THE IDENTITY TEXTS PROJECT
USING IDENTITY TEXTS, POETRY AND DRAMA
1. Identity texts
Use of identity texts (Cummins, 1981; Cummins 1986; Cummins, 2000; Cummins & Early, 2011) to engage students and support development in writing.
The term ‘identity text’ was coined by Cummins (1981) to draw attention to “essential aspects of the link between identity affirmation, societal power relations, and literacy engagement (Cummins, Hu, Markus & Montero, 2015, p. 556).
Developing an identity text allows students to use material and experiences from their own backgrounds including their own linguistic resources and includes the opportunity for first language use.
An Identity Text can be a written text, a multimodal text or an oral text but it will be a text which connects to the students’ community and it will be one that disrupts a transmission pedagogy which views the student as a blank slate (Freire, 1975).
2. Poetry
Poetry offers an ideal vehicle for transformative ‘thirdspace’ translanguaging pedagogy. Despite being a mandatory component of subject English, writing poetry can be a marginalised activity in classrooms due to perceived time constraints associated with high stakes testing, as well as low levels of teacher confidence (Dutton & Rushton, 2020, in press).
Poetry has been shown to:
give voice to students’ individual linguistic, meta-cognitive (Song and Cho, 2018) and social capacities (Li Wei, 2014);
support unique language practice and ways of knowing (Vogel and Garcia, 2018)
encourage experimentation with languages and symbolically articulating personal representations of identity (Dutton and Rushton, 2018a).
offer rich possibilities as a medium in which students can employ their full linguistic repertoire
create space for students to represent their identities as shaped by their family background and experiences in contemporary Australian society (Dutton & Rushton, 2020, in press).
Find examples here ...
3. Drama
Counter to the trend that sees the creative arts falling victim to the narrowing of curriculum in an educational triage response (see Dutton & Rushton, 2018), Drama-based pedagogy has been selected for this project.
Drama pedagogy:
Supports language development (Dunn & Stinson, 2011; Ewing, 2012)
Supports additional language learning (Dunn & Stinson, 2011; Piazzoli, 2011; Stinson & Freebody, 2006) with the affective space created by drama strategies reducing the anxiety of second language learners and building confidence and capacity for communicating in the spoken mode (Piazzoli, 2011).
Works towards positive academic and wellbeing outcomes for students (Ewing, 2010; Ewing & Saunders, 2016; Lee, Patall, Cawthon & Steingut, 2015). “Embodiment and enactment are often important precursors to other ways of knowing and therefore can facilitate … deep learning across the curriculum” (Ewing, 2012, p. 9).
Promotes student engagement via drama’s kinaesthetic engagement (Lee, Patall, Cawthon & Steingut, 2015; Rothwell, 2011).
Aligns with Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2014) general capabilities of Intercultural Understanding as well as Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal and Social Capability.