Sections I'm worried about

In the late summer of 1996, I traveled west to enroll at the University of Iowa, to learn how to become a high school English teacher and to further my education as a writer. These were the two identities I held most strongly at this point in my life: pre-service teacher and writer. The first I shared with others (if asked), the second I kept mostly to myself.

But during my two years at Iowa, my sense of self, and, subsequently, my intentions and desires began to shift. As I traveled to my first academic conferences, worked as Dr. Sunstein’s research assistant, attended lectures by visiting scholars, read and began to experiment with scholarly writing, taught first-year composition, and met and socialized with doctoral students, I gained access to a side of higher education about which I had previously known very little. I felt drawn to this new world. I was a serious student and I sensed that graduate education, beyond the terminal Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree I had come to Iowa to pursue, was the ultimate opportunity for rigorous academic study. I began to think I might make a good professional student.

And yet my desire to pursue further education, to stay on, say, for a doctorate, was complicated by my sense of myself as a member of the UNH writing tribe, which, at this point, I associated primarily with teachers and writers (the latter of the creative sort). These two identities, teacher and writer, seemed to conflict with this other identity I was beginning to imagine for myself, scholar. I associated the first two identities with practical matters, rooted in the real world (which I perceived to be a good thing). I associated the identity of scholar with abstraction and with theory (of which I was suspicious). Despite the example of my mentor, Bonnie Sunstein, and of several other members of the UNH writing tribe whom I was meeting on the pages of the books and journals I was reading (and sometimes in person), I struggled to envision a way that I could be all three things at once—teacher, writer, and scholar. I somehow couldn’t imagine that in becoming the latter (scholar), I wouldn’t have to give up the former (teacher, writer).

These boundaries I was drawing up in my head shaped virtually everything I did during my time at Iowa. As I fought to maintain allegiance to my limited understanding of my UNH writing tribe identity, I simultaneously began to tentatively give myself over to new more scholarly ways of being. This process of negotiation manifested itself in conversations with friends, in the classroom, and, perhaps most interestingly, on the page.

Writing researcher Roz Ivanic has actually looked into what I’m trying to describe here. Ivanic studies the way writers construct and negotiate identity during the act of writing. Her central thesis: writing is an act of identity. When we write, Ivanic argues, we work to construct a vision of ourselves on the page, work to be a certain kind of person, while we simultaneously work to align ourselves with or distance ourselves from different audiences (31). In the framework Ivanic has developed to analyze writing and identity, there are three elements to consider. First, there is what she calls the autobiographical self, which “is associated with a writer's sense of their roots, of where they are coming from” (24-25). The autobiographical self is the totality of the experiences a writer has had in her life when she sits down to write, as well as her cumulative sense of who she is as a person (i.e. a person who is committed to social justice, a person who is a cut-throat deal-maker, a person who struggles with authority). We inevitably bring our autobiographical selves to each act of writing, Ivanic claims.

Second, there is the discoursal self, which is the “impression—often multiple, sometimes contradictory—which [a writer] consciously or unconsciously convey[s] of themself [sic] in a particular written text” (25). The discoursal self is the person we are trying to be when we write (e.g. a recent medical school grad trying to be a doctor, a college student trying to be a member of her major, a job applicant trying to be the solicited employee). The discoursal self is shaped by what Ivanic calls the “possibilities for self-hood” in a writing situation, which is to say the social context. When constructing a discoursal self, we write as the person the situation requires us to be.

Finally, there is the self-as-author, which refers to the extent to which, in a given situation, a writer feels “enough of a sense of self-worth to write with authority, to establish an authorial presence” (26). The authorial self, Ivanic asserts, is shaped almost entirely by a writer’s sense of confidence in her ability to successfully navigate a given writing situation (i.e. a student writing an essay about a book she hasn’t read vs. a student writing a personal essay about her own life, a job applicant who is not really qualified for the position she is applying for vs. an applicant who is over-qualified, a manager who has worked in an industry for twenty years vs. one who has just promoted to her first management position). For Ivanic, one’s sense of self-as-author is shaped by the degree of experience and self-assuredness one brings to a specific writing task. When one’s autobiographical self meshes well with the discoursal self that a writing situation requires of her, the writer will build a sense of self-as-author that is convincing and persuasive. Often, though, as Ivanic points out, this is not the case—the person we feel we are does not jive with the person we are asked to be on the page. From the perspective of the writer, this is when writing becomes a challenge. From the perspective of the researcher, as we will see below, this is when writing becomes interesting.

If I draw on Ivanic’s framework to better understand my experiences at Iowa, I would begin by trying to reconstruct the autobiographical self I brought to the page each time I sat down to write.