Enacted identities : a narrative inquiry into teacher writerly becoming

Abstract

This narrative inquiry explored the ways in which four mid-career English teachers construct themselves as W/writers and how those writerly identities are performed in their pedagogy. I curated data collected from extended interviews, journals, personal and professional writings to build narratives of these teachers-aswriters. Through these narratives and metaphorical thinking (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), I analyzed the wholeness of each participant's experience with writing. Then, in stage two of the study, I used data collected from teaching observations to build a continuum of process --> product, employing Goffman's (1974) frame analysis to place the teachers within that continuum. This continuum represented the stable thread that continued through the teachers' personal and professional identities and led to three insights: (1) Those teachers who identified as Writers were more comfortable teaching writing processes (2) The desire to be seen as a "kind of W/writer or teacher" brings risk writing instruction and (3) Agency provides Writers a way to mitigate the risk of teaching writing.