Adolescent Identity Performances Within Literacy Practices

Using NLS as the theoretical framework, this study focused on how students performed identities during and in response to literacy events and practices in multiple settings within one high school. This study recognized the ideological model of literacy over an autonomous model stripped of context, culture, and socialization (Street, 1984; 1995), as it paid particular attention to the localized and socialized identity performances as related to and tied up in literacy work. This study has worked to identify how students have performed identities (Blackburn, 2003), and often academic identities, within, across, and in response to literacy events and practices in literacy rich contexts.;Using ethnographic methods and identity performances within literacy practices as my unit of study, the purpose of this inquiry was to seek answers to the following question: What are the material consequences of identity performances, especially in performing or not performing academic identities during, in response to, or in resistance to literacy practices in the classrooms, LMC, and book clubs at Ridgehill?;By asking other research questions, which map onto a close representation of Barton and Hamilton's (1998) and Barton et al.'s (2000) definitions of literacy practices, I was able to better understand possible explanations of the overarching research question. As a result of asking these questions, three major themes emerged from the data and were fleshed out in the analysis allowing for a response to the overarching research question. Identity performances that worked as interruptions or subversions to established or expected power patterns signaled ways in which the literacy curriculum may not have worked for all students at all times, why that may have been the case, and how those performances affected performing academic identities. Ways that students performed for certain audiences also signaled reasons why students performed certain identities. The complexities of text and context, of intertextual and intercontextual work and understandings, also offered some insight into possibilities for fostering academic identities. Thus, the findings of this study surround the themes of identity performances that subverted or interrupted power patterns, the influence of audience on identity performances, and how academic identities were fostered through explicit intertextuality and intercontextuality. I conclude with demonstrating how all three of the themes discussed in the findings have implications for teachers, research, and theory.