Student voice and teacher agency: storytelling in letters of recommendation for college admissions

Abstract

We analyze eight letters of recommendation written by high school teachers for first-generation college students, so as to illustrate narrative strategies that can make letters more effective in providing support for students’ college applications. Amidst recent criticisms of the limited utility of letters in college admissions, we argue that they can provide valuable context to students’ applications and present data in letters that shows how teachers make their students stand out. We draw on Bakhtin’s notion of voice and Bamberg’s theory of narrative positioning to examine teachers’ portrayals of their own and their students’ voices, especially through constructed dialogue. We show that such portrayals play a key role in allowing teachers to bridge the gap between students’ personal experiences and admissions officers’ institutional expectations by positioning teachers in a supportive and authoritative role, on the levels of the storyworld and the storytelling world.

Keywords:

• Letter of recommendation
• college admissions
• narrative positioning
• constructed dialogue
• teacher agency
• student voice

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the high school educators we worked with in developing this paper, as well as to Frederick Erickson, Deborah Tannen, and Nadja Tadic for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.