Acting in the middle : the dialogic struggle for professional identity in adult literacy and basic education in Victoria

Abstract

The idea of grand narratives has sustained Western thinking for centuries; postmodemity has challenged this idea. I take the challenge to two of these grand narratives, that of 'the self and that of 'literacy', to explore how adult literacy professional identity has been formed around struggles between contradictory discourses of the self and of literacy. The study's main focus is the discursive struggles that adult literacy professionals negotiate in the formation of professional identities. I argue that this formation takes place through on-going discursive dialogue. The adult literacy professional self is one site among many 'specific disciplinary institutional sites' (Lee 1996:184), where professional identity is formed. I use thirteen professional narratives, my own auto-ethnography and selected public documents to explore the discursive constitution of adult literacy professional identity, through struggles over self and literacy. The thesis builds on two main metaphors to explore the nature of professional identity. First is the metaphor of being 'in the middle' (after Grurnet 1988, Gurevitch 2001, Gutierrez et al. 1998, Hall 1997), a pedagogical space where professional subjectivity is played out between teacher and learner. The second metaphor is that of Bakhtin's 'dialogic struggle' (Holquist 1981), and the idea that the en/acting in the middle, the formation of one's professional identity, is always a struggle, dialogic and on-going. Discursive struggles make contradictory subject positions available for 'the I' of the professional self; at the same time these discursive struggles construct 'the other' of the adult literacy learner, in particular and contradictory ways. Constitution of self in relation to the other inserts the need for a theory of agency and an ethics of alterity . The thesis also works towards a theoretical position, with the notion of the dialogic self, which overcomes the personal/social binary. In the context of adult literacy education the self is constituted through struggle, as both personal and social, with words, symbols and spatial practices from other contexts and other eras, (after Soja's 1996 concept of 'the trialectics of historicality, sociality and spatiality').