Danish perspectives on writing and identity in a school context: Responding to the situation: Discoursal construction of identity in school writing

Taking a socio-cultural perspective on writing (Bazerman, 2016), this study investigates two cases of situated writing in Danish compulsory education. Nordic writing research has shown that school writing is characterized by double genre expectations and takes place in a double semiosphere (Berge, 1996; Karlsson, 1997). To support student engagement by offering an authentic writing purpose, writing prompts often imitate (or even act upon) real-life situations encouraging students to address out-of-school readers through authentic genres such as newspaper articles or contributions to the public debate. However, the hegemony of the school semiosphere exposes that the scenarios presented in the writing prompts will always be subordinate to the overall purpose of school writing. This inflects the socially available possibilities for selfhood (Ivanič, 1998) of the students compelling them to navigate both as participants in the writing culture of the classroom or examination room and as ‘journalist’ or merely young people writing for out-of-school purposes.
Research question
To what extend do interacting semiospheres provide and restrict socially available possibilities for selfhood in two cases of school writing?
Design
The first case includes data from a study that explored authentic writing in three 5th grade classrooms (Molbæk, 2018). In one classroom, the students were asked to interpret and respond to a real-life situation. The students’ school was to receive new students because of an upcoming school merger. Therefore, the students in the 5thgrade classroom in focus were invited to accommodate their future peers by writing them letters. Data on this case comprises recorded dialogic interaction between students and teacher as well as field notes.
The second case stems from an explorative study on exam writing at the end of grade nine (age 5-16) (Troelsen, 2020). The Danish school-leaving exam in written composition is a high-stakes writing event crucial to the future educational opportunities of the students. Data from this case comprises four different writing prompts and student papers from an average public school in spring 2017.
Results
Case one shows that the anchoring of the writing event in a real-life situation, despite its known potential in encouraging students, may also reduce engagement. The school semiosphere and the rhetoric situation, including ¨the teacher’s interpretation of the situation, demand specific discursive identities, including ways of relating to peers. This results in restricted possibilities for selfhood as student writers, which challenges participation for some students, but leads to constructive negotiations for others.
Case two underpins the fact that exam writing as social action serves a double purpose: On the one hand, students must answer to the scenario presented in the writing prompt. On the other, they must do so addressing the school semiosphere since the main purpose of exam writing is to achieve recognition from the rater. Findings show that most students prefer the traditional school essay to assignments imitating real-life genres. Regarding the issue of discursive construction of identity, exam papers serve as metonymic representations of the students since rejection of their writing is, implicitly, a rejection of their ‘autobiographic selves’. Thus, constructing a ‘discursive writing self’ worth recognizing becomes essential to the students’future educational opportunities and self-esteem.
Discussion
For discussion, we focus on the potentials and challenges related to writing for real-life purposes and the representation of writing as a meaningful, intentional social action. We focus on the relationship between the autobiographical self and the exigences of the writing situation described in the prompt and reflected in the dialogue between teacher and students.
Theoretically, we argue that high-stakes exam writing may serve as a magnifying glass for the general challenges of handling the double semiosphere of school writing, including school writing for real-life purposes.