Academic Selves Research Articles

The Role of Identity Styles and Academic Possible Selves on Academic Outcomes for High School Students

The authors examined linkages among identity styles, academic possible selves, and grades for 1,137 public high school students across a southern state in the United States. The measurement model revealed a positive association for the informational style and a negative association for the diffuse style with academic possible selves. There were positive associations for the informational style, normative style, and academic possible selves with grades, but negative associations for the diffuse style with grades. The structural model showed academic possible selves mediated the relationship between the informational and diffuse styles and grades. Moderation tests indicated that the association between academic possible selves and grades was stronger for girls, and that the normative style was related to academic possible selves only for European Americans.

Disciplining Cultural Pasts: A Review

One of the great promises of extending our academic selves across disciplinary lines is the opportunity for introspection. Done well (which is to say sincerely and generously), undisciplined reading serves to unearth the norms that implicitly maintain modern scholarly boundaries, helping to guard against creeping crippling complacency. This is a useful way for subscribers of this journal to approach American Empire and the Politics of Meaning by Julian Go. Though ultimately posing a sociological challenge to prevailing theories of “culture,” Go makes a formidable contribution to historical scholarship. He has authored, from within a sociology department, a bona fide comparison of the cultural impact of U.S. colonial rule in the early twentieth century Philippines and Puerto Rico. The monograph, as a result, instructs not only about change in the past, but also about the present state of the discipline of history. Go's underlying premise is that, geographic remoteness aside, the people of Puerto Rico and the Philippines shared a fundamental predicament during the twentieth century's first decade. Both populations, as is well known, came under U.S. occupation after the so-called Spanish-American War of 1898. More crucially for Go, however, inhabitants of both places faced coerced cultural reeducation that simultaneously realized and legitimized their political subjugation. As American occupiers sought to legitimize a sovereignty won at the barrel of a gun, they presented themselves not as vainglorious rulers but as benevolent teachers. Construing their imperial burden in pedagogical terms, U.S. officials publicized their purpose as equipping unschooled peoples, elites especially, for the schemas of modern government. Lecturing, publishing, disciplining, and punishing, they set out to mold their tropical subjects into rational-minded individuals able to recognize the virtue of keywords like “liberty” and “rights.”

Discourses of Remediation: Low-Income Students and Academic Identities

This article draws on the framework of new literacy studies (Gee, 1996, 2005) to explore remedial students’ academic identities. The authors use discourse analysis to examine students’ written assignments from one remedial summer bridge course. Student-written assignments include themes and rhetorical devices that suggest the complexities of negotiating academic identities. In particular, low-income student participants express uncertainty about their academic selves. The authors offer this framework as one means of further exploring remedial student experiences.

What's [Yet] to be Seen? Re-Using Qualitative Data

This paper considers current debates about re-using qualitative research data by reflecting on its implications for the nature of social science knowledge created in this process and the ways in which the disclosure of researchers’ practices are linked with the making of professional academic careers. It examines a research project using two different approaches – a ‘virtual’ and a ‘classic’ ethnography – to argue that issues concerned with re-use of data depend on the methods employed and the overall processes of investigation. The paper argues for an appreciation of the contexts involved in the generation of research material which takes into account both the development of the study and related fieldwork processes as well as the academic context in which knowledge is produced, particularly those involved in the construction of academic selves and professional careers, which are part of a wider situation bearing upon scientific enquiry.

The relational selves of female graduate students during academic mentoring: from dialogue to transformation

This study, framed by social constructionism, retrospectively examines how faculty mentoring influenced the transformations of 10 female graduate students’ relational selves and their professional identities as qualitative researchers and scholars. Participants reported that effective mentorships often resulted in collaboration on research projects, as well as shared decision‐ and meaning‐making. Effective mentoring also led to the development of the students’ research skills while simultaneously constructing their professional and academic selves. These situated mentorships were shaped by the diverse values, expectations, and hopes that the participants associated with mentoring. Additionally, the local practices, power structures, and relationships at the department or university level influenced, and possibly discouraged, active communication and ongoing dialogue regarding the individuals’ experience of mentoring. Ultimately, participants described how their experiences of mentoring welcomed them into the scholarly community and ensured their professional competence as researchers and academics, which, in turn, transformed the students’ broader sense of self.

Two Truths and a Lie: Performing Professorhood/Motherhood

The following is autoethnographic performative writing that invites the reader into one woman's experiences of simultaneously becoming a new mother and professor. The writing weaves the autobiographic tale of her new job as an assistant professor with a dramatic performance text based on a graduate student's ethnographic interview about the birth of her first daughter. Experimental in nature, this script seeks to problematize the relationship of academic selves and others through creative writing.

Two Truths and a Lie: Performing Professorhood/Motherhood

Abstract The following is autoethnographic performative writing that invites the reader into one woman’s experiences of simultaneously becoming a new mother and professor. The writing weaves the autobiographic tale of her new job as an assistant professor with a dramatic performance text based on a graduate student’s ethnographic interview about the birth of her first daughter. Experimental in nature, this script seeks to problematize the relationship of academic selves and others through creative writing.

A critical commentary to our academic selves

A critical commentary to our academic selves

The Relation of Present and Possible Academic Selves during Early Adolescence to Grade Point Average and Achievement Goals

In this article we describe 2 studies examining the role of present and possible (future) academic selves. In the first study, the relations between present and future selves and changes in grade point average between the sixth and seventh grades were examined. Survey data were collected from a sample of 315 seventh-grade students. Results indicated that positive present and future academic self-concepts were related to positive changes in grade point average. In addition, when adolescents' present perceived academic selves were higher than their future academic selves, GPA increased, whereas when present perceived social selves were higher than future perceived social selves, GPA decreased. In the second study, survey data were collected from a different sample of 220 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. The relations between present and future selves, and mastery and performance-approach achievement goals were examined. Results indicated that a present good-student self-concept was related positively to ...

Academic Identities: women on a South African landscape

Drawing from theories of identity formation and feminist theories, this paper develops an account which is both structural and personal of the social construction of academic women's lives in a South African selling. Such discussion is necessary given the paucity of material on gender in South Africa, and timely in its comparative account of the shaping effects not only of gender, but also of race in the academy. Using life‐history interviews, the paper explores and begins to explain the marginalisation of women in South African universities where male and masculine carries greater cultural prestige, and where the gendered economy and gender divisions in private lives shape and constrain academic selves, but where race has been and is a central carrier of power. Using the words of the women, it seeks to unpick the seamless narration of the White, male, masculinist colonial university as a move towards a more inclusive and so more fully human account of aspects of life in South African universities.