Identity in disciplinary writing and learning

This dissertation explores disciplinary writing and learning from a social perspective. It examines the social activities of students in an introductory sociology class in terms of identity work and answers the following research question: How does the identity-work of students in a disciplinary classroom interact with the conventions of the discipline the class purports to instantiate.;I examine identity as an accomplishment in interaction in classroom talk and writing and use participant observation to build thick descriptions of the activities of students in the class. Data for this study come from fieldnotes, all of the written material in the class, videotaped classroom interactions, writing conferences, and interviews.;Analysis of the data shows that students in this class worked with local resources to make sense of the expectations of the class and the discipline and to pursue and inflect the lasting identity of good student. Students both pursued this identity and succeeded at doing so to varying degrees, both in the classroom participation and in their writing. In their writing, however, more students both worked toward and achieved success. Writing was especially important in this class as well because it offered students both public and private resources with which to work. The private resources sometimes gave students somewhat different ideas about the nature and requirements of sociology. Further, these findings show that students in this classroom oriented not only to the teacher but to other students in their classroom talk.;This study also suggests a relationship between identity-work and learning. As students actively performed their identity-work in writing and speaking, they took up the language and conventions of sociology as resources. In so doing, they also took on the perspectives of sociologists. Though not all of them did so in classroom talk, all of the students in this class did so in writing.