Identity Matters: Schooling the Student Body in Academic Discourse

SUNY Series in Public Policy

by Donna Lecourt

Identity Matters explores the question that consistently plagues composition teachers: why do their pedagogies so often fail? Donna LeCourt suggests that the answer may lie with the very identities, values, and modes of expression higher education cultivates. In a book that does precisely what it theorizes, LeCourt analyzes student-written literacy autobiographies to examine how students interact with and challenge cultural theories of identity. This analysis demonstrates that writing instruction does, indeed, matter and has a significant influence on how students imagine their potential in both academic and cultural realms. LeCourt paints not only a compelling and vexing picture of how students interact with academic discourse as both mind and body, but also offers hope for a reconceived pedagogy of social-material writing practice.

255 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

Reviews

[Peaches · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, some of this took me a while because Lecourt is far more intelligent than I am, but it's a relatively accessible poststructural text if you know a bit about the framework beforehand and raises questions about composition pedagogy that are still current over ten years later. I enjoyed it in that it made me think and reflect on my own teaching, as well as enhanced some of my understandings of poststructuralism.