Bella Here and There: Forming and Re-Forming Identities Across School Contexts

Abstract

Bella is perky, petite, and wide-eyed. The daughter of a beautician, she has long, dark hair which she manages with an assortment of colorful bands, some decorated with glitter. Yet Bella is no girly-girl. One day she came to school wearing new sport shoes but assured me that she had no interest in maintaining their tidy appearance if that meant she had to avoid the high-energy schoolyard games she enjoys. She was also quick to tell me that she struggled with English vocabulary and expected to learn many new words as we worked together. Excerpted from field notes taken soon after I met her, this is my most vivid memory of the nineyear-old girl whom I tutored throughout her fourth-grade year. But other distinctive aspects of her identity emerged in the various contexts in which I observed and interacted with Bella (pseudonym). Approaches to literacy development that assume a core identity across contexts are problematic, and the study on which this article is based, addresses this problem by tracking Bella's learning across school settings. There is much to be learned about children like Bella from an analysis of her experiences and responses to those experiences. As such, the purpose of this article is twofold: (a) to describe how Bella constructed and expressed her identities and affective states in the various school environments within which she was taught. The behaviors she demonstrated appeared to reflect her lived experience (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014): thoughts, emotions, reactions to those around her, and the level of comfort-or discomfort-she felt in school spaces. (b) to link what is known about Bella to the education of other children who struggle with literacy Bella was both an emergent bilingual and a vulnerable reader and these attributes influenced her experience in important ways. I employ the term emergent bilingual rather than English learner because it emphasizes what these learners retain (their first language) as well as what they gain (additional

“I Think When I Speak, I Don’t Sound Like That”: The Influence of Social Positioning on Rhetorical Skill Development in Science

“…Scholars in the field of writing studies have examined how students from different socioeconomic backgrounds engage with the language and discourse of the academic community over time (Carrol, 2002; Herrington & Curtis, 2000; Shaughnessy, 1977; Sternglass, 1993; Wilder, 2012)—even more with regard to engagement at high-ranking and majority-serving institutions (see Haas, 1994; Poe, Lerner, & Craig, 2010). More recently, scholars have contributed to discussions of socially situated reading identities (Alvermann, 2001; Qin, 2018), the alignment of student identity with instructor expectations (Fairbanks & Ariail, 2006; Vetter, 2010), the influence of space and audience on adolescent identity and writing (Lammers & Marsh, 2017), and the negotiation of individual identities with the figured worlds of reading classrooms (Frankel, 2016; Jaeger, 2018).…”