The Daybook Defense: How Reflection Fosters the Identity Work of Readers and Writers

Abstract

Classrooms play a large part in shaping youths’ identities as readers and writers. Due to the pressures of high-stakes exams, for example, reading and writing identities are often defined by a set of academic skills that students can or cannot perform. Such rigid concepts of readers and writers often cause secondary students to believe that their literacy abilities are fixed (i.e., as struggling readers). This study explores how reflective conversations through a daybook defense (an oral reflective assessment for a writer's notebook) opened opportunities for students to redefine what it meant to read and write in two English language arts classrooms. Findings suggest that reflections opened opportunities for students to articulate behaviors of reader/writer identities and express beliefs about reader/writer identities. Implications suggest that such reflective opportunities can provide spaces for students to rewrite reader/writer identities in the classroom.