I have recently been reading Ken Gergen's _Invitation to Social
Construction_. In his chapter on identity he makes the central point that
our identities are ultimately about how we relate to other people. I
believe there is a powerful critical principle in this observation: we need
to ask what kind of community is sustained by the various notions of
'appropriate identity' that are fostered, or not, by schools and their
cultures. I think there is ample room to say that narrow identities of
'good student' and 'academic success' or even of 'competent technician' or
'promising biologist' may encourage students and teachers to relate to
others in ways that are destructive of important values of community.
Identities to which schools' official cultures are antipathetic, such as
many identities which are revered in the peer group or identities fostered
in non-dominant subcultures, may be so excluded as to exclude students who
wish to perform those identities. In effect schools often say, you cannot
both be successful here as a student and also be someone with values and
behaviors that support the other communities in which you live.
I do not take identity as such to be either good or bad. To the extent that
the notion is useful at all, it's hard to avoid performing some multiplex
set of identities, or features of identities, available in the culture.
That is part of what it means to act as a recognizable kind of human being,
to act meaningfully for others.
But the performance of particular identities supports different kinds of
interpersonal relations and so different 'qualities' of community. It is my
impression that dominant culture in my own society has an extremely narrow
range of tolerance for identity diversity, and that the identities favored
by dominant culture tend to reinforce its dominance at the expense of both
rich human interpersonal relationships and supportive human communities. I
believe that my own dominant culture is deeply pathological and
unsustainable in these respects. The official cultures of schools,
especially secondary schools, and certainly universities, are deeply
complicit in fostering these pathologies. Most teachers, when performing
their identities as teachers, are much less interesting and socially
responsive than the same persons are when not performing these identities.
The same is true of students in classrooms. Professionalized role
identities in general in modern society are deeply and increasingly inhuman
(physicians, lawyers, professors, bureaucrats, ...) and this fact is widely
recognized not just by people outside upper-middle-class culture, but by
most of the people performing these roles as well. The role of
'student' is increasingly being fit to this same pattern.
If I continue this line of argument, it will become quite unpleasant. I
think those who are still reading at this point will have little trouble
doing so for themselves. I could also re-state the argument in terms of
cross-timescale relations, with bodies caught between
interpersonal-interaction scale processes and institutional-scale
processes; different notions of what constitutes valued community are
emergent between these levels, but the relations are unstable. Perhaps this
version might allow us some optimism on still longer timescales, but I am
not sure that we have yet earned that optimism.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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