Homogenizing Identities

Abstract

So how did the students negotiate their academic identities in the space created between the diversities they embody and academic discourse as it was socially constructed in this setting? To determine what space was created, I looked at what implicit messages about student identity were conveyed through the curriculum-in-practice. I also analyzed how the students interpreted those messages as they negotiated their identities in the community college classroom as evidenced by their classroom participation and interview responses. Specifically, the focus of this chapter is how identities are negotiated through linguistic practices, an approach that values the “sociohistorically shaped partiality, contestability, instability, and mutability of ways in which language ideologies and identities are linked to relations of power and political arrangements in communities and societies” (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 10).