Week 6 Post

Sedimented identities, Habitus and Capital

"'Becoming literate is as much about the interaction one has with others around oral and written language as it is about mastering the alphabetic system'" (Bartlett, 2007).

This was my favorite quote this week. The setting and participants in Bartlett's (2007) study immediately brought me back to much of the love I have for Freirean thinking. The way Bartlett framed the study, though, is what had led me to consider how ideas of literacy practice, identity and artifacts related to my own students. This idea of attempting to "seem" literate that can look starkly different in varying spaces made me think about the way my students performed their identities in different ways during different times of the school day. I'll stick with the same student I began talking about in class last week as a specific example.

Drew very regularly participated in what Holland described as forming and performing his identity in practice (cited by Bartlett on p. 56). He did this by using cultural artifacts that were material and conceptual. Drew was very in tune with reading the clothing, language choices/styles, gestures, gait patterns and hairstyles of the students in his high school that he referred to as the "big kids." This single sentence contains a combination of cultural artifacts that are both material and conceptual. He saw his construction of "big kids" (applied to nearly 1,500 students in the school who did not attend class with him) as a group possessing a great amount of cultural and social capital which made them extremely literate in the comings and goings of high school life. Here, I find it valuable to bring in the game analogy that Compton-Lilly (2014) offered:

"While people are not consciously following rules as they engage in everyday life, they are strategically competing for resources, positions, and opportunities. Being successful in the game is easier if 'one is born into the game' and has embodied ways of being, or dispositions, that are valued within the field" (p. 376).

In an effort to obtain more social capital, having not been born into the 'able' game so many of his peers had been, Drew used artifacts readily available to him (that held significant meaning for him) to attempt to "seem" and "feel" literate (Bartlett, 2007) in a figured world that had very specific sets of rules and expectations, differing drastically from the literacies of an academic space.

To continue to stick with this example, I'll bring in the concept of Habitus (Bourdieu) that Drew participated in in this specific social context outside the classroom. Drawing specifically on the figure we discussed in class, I'm thinking about the way that Drew's ways of being, doing and acting changed across time and space (Roswell & Pahl, 2007). Drew entered high school as a transfer student, having just moved in with a new foster family. After a few months, he began to realize that there was a different social order to the space in our classroom than the space in the broader high school (specifically the cafeteria). This, in turn, led to his use of artifacts (this is a significant digression and oversimplification for the purpose of getting to the point). Drew changed his gait pattern in an effort to imitate what he thought was "cool walking." Sweatshirts were extremely important because he could have the hood up-an important act of resistance since having hoods up was strictly forbidden in the school. On and on his use of artifacts went.

Cultural artifacts as sources/tools for agency (resistance)

Then…something happened in this habitus. Two young women who Drew considered to be "big kids" invited him to sit at their lunch table. This shift in practice was not something that came out of thin air but was rather impacted by the small moves made by Drew over time. This, in turn, impacted his structure of interaction with peers. He had gained limited social capital (especially over those with whom he attended class) which came with new ways of interacting, being and becoming alongside these young women and the peers in his classroom. Still, Drew's habitus hadn't changed in as drastic a way as he might of liked.

He gained limited acceptance and access to these new peers. His access to their lunch table did not mean that they considered him someone "literate" enough in their social practice to hang out with after school or with whom they'd exchange phone numbers. Rather, he was permitted access to their lunch table as a limit of his habitus, which, as Compton-Lilly offers (2014) lies in "historical and social conditions" (p. 375). Drew's diagnoses and the historical and social implications and conditions accompanying these as well as his positioning in the school put limits on how literate he could be or be considered in this group. As much as Drew attempted to seem and feel literate in this space with these people, the amount of capital he could gain was held down despite his best efforts.

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I'm going to shift here, perhaps leaving this part of Drew's every-evolving story very unfinished, but as I'm thinking about sedimented identities (Rowsell & Pahl), I'm also considering the kinds of texts Drew produced in the classroom that represented his layered identities over time. I mentioned above that Drew came to the high school where I worked after he had arrived at a new foster home. Drew is perhaps the student I think of most vividly when I consider how sedimented identities appear through artifacts we produce.

Drew had a strong preference for Thomas the Tank (read: the paradoxical nature of "big kid" implies that Drew, then, potentially sees himself as a "little kid"). Drew also had a history of emotional and physical abuse from both his biological family members as well as historical abuse from other foster guardians. He often demonstrated anger in the classroom, refused to conform to the expectations of authority figures and participated frequently in acts of resistance (e.g., putting his hood up purposefully to defy rules imposed on him). All of these aspects of his identity, and many more, appeared in the texts he produced (which were most often a combination of picture and written text).

Drew's text productions and designs often referred to a very specific episode of Thomas the Tank in which the trains are demonized.

His designs included him in the narrative, referring to himself most often as a "demon boy." For me, these texts and memories were concrete examples as I'm trying to hold onto this idea of "laminated" and layered identities (Holland & Leander-as cited by Rowsell & Paul). How were the ways that Drew was performing and forming his identities play into his designs? How were these "finished" artifacts representations of his sedimented identities?

Drew is multidimensional and he continued to make meaning of himself through his texts as he worked through many of the aspects of his identity that had been co-constructed based on his participation and positioning in the various, often drastically shifting figured worlds he has occupied over the course of his life. This was a representation of his habitus in texts which as Rowsell and Paul (2007) write, "can be understood as being a way of conceptualizing the way in which households bring particular ways of being and doing to a number of sites and these sites include representation as well as practice" (p. 395). The way Drew was, is and continues to become are shaped in the representations he produces as well as the practices in which he engages.