Abstract of

Literacy & Identity
Another Opening, Another Show: Performing Teaching Identities in Literacy Classrooms

Bronwyn T. Williams

Teachers are constantly performing different identities at different moments, with different students, and for different ends. In turn, the roles students perform are in constant negotiation with their teacher's role. This column explores how literacy teachers consciously or unconsciously construct their identities and how students read these identities. What happens when teachers' identities shift in the classroom, in conference, or in commenting on student writing? How might more careful reflection on who teachers think they are, and how they got that way, help them to better understand how they teach reading and writing and how students respond to them? In practical terms, teachers face problems when they try either to perform an identity that is incomprehensible or inconsistent for their students, or to inhabit an identity that they know students believe a teacher should have but that doesn't work for them.

Abstract from Williams, B.T. (2006, March). Another Opening, Another Show: Performing Teaching Identities in Literacy Classrooms. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(6), 536–540. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.49.6.8