Of scarecrows and straw men

For a while now I’ve been interested in identity. This stems from my research interest in storytelling and pretended play, where identity “feels” like it is a formative component of the context. Collaborative storytelling games center play on the creation of a character and their interactions in narrative. The distinctions and overlaps between participant identity and character identity quickly becomes very scruffy. For example, I’ve been wrestling with data of pre-service teachers playing story games where hypothetical “student” and “teacher” interactions co-construct representations of school.

Potter and Wetherell (1987) present a thorough overview of how identity has been a broad-ranging focus of research, from the psychological self-image to discursive orientations in daily interaction and sensemaking. In the psychological tradition, identity was initially conceived of as a combination of internal traits that determine an individual’s behavior (regardless of social context). Yet, if we consider the variability of discourse in social interaction, some of this perspective’s shortcomings become clear. Nonetheless, this notion of “personalities” is a commonsense approach to understanding individual identities in everyday practice. Consider pre-service teachers who find comfort in student "learning styles" as a series of identifiable individual traits. The teaching philosophy of a pre-service teacher regularly expresses the desire to meet each individual students “learning style.” There seems to be a comfort in knowing that students are composed of a specific series of personality traits that can be harnessed for learning (you just need to locate those “styles” and teach for them).

From here, Potter and Wetherell discuss role theory. I found their discussion of role theory particularly relevant to story games play, as participants orient toward shared understandings of a role (e.g., "teacher") in negotiating who their characters are and how their characters act. Roles become a little tricky in story games and collaborative role-play because the game system constrains role choice to a degree. However, considerable agency is given to how these roles are taken up and performed. Nonetheless, story games roles do seem to fit the definition provided by Potter as Wetherell as “a defined set of activities, qualities, or styles that are associated with social positions” (p. 98). If these roles exist independently individuals, than I agree with the necessary critique by Potter and Wetherell. However, what I find interesting in story games is that the game appropriates roles from society and uses these roles to govern an imagery space for play. Thus what determines identity in story games is a sort of meta-role, imported from societal structures, that is critiqued, manipulated, or adopted by participants during play. With this in mind, roles do not need to be regarded as character traits. Of course, participants are performers, acting dramatic and theatrical. But it seems to me that participants are quick to subvert intended roles, co-construct new versions of social reality and therefore find grounds for critique and alternative lines of discourse. Put differently, story games play is societally aware.

You could argue that story games assume the existence of a pre-existing role that guides the play, but remains removed from the players “true identity.” Therefore, story games play is “experimental” and divides the individual into two conscious forms, one the honest self and one based on character traits. True, story games play exists in designed contexts that are arguable “de-contextualized” (a phrase that often gives me pause). That is, pre-service teacher enacting “student” and “teacher” is not "ecologically" valid. Disclaimer: I am not certain how DP (or social constructionism writ large) constitutes validity. I would, with careful hedging, think that validity is measured in, among other things, researcher alignment with participant perspectives and orientation. To be clear, I do not mean participant orientation as, for example, next turn proof (Potter, 2012), but that the researcher considers the “everyday, local practices of participants” (Lester, 2001, p. 289). I find this to be an interesting notion of validity in story games (and research generally), as my concern is not how mental representations of roles are enacted in play, but instead how play leads to the discovery and critique of roles that are representations of society norms and future orientations toward those goals. If courtrooms provide rich cases of memory as social action, perhaps story games provide similarly rich cases of hypotheticals.

I have been working toward conceptualizing "identity as learning" in my work with pre-service teachers. Myself, and my cohorts interested DP/DA, have been struggling to connect DP as a theoretically laden methodology with the learning sciences (which is theoretically driven as well).  I think one avenue to do this is through identity. Sociocultural perspectives consider learning to be the appropriation of cultural and historical practices of a community (Rogoff, 1993) and identity as an act of positioning one’s access to a community’s norms, values, and practices (Nasir & Hand, 2008). From this perspective, learning and identity are reciprocally enacted through the social interactions of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). To continue with my work, pre-service teachers are, at least initially, marginal members of school-based communities of practice, but have access to a lifetime of experience as students that shape and direct their identity as developing teachers. These idiosyncratic lived experiences potentially influence pre-service teacher identity construction as they perform doing “being teacher” in their coursework, field experiences, and formative years as classroom teachers.

I have come to consider learning and identity as convergent, situated in joint activity and mediated by cultural norms, available tools, repertoires, and social or institutional contexts (Hand & Gresalfi, 2015). Building on the notion of identity as a joint accomplishment, I see merit in the investigation of identity as traced through material, relational, and ideational identity resources acquired and employed in social interaction within institutional contexts. This ties well with my previous work, as pre-service teacher identities are tiedto doing “being teacher or student” in future-oriented, albeit hypothetical, interactions (i.e., in story games).

I think this aligns well with Potter and Wetherell’s notion of a discursively constructive self that is “inevitably culturally and historically contingent, dependent on certain kinds of social practices” (p. 102). “Teacher” represents an ideological category that pre-service teachers are beginning to situate their future practice in. For example, it is not uncommon for pre-service teachers to reference a “teacher” as a self-sacrificing, underpaid, or altruistic. These characterizations are in contrast to other societal representations of “teacher” as less than capable (e.g., “those who know, do; those who can’t, teach”). Pre-service teachers already appear to be discursively managing a future version of their self in reaction to societal roles and norms in similar ways to story games play.  While I think I have exhausted this blog, in the future I hope to consider how story games live in an “ecological rich” place that provides opportunities for social interactions that would otherwise not be possible – potentially further complicating notions of natural and experimental boundaries or talk. Moreover, I plan to dig deeper into story games as access points to ideologies of traditional schooling via interpretative repertories. In the end, connecting identity in story games play to learning.