Pedagogy and Identity in the Community College Developmental Writing Classroom: A Qualitative Study in Three Cases

ABSTRACT

By many accounts, developmental writing courses in community colleges fail to teach students skills needed to be successful in college-level coursework. In the current study, an identity-based pedagogical approach aimed at Promoting self-Relevance, triggering identity Exploration, facilitating a sense of Safety, and Scaffolding identity exploration strategies – the PRESS model – was used to intervene in and examine students’ experiences in developmental writing courses in a community college setting. This model assigns educators the role of identity agents who design identity exploration (IdEx) activities aim to facilitate students’ identity exploration through reflection, questioning, information gathering and processing, understanding, and development of their identities as writers. Students’ identity exploration and development were then analyzed using the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI). Cross-case comparisons of participating students in Phase 1 of the study highlighted the unique role identities, identity exploration, and motivation for each student. The findings suggested that students’ role identities could be characterized along a dimension of sophistication, with richer content relating to greater alignment, versus thinner content relating to more fragmentation. The findings also indicated that, despite variability, students’ engagement with the activities involved identity exploration and development in many cases. This illustrates the potential of identity-based pedagogy to promote desirable identity change, motivation, and learning in developmental writing courses. The study has implications for theory, research, practice, and professional development in community college developmental writing courses.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms have been used to protect students’ privacy.