportunity cost involved in this as he had to deny other means of creating a self. The students in Coláiste Fionn will also have to make choices with regard to the figured worlds that they are drawn in by. Whatever identity they choose to adopt, this will be central to how they negotiate their way through secondary school and also how they grow as newcomers to Coláiste Fionn. Identities are meaningless in the absence of participation in activities. We must participate in activities, even vicariously, in order to take them up (Hall, 2008). The importance of participation as a source of self is developed in the work of Etienne Wenger. Hence this empirical study enacts the broad strokes of identity- making through illustrating key theoretical concepts like figured worlds and positional identities. The second empirical study that I will explore is the work of Dympna Devine- Children, power and schooling - How childhood is structured in the primary school. This empirical study speaks to my research as it looks at children’s experience of school and how this experience influences their emerging identities. The school environment is a highly social one in which both teachers’ and pupils’ identities are simultaneously challenged and affirmed. Power is
exercised in everyday school life as teachers control the time and space of children in school. Positioning children as other in school and influencing how they think of themselves as persons with particular identities all happens in the everyday life of school.
In this study Devine concludes that children position themselves in relation to both their teachers and their fellow pupils. In their accounts of difference in status between themselves
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and their teachers, children expressed a keen awareness of status hierarchies in the school, with themselves positioned at the bottom of this hierarchy (Devine, 2003, p.12).
As the school year unfolds, teachers and pupils come to share an understanding of what is and what is not tolerated in their interactions with one another. Negotiating is an important aspect of the exercise of power between teachers and pupils in the school. The children’s participation in the world of childhood games and rituals frame much of their attitude toward and experience of school. This underlines the crucial role of play and participation in the making of identities.
In this study, children’s identities are defined and redefined with reference to adult norms. It is Devine’s belief that through their experience of schooling, children form identities as pupils. Her study paints a picture of identity as performed in the moment-to-moment social spaces. This is played out through listening to children’s voiced experience of what life is like for them at school.
A central theme of this study is that identity is socially constructed and derived from the range of discourses to which the individual is exposed and consequently discourses of childhood will influence the perceptions children have of themselves. Children define themselves in terms of their relations not only with adults but also with peers, in terms of their gender, social class, ethnicity. As active agents they position themselves, defining their identities and shaping their behaviour according to their own experiences. Devine feels that school practices influence children’s construction of themselves as children, in terms of their role and positioning as individuals in school. This positioning is an active process. Children reflect, react to accommodate such practices, incorporating them into their own sense of self. This illustrates the fluidity and non- bounded nature of identity. This empirical study is helpful in my argument that identity is occasioned in the everyday. It is performed and negotiated with other people and layered with the history of its participants.
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The next empirical study that is useful in illustrating some of the theoretical concepts that form the backbone of my theoretical framework is that of Elizabeth Moje- “To Be Part of the Story”: the literacy practices of Gangsta Adolescents. Moje’s work illustrates how five gang connected youth see their literacy practices as meaning making, expressive and
communicative tools. My research involves the construction of identity and how students take up a social position in their world. Moje illustrates the power and centrality of graffiti to who they are as people.
It is a way of conveying, constructing and maintaining identity, thought and power (Moje, 2000, p.651).
Hence student literacy gives a powerful lens into the student social world and space, identity construction and representation. The adolescents in the study connected to gangs used language, literacy and other discursive practices to make meaning for themselves,
communicate with others and gain membership in the community. Because the gangs were so powerful in the youth culture of the school, these young people used gang-connected practices to negotiate their school lives. There is also a strong theme of communities of practice in that the adolescents are learning practices by apprenticing others in a community of practice and by practicing their different forms in various spaces (Moje, 2000, p.672). This links with the unfolding of identities in communitites of practice which I discuss in chapter 4. Moje’s research hangs from a sociocultural thread, as the social and cultural lived worlds of the participants impact on the kind of people they are and how they are allowed to become– part of the story. I would also like to draw from Moje’s definition of identity. She envisions identity as follows:
the perspective on identity that I offer suggests that identity is not a stable, unitary construct; instead anyone person can construct many different identities, identities can conflict with one another, but are articulated to the subject positions that people construct or that are constructed for them (Moje, 2000, p.656).
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Hence Moje view’s identity as fluid. It is multiple in that people can embody many different identities and it is linked to the positionality of the participants. I find this perspective of identity advances my theoretical argument that identity is not fixed and involves other people.
The final empirical study that I have chosen for this section of the chapter is Deborah Hicks’ work- Literacies and Masculinities in the life of a young working-class boy, which illuminate children’s negotiation of cultural and textual spaces between home and school. Hicks
constructs a narrative that details the complex particulars of values, feelings, and practices in a social context. The research centres around a young working - class boy named Jake. Jake had no difficulty negotiating his identity in Kindergarten, but due to the dissonances between family identities and school practices, he increasingly came to resent what school demanded of him in first and second grade. Because of the open-ended nature of many kindergarten social and academic practices, Jake was able to construct his own points of entry with school. He engaged with classroom practices that mirrored his modes of learning at home. These included roaming, moving freely, working for long periods at centres involving building vehicles or working with objects. This mirrored activities that Jake was observed engaging in at home.
Jake was nearly constantly in motion, sitting down only to perform a task, then moving right on to the next activity. His love for NASCAR racing and his emerging interest in joining his father in constructive jobs are things that could sustain him for long periods of time (Hicks, 2001, p.219)
In sharp contrast in school, he resisted activities involving two-dimensional text- reading, writing and drawing. His early reaction was one of disinterest and tuning out. There was a cultural dissonance between Jake’s home life and that of school. When Hicks’ visited his home, she experienced a different cultural space.
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Relationships and activities within Jake’s close and extended family are fluid and shifting; social spaces in his home are therefore typically buzzing with ongoing talk and activity (Hicks, 2001, p.218).
The research highlights Jake’s difficulty in first and second grade as he moved between the social world of home and school. Jake did become a reader but with some degree of struggle amid the social boundaries of classroom reading and writing practices. In general, he became a struggling student. Jake’s strong preference for the forms of being and knowing that he practiced at home interfaced with first and second grade expectations.
Jake was a young boy strongly immersed in the stories and practices that were lived by his father.
Jake also joined his father in a family passion for car racing and collecting small replica racing cars. In his parents’ room was his father’s extraordinary collection of miniature racing cars, each displayed with a picture of the car’s driver. Hung in Jake’s bedroom was an emerging collection of race car miniatures (Hicks, 2001, p.219).
Sustained interest in an activity, required that the task made sense to Jake. A task had to be something that needed to be done. Otherwise Jake would refer to it as plain “stupid”. The research pinpoints Jake’s struggle to align school reading practices with his life as a reader at home, including the gendered relationships and identities that shaped reading in his family life.
The research on Jake amplifies some key observations regarding identity which resonate for my study. There are different identities around home and school and these are bounded by social class and gender. Jake’s sense of himself as a reader was bounded and constrained by his gender. The pervasive influence of social class cannot be escaped. This influence is constructed through interaction. Both social class and gender are big physical markers influencing what is made available. Gender is made- there is a way to be a boy. Hence Jake is positioned. There are also strong messages regarding the self and its performed nature.
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The self is always performed and interactional and relational. The way one perceives what is relevant in a particular situation is due to our histories of participation. Jake’s teachers did not take account of his history of participation and the social practices and relationships experienced at home were not brought to bear on his school work.
The above empirical studies highlight broad themes ranging from the shaping of figured worlds to the fashioning of identity in everyday social spaces. My empirical study is based in a newly amalgamated second-level Irish school and aims at gleaning insights into the social construction of identity in this context. It endeavours to shed light on issues like newcomer