6.2.1 How do students appropriate (take up and modify) the writing practices sponsored by their teacher? How do students’ positions as writers, and their projections of possible writing identities, develop in response to their teacher’s sponsorship?
As Mr. Royal’s instruction at times emphasized ideologies more than skills and skills more than ideologies, so too did focal students’ appropriations of writing practices. As writers, their appropriation of sponsored practices sometimes maintained Mr. Royal’s constructions, but they also modified practices by emphasizing ideology where Mr. Royal emphasized skill or imagining economies for practices that were not addressed in his instruction. From their positions as writers, they also projected possible uses for writing that synthesized and translated Mr. Royal’s sponsorship into new storylines about how writers work.
Read with a writer’s sensibility was primarily an ideological practice in Mr. Royal’s construction of it, and it remained as such for Olivia, the only student to mention how reading affected her writing. However, she found a different ideology than the one Mr. Royal intended. She saw in reading for Mr. Royal a seriousness of topic and tone that she had not encountered elsewhere. She appropriated that seriousness in her memoir for class and personal writing.
The focal students maintained the ideological focuses of share your story that Mr. Royal sponsored, but largely saw the practice as an ideological one without also referencing the skills
he built into it. The focal students accepted the ideology that they should pick personally meaningful stories to write and that they would reveal themselves to others through their writing and constructed multiple benefits for doing so, including personal growth and social bonding. While Joel and Hazel accepted the position of writer for those ideologies, they also maintained a position of student in referencing grades as motivators for writing their memoirs. Students’ projections of futures for this practice involved continuing to share stories, though not necessarily in writing, and business writing.
Students also maintained ideological focuses for use writing to challenge your thinking and mature. Writing became a means of capturing thoughts and preparing themselves to talk or write longer essays. Writing also revealed learning as students worked through tasks and new perspectives on the world as they selected evidence to include in writing.
When students talked about argumentative writing is a formula, they described the skills they wanted to appropriate for their future academic and professional writing—which was in keeping with Mr. Royal’s sponsorship of that practice. Students nominated the specific elements of arguments they found most helpful, either counterarguments or Mr. Royal’s formula. Joel and Lily connected the practice to future professional identities in business and the law. Lily seemed especially eager to appropriate the understanding of argument that she gained from Mr. Royal’s sponsorship to what she imagined work as a lawyer would be like. Olivia, at least, noticed that Mr. Royal’s instruction in this practice and state assessment writing is a formula occurred at the behest of other sponsors, and while it was not necessarily connected, she did not project a future for herself that valued argumentative writing as she did with other personal kinds of writing.
Students had little to say about their appropriation of state assessment writing is a formula, which perhaps would be how Mr. Royal preferred it given the multiple cynical
comments he made about its purposes and worth. Lily noted that she appropriated the skills of the practice in the way Mr. Royal intended, but neither she nor him imagined a use for the practice outside of standardized tests.
All focal students described good writers revise everything as a practice they wanted to appropriate for future academic writing. They also could name both terms of access and ideologies that they would appropriate, though for most students there were some differences in the skills they planned to appropriate and what Mr. Royal had sponsored. Students imagined their future revision processes as modifications of what Mr. Royal had taught, more like checklists of what to look for in each sentence rather than actual charting and revising of every sentence. Students’ strong affective reactions to the practice coupled with statements of the value they found in it suggested that in accepting the ideologies of good writers revise everything, they were adding to it the economy of growing in social and emotional maturity. If they could show the maturity necessary for a discipline like revision, they could position themselves well for academic writing success.
The potential identity implications of Mr. Royal’s sponsorship and students’ appropriations of practices took multiple forms. One form was the new practices students created out of Mr. Royal’s instruction. The focal students saw themselves improving as writers, managing difficult writing tasks so that writing seemed easier, slowing down enough to think through their writing, and possibly writing outside of school for their own purposes. Lily was the student who most clearly articulated a future identity for herself that included a specific practice she learned under Mr. Royal’s sponsorship. In order to become a lawyer, she wanted to develop her abilities with argument writing, and specifically the claim, evidence, and reasoning formula. Olivia saw her future identity as a college student as being partially dependent on
writing, specifically her ability to publish some of her writing before she applied to a college. However, Mr. Royal’s sponsorship did not address publishing, and so her articulation of that goal must have grown out of ideologies she encountered elsewhere.
Students’ academic identities may have had some influence on their writing identities as well. I said that Blake, Olivia, and Lily were on Troy’s highest honors list. Hazel and Joel were not. Though Mr. Royal did not indicate that he graded students any differently based on his perception of their general academic abilities, he did specifically single out Hazel and Joel for praise for their accomplishments in memoir writing despite acknowledging that the technical aspects of the writing were not on par with their peers. Hazel had overcome a writing aversion in Mr. Royal’s class and seemed to feel equipped to achieve more academic success as a result. Joel’s modus operandi, in both his and Mr. Royal’s formulation, was hard work. Joel had little to say about his potential academic successes but did see for himself professional uses for writing. As “honors” students, Blake, Olivia, and Lily each saw themselves as clearly bound for college. Interestingly, Blake and Olivia did not particularly seem to like the kinds of writing most valued in post-secondary academic economies: argument writing. However, perhaps their status as generally academically successful, and their abilities with producing writing in the manner requested of them by school even without personal commitment to that kind of writing, shielded them from intervention meant to increase their “buy in” to that practice.