How do we paint ourselves on the world? In many ways this question resonated in both scholarship and society. Who is I. Are we We? Do I have multiple Mes,

Learning Identity drives literacy. James Gee says Language has two goals, “scaffold the performance of action in the world, including social activities and interactions; to scaffold human affiliation in cultures and social groups and institutions.”

Yet in our schools we focus on literacy as a mans for information acquisition aguired through skill acquisition. But what if Gee is right and words are so much more?

We need to expand our Perspectives when it comes to langauge and encoruagr students to explore identities. As our methiod to do so, we are encouraging each other as reflective blogging

Domain Of One’s Own

Module Zero focused on you setting up your digital infrastructure to explore open pedgagogy and blogging as a teacher. Giving a student a URL is kind of like giving them a locler or letting them decorate a notebook. They make it their own. The language use becomes an Identity Kit, as Gee would say.

Identity drives so much of learning. Self-Efficacy scholars like Bandura and Zimmerman talk about increasing perfomance by encouraging students to interoogate abilities. Carol Dweck has written on the importance of a “Growth Mindset” all of these are driven by Learner Identity.

Identity Work

Adorno, developed the term “identity thinking” in his work on “negative dialectics.” A member of the Frankfurt School, a group of mainly Jewish scholars who escaped Germany and settled at Columbia University and developed critical theory, Adorno critiques the construct of self.

To Ardono “identity thinking” is a form of thinking which is the most expressive philosophical manifestation of power and domination.

“Dialectics seeks to say what something is, while identarian thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself.” (1990:149), he wrote. What does this mean for learners

To Ardono “identity thinking” masked the object being identified. Much of this buils on Nietzsche and other Posr-Structuralist thinkers. Yet Ardono pushed us to move beyond simplistic notions of fixed identities. As teachers we have to embrace the dynamic, non-identical nature of both individual experience and the social world that projects identity back on to us.

Swann has introduced the term “identity negotiation " to talk about learning over time.

Identity Work in Blogging

The scholarship on technology has shifted towards the inclusion of principles related to the development of the autonomous learner. A “growth mindset.” A “self-programmable” learner. We see this in our instructional routines on like PBL, Genius Hours, or even traditional models such as Montsesori

The idea is the learner has agency within the system. Your blog is how you express your agency. Your agency is how you do the identity work as a reflective practioner.