Theorizing Identities in a “Just(ly)” Contested Terrain: Practice Theories of Identity amid Critical-Poststructural Debates on Curriculum and Achievement

Abstract

In K–12 schools throughout the United States, policies intended to increase student achievement, such as those associated with No Child Left Behind, often propagate deficit notions about minoritized students and overlook the interdependence of students’ identities, academic achievement, and classroom contexts. The classroom is an evaluative school setting in which students construct and negotiate multiple identities that are shaped by their ascribed and/or assumed positions as learners and achievers. This article explores how an identities-in-practice theory can reframe pivotal critical and poststructural debates on achievement and curriculum by problematizing conceptions of students’ multiple identities in the interest of education for social justice. Conceptualizing identities as multiple, intersectional, and contextual, as well as mediated by mainstream academic discourses, allows educators to consider how raced, classed, abled, and gendered identities (among many others), shape and inform experiences of curriculum and achievement for minoritized students in U.S. schools.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr. Michelle G. Knight, Dr. Molly Quinn, Dr. Lorraine Falchi, Rebecca Stanko, and anonymous reviewers for their insights on earlier versions of this work.

Notes

Some scholars group White and Asian middle class students in comparison with low-income students of color (Darling-Hammond, 2004), whereas others frame the achievement gap among ethnic and racial lines (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Although the term “students of color” can be a proxy for students of African American, Black, and/or Latino backgrounds, I use the term in this article because rather than discussing a particular race, ethnicity, or nationality, my intent is to propose identities-in-practice theory as a lens for the examination of the identity construction/negotiation of historically marginalized and minoritized student populations.

According to Ochs and Capps, “narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience” (1996, p. 19). The process of attempting to make sense out of perceptions, lived events, and circumstances involves constructing narratives. These narratives of experience, like identities, are contextual and continuously under revision. Because narratives of experience are among the factors that inform self-understandings and behavior, I conceptualize students’ experiences as connected to the process of identity construction and negotiation.

Whereas Alvesson (2002) saw postmodernism as a philosophy that grew out of French poststructuralism, others defined the term as the “condition of our contemporary world,” the context in which critical discourse is situated (Whitson, 1991, cited in Stanley, 1992, p. 152). My analysis is intended to engage specifically with certain concepts informed by critical theory and poststructuralisms, but I use postmodernism and poststructuralism depending on how the referenced authors use the term(s).

Ogbu and Simmons (1998) defined voluntary minorities as immigrants who have come to the United States in search of a better life for themselves and their children (e.g., Chinese Americans, Cubans, West Indians) and view schooling as a means to an end.

The term agency refers to the capacity for human action and improvisation amid “powerful and hegemonic” cultural and social regimes (p. 277).

Holland et al.'s (1998) use of “self” and “selves” is generally used to represent the factors or characteristics that inform a person's behavior, including “expressions implying a subjective sense of oneself as an actor/subject” (p. 19).