Ethical Readings of Student Texts: Attending to Process and the Production of Identity in Classroom-Based Literacy Research

Abstract

This paper highlights multimodal literacy activities that invited the social re/positioning of learners as creators of meaning and experience rather than passive readers of text.  Elaborating two cases, the paper describes the ways in which newcomer students’ identities were negotiated and enacted during the project, and how their identities were read and constructed by teachers in the classroom.  The paper recommends an analytic approach to literacy studies research that accounts for the ways in which literate identities are materialized in classrooms, and the value in documenting both the product and process of students’ literacy work.