Academic Identity Construction Research Articles

Construction of the Blackademic: An arts-based tale of identity in and through academia

Abstract The act of making a doctoral gown is a response and metaphor to describe the construction, reinforcement and intersections of racial and academic identity within a probationary period of employment in academia known as tenure-track. A collective arts-based autoethnographic project inspired my garment-making to examine three salient racializing moments during my transition from a Ph.D. programme and into the first four years of a tenure-track position. I use concepts of garment construction – marking, pinning, measuring, pressing and stitching – as aesthetic interludes to illuminate and organize moments of intersubjective dialogue, which ultimately lead to an ascribed racialized academic identification. The construction of a Blackademic identity emerges, inspiring the creation of academic regalia. This arts-based project describes a hypervisibility of racial experience within academic spaces and acts as a visual representation of systemic and intersectional factors, which have guided my movements in academia.

The role of peer review in identity development for engineering education researchers

ABSTRACTPeer review has been the focus of an ongoing study at a series of recent annual conferences of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE). A further development of this study has been to explore the perspective/s of the authors of these conference papers and the impact that peer review can have on their development as researchers. This paper uses the identity-trajectory framework to illustrate relationships between peer review and academic identity construction for engineering education authors in the AAEE community. Participants’ responses illustrate how various aspects of responding to reviews and writing reviews for other authors, contribute to the development of the networking and intellectual strands of their academic identity as engineering education researchers. We suggest that members of the global engineering education community should be mindful of how they write their peer reviews of conference papers to ensure the opportunity to constructively contribute to their peers’ successful transition into this different research paradigm is not missed.

Mistrust in a multi-campus institutional context: a socio-spatial analysis

ABSTRACTHigher education literature identifies mistrust as one of the prominent features of managerialism. Similarly, multi-campus institutional studies have interrogated mistrust in various ways. However, there is limited research on academics’ experiences of how mistrust relates to their understandings and values of their academic profession in multi-campus contexts. This article contributes knowledge to narrow this gap. It draws from a study that examined academics’ experiences of how space enables or constrains their practices towards academic identity construction in an open distance learning institution in South Africa. A total of 12 academics who work on satellite campuses of the institution were interviewed. The social production of space framed the analysis. Findings indicate that a multi-campus institutional context aggravates mistrust and impinges on academics’ interaction and prospects for development within a wider institutional space. Recommendations are made about how to reduce the influence of mistrust on academics’ practices in multi-campus contexts.

Constructing an academic identity in Australia: an autoethnographic narrative

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the process of academic identity construction experienced by a Chinese PhD student in an Australian university from 2010 to 2014. The researcher draws on his diaries written in Australia and uses some stories of the relationships with his supervisors and other scholars to unfold the process of his academic identity construction in a host academic community. Two years on, the researcher reflects on the challenges confronted during his candidature, exploring the Australian PhD education system from within. This study will help educators and supervisors to understand an international higher degree research student’s gradual academic identity construction as a cultural Other in the context of globalized higher education systems, and it will contribute to the mutual understanding between supervisors and international research students, as well as supervisors’ professional supervision in a globalized higher education context.

College academic identities situated in interlocking contextual blocks

ABSTRACTThrough an examination of 13 first-generation college students’ views, this paper aims to provide one possible lens to viewing the complex social and academic landscapes that impact on students’ academic identity construction. Academic and social experiences within and beyond the safety net of a mentoring program are explored. The paper concludes with recommendations for campus-wide initiatives for the support of the focal students.

Space and Academic Identity Construction in Higher Education: An Open and Distance Learning Perspective

Research suggests that higher education changes affect the work and identity of academics. The consequent challenges often mentioned include too little time, work overload and limited autonomy among academic staff. Space is rarely mentioned, especially in relation to the context of open distance learning. This article reports on the findings from a study that was conducted in an open distance learning institution to understand how the institutional space is experienced by academics as they construct their identity. Institutional policy was examined, semi-structured interviews were conducted with academics and observations were made. The findings suggest that imagined institutional space is sometimes different from the lived space due to academics’ differing preferences of space. It is recommended that the institution should find the common ground between academics’ spatial needs and the institution’s imagined space as provided for through institutional policy.

“Blessed”: Musical Talent, Smartness, & Figured Identities

The purpose of this study is to explore smartness and talent as social constructs. Drawing on Holland et al.'s (1998) figured identities, this article explores the figuring of abilities by elucidating the voices of African American high school chorus students. Critical Race Theory (CRT) helps to unpack normalized language and practices that comprise intelligence, talent, and identity construction. The student participants in this study contrasted high school experiences in which they constructed musical and academic identities, describing how smart or talented they were relative to significant others around them. Findings suggest that constructions of musical talent and smartness socially positioned students along race, gender, and class lines. Interpretations of talent and intelligence may impact the curricular options made available to students, their academic identity construction, musical identity construction, and inequitable school practices.

Troubling intra-actions: gender, neo-liberalism and research in the global academy

This article raises questions about gender in the neo-liberalised research economy. Theoretically, it includes Barad’s concept of intra-action to analyse how discursive-material differences between research winners and losers are created and sustained. Empirically, it draws on international research conducted at British Council seminars on Absent Talent: Women in Research and Academic Leadership. I examine how neo-liberal policy cultures of financialisation and market values are entangled in research processes, management, and academic identities. I discuss the intra-actions or mingling of knowledge capitalism, research as a vehicle for surveillance and performance management, the affective economy, gendered maldistributions of opportunity structures and academic identities. I argue that research is increasingly instrumentalised as a major relay of power in the construction and destruction of academic identities, with material and affective consequences. The paper poses questions about how disqualifications are constituted and reproduced via a range of intra-actions including research financialisation and its impact on academic identities and the under-representation of women as research leaders in the global academy.

Identity in Academic Discourse

ABSTRACTThis review article is concerned with the construction of identity in academic discourse. It examines recent journal articles and monographs in applied linguistics and considers various perspectives on the issue. After a brief introduction and review of the theoretical background relating to identity, followed by a characterization of academic discourse and how it relates to identity theory, the article explores the following topics: linguistic resources for audience engagement; voice and academic identity; disciplinary identity; identity in peripheral academic genres; academic identity development over time; academic identity and English as a lingua franca; power, ideology, and critical language awareness in academic identity construction; language reuse, intertextuality, and academic identity; pedagogically oriented studies and academic identity construction; and methodological diversity and innovation in the study of academic identity. The article concludes with suggestions for future work in the field of academic identity research.

‘Being an English major, being a humanities student’: connecting academic subject identity in literary studies to other social domains

This study examined students’ construction of academic subject identity in a university humanities discipline, English literary studies. In so doing, the study aimed to provide an empirically grounded intervention in current debates on the value of the humanities in higher education. Eight students participated in interviews lasting 15–20 minutes each. Narrative methodology was aligned with the social constructionist paradigm to investigate identity construction and emergence. These showed students’ creative agency as well as careful negotiation with existing social views. They revealed a variety of identity stability and conflict, determined by one key issue: whether or not students felt they could competently translate their subject identities into other social domains relevant to their lives. These findings improve current understanding of the value of humanities education by showing students’ perspective instead of educational practitioners’. They also point to possible educational intervention strategies to increase students’ competence in subject identity construction.

Participatory action research and the construction of academic identity among postgraduate research students

This paper discusses the construction of academic identity among postgraduate research students who emerged from a participatory action research (PAR) project. The article reports on how postgraduate research students constructed their academic identity deliberately, as they pursue their studies in a sustainable learning environment (SuLE) project. The aim is to contribute towards an understanding of the impact PAR has on research work of postgraduate students in the Faculty of Education, at the University of the Free State, in South Africa. This paper draws on the work of Yosso’s community cultural wealth to amplify how a relatively unexplored methodology in postgraduate research studies can change and contribute towards the social justice agenda, and give hope to an unequal society ruptured by apartheid. A critical emancipatory research theory of the Frankfurt school was used as the focal lens through which the literature was reviewed, together with a participatory action research process to generate data. Free attitude interviews were applied to focus groups, workshops, and meetings of Master’s and doctoral research students, as well as individual supervisory dialogues, so as to ensure the in-depth views of the construction of students’ academic identity. Video-tapes as an instrument in the generation of the data, which was transcribed into text and further analysed in line with the objectives of the study were used. Finally, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) technique was used to arrive at the following findings: (i) ingenious commitment to social justice; (ii) genuine commitment to serve communities; and (iii) inter-centricity of humanity in relations.

The construction of academic identity in the changes of Finnish higher education

This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in the present-day university. Narratives of resistance, loss, administrative work overload and job insecurity are embedded in a regressive storyline, describing deterioration of academic work and one's standing. In a sharp contrast, narratives of success, mobility and change agency rely on a progressive storyline which sees the current changes in a positive light. Between these opposites, narratives of work–life balance and bystander follow stable storylines, involving a neutral stance toward university transformations. The paper concludes that academic identities have become increasingly diversified and polarized due to the managerial and structural changes in higher education.

Academic Identity Construction in Writing the Discussion & Conclusion Section of L2 Theses: Case Studies of Chinese Social Science Doctoral Students

There has been an increasing interest in studying thesis writing genre in the past two decades, however, the study on how social science doctoral students construct their academic identity in l2 thesis writing still remains underexplored to date. This paper attempts to fill the gap by examining the ways in which a cohort of Chinese social science doctoral students constructed their academic identity in the process of drafting, revising, and shaping the Discussion & Conclusion section of their L2 theses. The study adopted multi-case approaches and in-depth interviews. It found that the process of the students’ academic identity construction was fluid and dynamic. These students gradually evolved from novice student writers at the initial stage to more skilled academic writers at the later stage. The findings generated from this study offer significant implications for L2 writing pedagogy in China.

Teachers’ Inclusive Strategies to Accommodate 5th Grade Pupils’ Crossing of Cultural Borders in Two Greek Multicultural Science Classrooms

The demographic changes in Greek schools underline the need for reconsidering the way in which migrant pupils move from their everyday culture into the culture of school science (a process known as “cultural border crossing”). Migrant pupils might face difficulties when they attempt to transcend cultural borders and this may influence their progress in science as well as the construction of suitable academic identities as a means of promoting scientific literacy. In the research we present in this paper, adopting the socioculturally driven thesis that learning can be viewed and studied as a meaning-making, collaborative inquiry process, we implemented an action research program (school year 2008–2009) in cooperation with two teachers, in a primary school of Athens with 85% migrant pupils. We examined whether the two teachers, who became gradually acquainted with cross-cultural pedagogy during the project, act towards accommodating the crossing of cultural borders by implementing a variety of inclusive strategies in science teaching. Our findings reveal that both teachers utilized suitable cross-border strategies (strategies concerning the establishment of a collaborative inquiry learning environment, and strategies that were in accordance with a cross-border pedagogy) to help students cross smoothly from their “world” to the “world of science”. A crucial key to the teachers’ expertise was their previous participation in collaborative action research (school years 2004–2006), in which they analyzed their own discourse practices during science lessons in order to establish more collaborative inquiry environments.

Who is it That Would Make Business Schools More Critical? Critical Reflections on Critical Management Studies

We suggest in this paper that whilst exploring how to make business schools more critical we must also turn a critical and reflexive lens upon ourselves, critical management thinkers. Our endeavour is outlined here as a ‘reflexive journey’ in which we turn upon ourselves, academics who identify as ‘critical’ thinkers, the theories we use to analyse others. Our focus is upon critical management education. We use three vignettes drawn from our previous research. One is of graduands from the postgraduate programmes on which two of us teach, the second an analysis of knowledge transfer programmes in which we have participated, and the third a study of the construction of academic identities. The first study shows the academic teacher may become an internalized, judgemental gaze, the second that what we see as a critical approach may be construed by our students as another ‘truth’ that fails to encompass the complexities of organizations and management, and the third encourages us to ask some questions about our own positions. This causes us to ask some uncomfortable questions about our own positions as critical management scholars and the ways in which we conceptualize business schools and our colleagues who work in them.

The multilayered character of newcomers’ academic identities: Somali female high‐school students in a US school

Drawing from the findings of a qualitative study with female refugee high school students from Somalia in the US, this paper attempts to provide a window to understanding the multilayered character of newcomer students’ academic identity construction. The students’ micro‐level processes of creating spaces for belonging at school are linked to their macro‐level extra‐educational connections at the societal and global levels. The framework presented attempts to sensitise educators to increase their attention to the global‐socio‐cultural contexts of education and strive to create spaces within schools for the recognition and facilitation of students’ complex identities.

Contextual shifting: Teachers emphasizing students' academic identity to promote scientific literacy

AbstractThis research presents a case study of two teachers' emphasis on students' academic identity as a means of facilitating their science literacy development. These cases support a theoretical position that deconstructs the notion of normative science literacy into its constitutive components: (a) being scientific and (b) appropriating its literate practices. Such a perspective views language as a substantive resource for academic identity construction. As such, we utilize a theoretical metaphor of “contextual shifting” to underscore teachers' central role in facilitating student understanding of literate practices associated with school science. Through a cross‐case analysis of two elementary science classrooms, we identified ways that students' academic identities were connected to their affiliation with specific scientific literate practices. Our findings reveal that the teachers in both research classrooms utilized teaching practices designed to afford students opportunities to develop academic identities commensurate with science learning. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 92:1015–1041, 2008

Teaching engineering/engineering teaching: interdisciplinary collaboration and the construction of academic identities

Academics in higher education institutions are members of disciplinary communities by virtue of their qualifications and research activities, and as teachers of particular disciplines (or professions) they are (or need to become) members of a community of educational practitioners. In this paper, I analyse the ways in which a small group of lecturers in a professional engineering discipline negotiated their academic identities in the process of attaining a Masters degree in Engineering Education. A series of narrative interviews was used to track shifts in the lecturers’ identity trajectories during the Masters programme. The findings indicate that academic identities, even within a single engineering discipline, are flexible, multi-layered, and susceptible to different degrees of change. Despite these differences, all participants experienced similar stages in the process of shifting from engineering to engineering educator identities.

Standing Outside on the Inside: Black Adolescents and the Construction of Academic Identity

Standing Outside on the Inside: Black Adolescents and the Construction of Academic Identity, by Olga M. Welch and Carolyn R. Hodges. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 144 pages. $14.95, paper. Standing Outside on the Inside sheds light on the experiences of a group of disadvantaged African American adolescents who participated in a university-sponsored enrichment program called Project EXCEL (Encouraging Excellence in Children Extends Learning). Authors Welch and Hodges first launched Project EXCEL as a pilot project to provide enrichment in reading, writing, and foreign languages to college-bound, African American juniors from a local inner-city high school. After two years, the program was expanded to include sophomores as well as European American students from a second inner-city high school. This book details the authors' action research documenting how students' experiences in Project EXCEL helped them develop an academic identity or, to use a term coined by the authors, a ethos. Whether participation in the program and the development of this ethos improved students' academic achievement, as measured by their grade point averages and standardized test scores, was the focus of this study. Welch and Hodges, both African American women who teach at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, used their own educational backgrounds and personal experiences to develop the hypotheses and research questions examined in the study. Welch (a professor of Rehabilitation, Deafness, and Human Services) and Hodges (a professor of German and Slavic languages, and chair of the University's comparative literature programs) come from very different social backgrounds. Despite this, the two note that they both developed academic identities grounded in traditional African American values pertaining to education, family, and community: We came to understand that education was to be seen as a possession which, driven by a personal sense of pride in achievement, could never be taken away. Furthermore, this education could be passed on to others directly through teaching and advising, and indirectly through serving as role models. Because this commitment to excellence and to the life of the mind was recognized as a permanent possession, it was internalized as a way of being free and as a key to freeing others. (p. 6) The introduction to Standing Outside on the Inside outlines the study's conceptual framework and research methodology. Chapter one provides an extensive review of related literature and an in-depth exploration of the key themes explored in this work. In it, Welch and Hodges focus on the failed promise of reforms designed to promote equal educational opportunity for African American students. They suggest that inherent in these reforms is a presumption of African American students' deficiency that marginalizes these students and casts them as outsiders in the educational process. They further suggest that the development of a positive academic identity or scholar ethos is vital if African American students are to achieve academic success despite the culture of oppression prevalent in urban educational settings. Chapters two, three, and four are the most informative, for they offer specific details about Project EXCEL and case examples of students' and instructors' experiences in the program. The vignettes Welch and Hodges present throughout these chapters illuminating these experiences are the strength of the book, and should provide most readers with a deep understanding of the concepts presented. For instance, in chapter two, the authors argue one of Project EXCEL's primary tenets: that a positive academic identity is a component of global self-concept and is central to high performance and achievement motivation. To make this point, they contrast the experiences of two students: one an African American male whom they believed had a great deal of potential but who was aloof and unwilling to contribute beyond the minimal requirements, and the other an African American female who lacked confidence in her abilities and who was described by her high school teachers as a diligent, but not gifted, student. …