I just finished reading Wendy Bishop’s Something Old, Something New: College Writing Teachers and Classroom Change. It’s nice to actually focus on reading an entire book now that break is here.
Sara Jameson and I are preparing for our talk at CCCC in March on online identity (esp. in relation to GTAs — we’re in the process of narrowing our focus, or will be after some more exploration). Bishop’s book is interesting and helpful in understand some of the ways that teachers create identities (though this is before the advent of ubiquitous online remediation of and creation of identities).
Bishop writes that new GTAs have to activate new teaching identities at the same time that they activate new doctoral student identities. Also, interactions with others outside of grad seminars require even more identity negotiation. She writes, “Identity sorting, both personal and private, and identity shifting were major considerations for those enrolled in this program and this seminar” (6).
Teacher identity formation is a “complex process, in part because teachers rarely get together.[…] Teachers in a doctoral program may develop identities by slow initiation into the research community through their writing and course work and by a complex process of doubting and believing as they sift through theory and methodology” (100).
Bishop also points me to a few articles by R. Brooke that I think might be helpful. Brooke (1987) discusses students’ needs of an “underlife” where “actors in an institution develop behaviors which assert an identity different from on the one assigned them” (qtd in Bishop 101). Brooke (1988) also defines identity formation:
An individual’s identity, in other words, is a consequence of the way that person acts around others. On the basis of their actions (occupation, hobbies, mannerisms, quickness or slowness to anger, likes and dislikes, etc.), individuals come to be recognized and come to recognize themselves as certain sorts of people. This mutual recognition of self by self and others becomes one’s identity. In interacting with others, then, one negotiations and is assigned a kind of consistent stance toward the world, based on the pattern of one’s past and present interactions. This assigned consistent stance is, as far as anyone in the situation can tell, one’s identity. (qtd in Bishop 132-133)
Bishop, Wendy. Something Old, Something New: College Writing Teachers and Classroom Change. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.
Even though I just read this book myself, you manage to spotlight and remind me of important paragraphs that I read but didn’t write down. Your habit of collaging the citations immediately imprints them more forcefully. And thanks for posting this to the 4C’s note page.