Identity negotiation in cultural and pedagogical contexts: Institutional possibilities for selfhood

Because negotiating academic identity is an integral part of tertiary students’ learning process our purpose in this paper is to look at both ‘institutional possibilities for selfhood’, which offer participants opportunities to enrich their academic identities within the context-sensitive, instructional environment, as well as ‘institutional constraints on selfhood’, which draw attention to the ways in which possibilities for selfhood are institutionally limited. To achieve this objective we build on Clark and Ivanič’s conceptualization of writer’s voice seen as both ‘voice as form’ and ‘voice as content’ (Clark and Ivanič’s, 1997). These conceptualizations are represented by the concepts of ‘the discoursal self’, which refers to the social notion of voice and is constructed by a “writer’s affiliation to or unique selection among existing discourse conventions” (ibid.) and ‘the self as author’, which refers to “writers’ expression of their own ideas and beliefs” and reveals an individualistic, expressive and assertive voice (ibid.). Since cultural context is both reflected in and constituted by discourse we call for the development of ‘multivoiced classrooms’ (Dysthe, 1996) which overcome the constraints of a homogeneous, institutionalised discourse. Such an approach to culture in pedagogical contexts will foster the formation of a third space (Kramsch, 1998), a place in which the intercultural speaker (ibid.) is competent in negotiating and mediating discourse, but not necessarily with a native speaker’s competence.