Applying the Theoretical Framework (Part 1)

See: "Indigenous Interests": Reconciling Literate Identities across Extracurricular and Curricular Contexts" 139-162 in Reinventing Identities in Second Language Writing.

While we view the different perspectives that older students bring as resources, teaching them well will likely require that we rethink our notion of whom we teach and our assumptions about them. Having older students may ultimately affect our assignment-making, class discussions, and dynamics inside and outside the classroom just as having students from a variety of linguistic and ethnic backgrounds often does.
—Beverly Moss and Keith Walters (“Rethinking Diversity” 166)

In addition to the increase in the number of students from diverse ethnic backgrounds who will attend college in the coming years, the average age of students attending college will continue to rise, a tendency already clear in many schools. Consequently, no longer can we expect our first-year writing courses to be made up of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students fresh out of high school. Our older students may include wives, husbands, single parents, military veterans, full-time workers, and part-timers of many sorts… Although we know of no research concerning the ways in which the presence of this population might affect the writing classroom, we know from personal experience that these students have different kinds of goals and different strategies for reaching them than their younger classmates.

--Beverly J. Moss and Keith Walters, “Rethinking Diversity: Axes of Difference in the Writing Classroom” (451)

• Point 1: Adult students are not a monolithic population, what perhaps best defines the adult students in higher education is the diversity within this population.

• Point 2: One way of thinking about this diversity is offered in an NCES study that found two different groups of adults who participate in higher education—employees who study and students who work. These are two different kinds of students who bring different histories and experiences, motivations, and goals to the classroom. One key difference between these two groups is the role of employment or work—whereas students who work often work part-time and pursue their studies on a more full-time basis, employees who study take classes more slowly and are often defined by their relationships to their work.

• Point 3: While both employees who study and students who work participated in the NSC study, I will be focusing primarily on the a single case study of an employee who studies, Tony Vaccaro. I will use Tony’s case as a way of raising questions, generally, about the role of literacy and schooling in the lives of adult students classified as employees-who-study.

• Point 4: Because adult students like Tony did not pursue the “typical” route through post-secondary study and are often positioned as newcomers or outsiders by the institutions in which they enroll in the fact that they must often take first-year writing courses, there may be a tendency to think of such students in terms of what they lack: basic or functional writing skills, confidence in literate abilities, success with academic literacy, a positive orientation towards literacy instruction. They are defined by what they don’t have—a college degree. If we apply the standard model to these students, the linear model where one graduates from high school, pursues higher education, and finds work, it may appear that these students have missed something or are missing something—and that it is, thus, our job to give that something that they do not have to them. We think of them as a glass that needs to be filled.

• Point 5:

So I have these two notions—

Whereas, once, schools were the primary disseminators of literacy, over the course of the twentieth century, Brandt asserts, the number of literacy “sponsors” expanded to the point where Americans’ literacy now develops at the hands of a diverse range of “sponsors.” “A proliferation of sponsors,” Brandt writes, “also means that people who move—sometimes from culture to culture—transport their literacy from one context to another or must adapt and amalgamate practices learned in one sphere to meet the new demands of another sphere” (198).

What I am interested in, in this book, is the movement of students from one literate context to another. Here is where I can connect to Wenger—because what these individuals are really doing is moving from one community of practice to another—each of the five employees who study who participated in this study were embedded to a considerable to degree in their workplace communities of practice. Thus, I am thinking of adult students less as students who are missing something or empty, but rather, as individuals like me or anyone else, negotiating their way between different communities of practice and the literate demands they face in these locations. I now see these students as facing “the challenges faced by all literacy learners.” The problem is somehow the notion that academic literacy precedes other forms of literacy.

Of her research participants’ literacy stories, Brandt writes,

these accounts suggest that what is unprecedented about literacy learning (and teaching) in the current climate is not so much a demand for literacy that seems chronically to outstrip supply, but rather the challenges faced by all literacy learners in a society whose rapid changes are themselves tied up so centrally with literacy and its enterprises” (651).

Literate identity: “one’s sense of oneself as a literate person in the world” (140)

Tony’s literate pursuits at NSC are shaped to a considerable degree by two factors:

1. His previous relationships to literacy activities and academic communities.
2. His current participation in his workplace community of practice

To a considerable degree, his ability to participate in the NSC community of practice were shaped by his earlier experiences of literacy instruction and the sense of himself that he had constructed as a result of those earlier experiences.

It occurs to me that Tony is balancing two conflicting identities. There is the identity of competence that he is able to produce in some instances in the workplace—particularly when he is allowed to employ multimodal composing tools and there is the identity of competence he has assumed by the nature of his status within the field (EMS educator/consultant, paramedic, Training Coordinator within ACME). And then there is the legacy of the identity that he carries from his earlier life, which is one of incompetence and failure and frustration.
Tony is balancing his multimembership.

So, the process of entering into a community of practice—in some cases, the COP is entirely new, one has no experience with or of it. In other cases, one may have experience with it, a history of involvement.

Key Terms: Marginal and Peripheral, boundaries, trajectories

My key term: Histories of participation (Wenger doesn’t really talk about the histories of participation that individuals bring to their participation in communities of practice)

I have argued that we know who we are by what is familiar and by what we can negotiate and make us of, and that we know who we are not by what is unfamiliar, unwieldy, and out of our purview. We not only produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in. Our identities are constituted not only by what we are but also by what we are not. In other words, non-participation is, in a reverse kind of fashion, as much a source of identity as participation. (164)

Non-participation is an inevitable part of living in a landscape of practices (165)

A coherent identity is of necessity a mixture of being in and being out (165)
TONY: I don’t read novels.

Wenger explains that there are two ways in which participation and non-participation can interact:

• Peripherality: some degree of non-participation is necessary to enable a kind of participation that is less than full. Here, it is the participation aspect that dominates and defines the non-participation as an enabling factor of participation.
• Marginality: a form of non-participation prevents full participation. Here it is the non-participation aspect that dominates and comes to define a restricted form of participation. (165-66)

Peripherality and marginality both involve a mix of participation and non-participation, and the line between them can be subtle. Yet, they produce qualitatively different experiences and identities, so it would be wrong to associate them to closely. (166)

Would I define Tony’s engagement as “a restricted form of participation”? Sort of. I am thinking about that story he tells of being left in the raft while the boat sails away—a powerful metaphor of non-participation or marginality.

The difference between peripherality and marginality must be understood in the context of trajectories that determine the significance of forms of participation. (166)

Whether non-participation becomes peripherality or marginality depends on relations of participation that render non-participation either enabling or problematic. (167)

A range of forms of participation with four main categories:

• Full participation (insider)
• Full non-participation (outsider)
• Peripherality (participation enabled by non-participation, whether it leads to full participation or remains on a peripheral trajectory)
• Marginality (participation restricted by non-participation, whether it leads to non-membership or to a marginal position).

I am thinking about Tony’s story of joining the marines after high school—there was no way he was going to continue with school.

The mix of participation and non-participation through which we define our identities reflects our power as individuals and communities to define and affect our relations to the rest of the world. It shapes such fundamental aspects of our lives as:

1. how we locate ourselves in the social landscape
2. what we care about and what we neglect
3. what we attempt to know and understand and what we choose to ignore
4. with whom we seek connections and whom we avoid
5. how we engage and direct our energies
6. how we attempt to steer our trajectories

I’m thinking of the contrast in the stories Tony told about his American Pop Culture course and his speech or oral presentation class—how he was drawn to the latter and generally did as little as possible in the former. I’m also drawn to the terms neglect and ignore—thinking about his avoidance of the paper in favor of the PPT presentation and his avoidance of the first-year writing class altogether.

How non-participation in an institutional context can become a defining characteristic of practice. (169)

…the identities of non-participation that they develop with respect to the institution and to the content of their work are an integral part of their identities of participation in their own communities of practice. (172)