By Erin Penner Gallegos

“Essential to any literate performance is feeling sufficiently at home in a place so that we will speak and write. When we enter the classroom, we carry a map—an interior image and internal geography—of our comfort zone in the world. If we are lucky, the academic place corresponds in essential ways to that inner geography, ensuring that the classroom is integrated into the intimate images of our safe areas.” –Kristie Fleckenstein, Embodied Literacies

As a graduate student in the MA program in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of New Mexico (UNM), I spent most of my time navigating the hallways of the second floor of the Humanities building, where most of the English teaching assistants have offices and where the English Department front desk and advisement staff are located. The carpet and the color-scheme are blue-grey. The building is dreary. The copy machine was often broken, although I understand the department has acquired two new machines since I graduated this spring. The door to the department mail room had a hand-written sign reading “No Students Allowed in Mail Room” taped to the frame. For two years, I had keys that open the mail room, the department lounge, two offices, and the exterior doors to the building. I now know the strange numbering scheme with the even-numbered offices to the west, odd-numbered ones to the east, and I often directed students to one side of the building or the other.

In addition to the layout of the second floor, I knew the names of most I ran into (or nearly) in the halls and in the inexplicably cold stairwells. I knew them as professors or colleagues, sometimes by reputation or face only. I spoke with some, lowered my eyes at others. I hugged some, waved to others. I answered questions, shut my office door, engaged in small talk about the weather and academic projects I was pursuing. I knew my place(s), manifested in various identities—teacher, mentor, student, employee (peon)—in that world of the Department of English Language and Literature at UNM.

The Place of “Place” in Education or, Why Reflect on My Own Literacies?

Kristie Fleckenstein notes in Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching that all students carry a map with them into the classroom —an internal map of their comfort zones for speaking and writing. We teachers have our internal language and literacy maps, too. For graduate students in English, the halls of the Humanities building quickly and usually easily (although not always) become a part of that map. Maybe not a favorite place on it, but certainly a familiar, navigable, frequented location; both literally and metaphorically, physically and through our work, we understand our “place” within the department and its place within academia and our place in the halls and also in the matrix of conversations that constitute our sub-disciplines. Many of our undergraduate students—some of them first-generation college students, many of them from multilingual or immigrant households, most of them educated in public schools that are either overcrowded or underfunded, usually both—are not equipped to feel comfortable or adroit in a college classroom. It is not, as Fleckenstein would say, a part of their internal map. It is not a comfort zone that invites them to speak or to write freely.

As an instructor, I had to confront this gap in perspective between my students and me, and in dealing with just how different my perspective is from that of my students, I was forced to examine the differences in the experiences that shaped our perspectives.

I was comfortable in the English department and in the writing classroom not only because I was sanctioned by my position as a TA, not only because I chose graduate study in this discipline, not only because I’ve always been a good student, but because this place has been a part of my own internal map for a very long time. My experience and comfort with the department was shaped by my historic association with it, in a way that differs even from most (if not all) of my teaching assistant counterparts. The copy and mail room, closed to students by a typed sign Scotch-taped to the door, is a place where as a child I often spent evenings and days off of school helping the department’s undergraduate advisor to make copies and sort department mail. The ugly grey-blue carpet and the stark, cold, tiled classrooms have been familiar to me since my mother was a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and then an adjunct professor in this same department, beginning in 1994, through my high school graduation in 2002. I have known many of my professors and much of the permanent staff since I was nine years old. I have spent now countless hours in the department, on the campus, at the duck pond, in the stacks at Zimmerman library. In addition to this particular (and somewhat peculiar) familiarity with the physical dimensions of the department and university in which I studied, taught, and worked while earning my MA in Rhetoric and Writing, I know that I am also one of those “lucky” enough to have had “academia” as a part of my internal language and literacy map for nearly as long as I can remember.

The path by which I came to be and belong in the English department is what I would like to investigate here, framed by the question that I asked most of my first-year writers on the first day of English 101: “How did you get here today?” It is a question that I asked my students for a number of reasons: it allowed me to see how they might interpret the question—whether they would see it as a question about a life journey, a physical journey, or a particular series of events that occurred on one specific day. It gave me a chance, then, to discuss the complex and metaphorical dimensions of the question; it offered a jumping off point for a discussion about what brought them to college, what kind of writers they think they are, what kinds of students they believe themselves to be. Incidentally, I could also get to know about their daily commutes, their lives outside of campus, the other activities and worlds in which they participate. But it is not, until this reflection (prompted by a “literacy narrative” assignment in an Education course), a question that I ever really attempted to answer for myself. In part, I thought that the answer to the question was simple, and easily accessible.

But as I posed this question to myself for an assignment of my own, putting myself into the shoes of my students, and drawing on theoretical resources in early childhood education, language development, discourse and identity, and sociocultural perspectives on language and literacy, I realized that perhaps the answer is not as simple as it seemed. To assume so began to feel like a refusal on my part to unpack the complexities of the geographic, intellectual, and linguistic journeys that brought me to this department. As a teacher, I tried to validate my students’ journeys to my classroom, knowing from my readings of composition theory and in my own gut that this kind of recognition is important. I also tried, mostly from a theoretical and detached perspective, to make sense of my own situatedness within the classroom—to imagine the ways in which my many identities and experiences interact with the identities and life histories of my students. But I never chose to fully undertake a deeper query of my own history, largely because I thought that I would find things that I already knew. I assumed that my private, college preparatory middle and high school education; white, educated parents; love of reading; and the fact that I was always a “good student” told the whole story. Careful reflection has taught me that I was wrong, and I endeavor here to put into perspective my own language and literacy development. To do this, I proceed with a focus on my early childhood—birth through about seventh grade—for these are the years that I now realize helped to cement my identity as a “good student,” an identity the maintenance of which required me to continue to perform well in school, and that also allowed me to persevere and achieve in later academic situations. This is a reflection on how the classroom and academics became a place of my own, a place from which I can speak comfortably. I attempt to trace threads of influence through space and time, arriving at a few conclusions about how this reflection does and should influence my teaching, and how I might invite my students to also make themselves at home in the classroom.

Place and Identity – A Note

Underlying this reflection is a belief, shaped by experience as well as theory, in the relationship between place and identity. I have no regard for the notion of environmental determinism, which suggests that individuals become who they are as a direct consequence of the environment or place in which they were raised. I do not believe the relationship between place and identity is either unidirectional or predictable enough to ensure that we can know how a person will turn out or who a person is merely by knowing the place(s) they come from. Nonetheless, identity and place are intimately related, and in some ways, co-constructed. Doreen Massey, who argues that places should be conceived not as isolated locales, but as networks of “intersecting social relations” (120), notes that “the geography of social relations forces us to recognize our interconnectedness, and underscores the fact that both personal identity and the identity of those envelopes of space-time in which and between we live and move (and have our ‘Being’) are constructed precisely through that interconnectedness” (122). In other words, both places and personal identity are defined and constructed through relationships, connections, and encounters with others. No identity, of a person or of a place, can be understood in isolation. Indeed, even the language that we use to talk about identity invokes a connection to both place and human relationships—we understand our “place” in social and cultural settings as something fixed and concrete, and yet that “place” is as tenuous as the relationships that hold it together.

While Massey shows that places can be productively understood through the language of human relationships, Philip Sheldrake notes that a sense of (physical) place is important to both individuals and cultures in forming identities and understandings of the world. He says, “Memory embedded in place, however, involves more than simply any one personal story. There are the wider and deeper narrative currents in a place that gather together all those who have ever lived there. Each person effectively reshapes a place by making his or her story a thread in the meaning of the place and also has to come to terms with the many layers of story that already exist in a given location” (16). Thus place, and a connection to particular places, is important for identity because places are both representative of and implicated in social relationships—the stuff of which identity is made. Places take on significance through human action, interpretation, and memory, and human actions, reciprocally, are interpreted and made meaningful always in the context of place. Thus, where I or my students, or anyone, for that matter, comes from, is solely not responsible for who we are as people, but the places we have seen, frequented, and lived within, cannot be discounted as powerful players in the composition of our identities, relationships, and worldviews. Where we have been is an important component of who we have become, and it is important to hold the tension of place as location and place as a network of social relationships in mind as I remember my way through my own identity construction and journey to UNM.

Early Encouragement in Language and Literacy: It’s a Family Thing

At my birth, both of my parents were college graduates, and all four of my grandparents had had at least some post-secondary education. My mother copiously recorded nearly daily notes about my development as a language-using being, noting on Beatrix Potter calendars and in baby books when I began using words in context and combining words and actions to communicate (15-16 months), using two-, three-, and four-word sentences (around 17 months), responding to difficult questions (18 months), and when I began recalling and talking about prior events (19 months). That my linguistic development was so carefully recorded during my first 24 months is odd—no one else I’ve ever met has such a detailed catalog of their early language development—but it isn’t necessarily surprising. My mother had a BA in psychology and had studied child language development; she had also long been an avid letter-writer and journal-keeper, and was not officially working during this time. I was her first child, and when my brother came along (I was two years, nine months when he was born), her nearly daily recordings tapered off considerably.

The reasons that I feel so comfortable in a school setting are likely very complex, but I believe that my mother’s vigilance to my language development, along with my early introduction to college campuses and college students—merely the idea of college—has as much to do with my current level of comfort in academia as does my private school education in middle and high school, and part of college. In fact, my early childhood holds clues as to how and why my parents raised my brother, Avram, and I to so highly value education, and why they sacrificed so much to guarantee that we had access to the best and most challenging educational experiences available.

Soon after I was born, my parents felt called to be missionaries. Supported by their congregation, Eastminster Presbyterian of Ventura, California, they joined the Navajo Gospel Mission in Flagstaff, Arizona, and in June 1985, when I was seven months old, packed up their small apartment and moved to the Navajo reservation, where they began their lives as missionaries in Piñon, Arizona. We spent the next 14 months on the reservation, and as I learned to speak, I was exposed to both Navajo and English. My parents have told me that I picked up Navajo easily and that I offered corrections to their pronunciations. While they struggled to learn the language during their time on the reservation, currently they remember much more of it than I probably ever knew. Nevertheless, my early linguistic development was marked by linguistic constructions in both English and Navajo. In one calendar entry from April 3, 1986 (17 months old), when we had been on the reservation for 10 months, my mother notes: “When Doug said ‘goodbye,’ Erin said ‘ha-go-ne’ [phonetic Navajo for goodbye] and waved (no prompting).” Clearly, I was picking up the languages that surrounded me without exhibiting preference for one language over the other. As M. A. K. Halliday notes, a child’s language acquisition is a matter of construction and is an “inherently social phenomenon” (32). Although I was raised in a primarily English household, I acquired Navajo words because Navajo was a part of the greater social sphere in which I first learned language. Later, after we had moved off the reservation and I no longer was around the Navajo language, I felt what can only be described as a sentimental attachment to Navajo, often requesting that my mother sing Navajo hymns as bed-time songs, rather than English ones.

Despite my early and continued periodic exposure to Navajo, both on the reservation and through my parents’ friends and the students they met through their continued missionary work at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, I never learned the language. My “mother tongue” is English from all possible angles—it is my first language, the language in which I am most competent (both in speaking and in writing), the language I use most often, and the language with which I and others identify me (Skutnabb-Kangas 44). Perhaps, had we lived longer on the reservation and had I attended school with or had to develop relationships with Navajo peers, I would have developed a different motivation to learn the language. As it was, however, I developed only a nostalgic relationship to it, never having been placed in a situation in which it made functional sense to devote time to learning it fully.

My mother was interested in my language development not just because she had some training in what to look for, nor because she was a new mother, but also, as she has told me many times, because she was eager for me to begin talking. She had no use for baby talk, she has said, because she couldn’t wait to begin having real conversations with her daughter. How true this is, in light of research suggesting that parents often unconsciously use baby-talk during verbal interactions with their children, I cannot say (see, for example, the discussion on caregiver language and baby talk in Moskowitz 97–99). Nevertheless, it is clear that my mother’s interest in my developing language skills was neither just a pastime nor a passing amusement for her. It was her way of taking an active role in tracking and shaping my language development, probably in part making sure that my language use was on track with what it should have been, according to her prior studies of child language development.

Today, my mother’s notes mean that I have a window on my early years of linguistic development, but they also characterize an attitude in my family that might otherwise be hard to represent. When I began writing this language history, I asked my mother to dig up these old notes that I knew were buried in a closet somewhere—I have known my whole life of my mother’s interest in language, and I have already on a number of occasions perused the notes about my language, literacy, and social development. Many of the stories in those notebooks, such as the time I emphatically told two fighting red ants to “settle down,” are already parts of other oft-repeated family stories. This is all to say that I grew up in an environment in which my linguistic, and later, literacy, skills were not only actively encouraged, but where it was clear to me that my communication and development were valued—“Erin’s rapid advances with words continue to astonish. e.g. ‘gorgeous’,” my mother wrote on May 4, 1986, when I was 17 months old, or “Erin’s expressive language continues to grow” at 19 months. As a child, I could and did read these entries with the knowledge of how important communication, verbal expression, and reading, but especially my own intellectual development, had been to my family.

The value and attention paid to my verbal development was extended to reading and writing activities, as well. The gifts I received as a very young child confirm this: for my first birthday, my parents made for me a scrap-book with pictures of recognizable objects and big-print words labeling them. I also received books from my uncles, aunts, and grandparents on that first birthday. By then, I knew about books and reading. I had a bible rhyme book of my own and I often requested my mom to read from it or the Bible. She noted several times, around 16 months and forward, that I responded to books I was looking at and asked what or if she was reading when she had books out. However, despite being surrounded by books—both mine and my parents’—from a young age, I do not have memories of learning to read. In fact, I really have no memories of not knowing how to read. I don’t even remember learning the alphabet or struggling over sounding out words, though I am sure that I must have.

Language and Cultural “Privilege” Acquired through Filtering

By 20 months, I even “enjoy[ed] ‘reading’” on my own, according to my mother’s careful hand in my baby book. This simulation of reading activities, well before I could say or recognize letters, is an example of what James Paul Gee calls “filtering,” defined as a “process whereby aspects of the language, attitudes, values, and other elements of certain types of secondary Discourses (e.g., dominant ones represented in the world of school and trans-local government and business institutions) are filtered into primary Discourse (and, thus, a process whereby a [secondary] literacy can influence home-based practices. Filtering represents transfer of features [such as reading] from secondary Discourses into primary Discourses [such as acquisition of a first language]. This transfer allows the child to practice aspects of dominant secondary Discourses in the very act of acquiring a primary Discourse” (“Language” 15). This kind of filtering didn’t stop with simulated reading, either. Just three months later, at 23 months, my mother notes that I spontaneously recited portions of the alphabet and recognized isolated letters, also continuing to practice my “reading” on new material. 

New reading materials were fairly easy for me to come by. For nearly every childhood birthday that I can remember, my uncle Jeff sent books; so too did most of my family members. As I learned to read better and faster, the sheer number of books that I wanted to devour might have been an expensive proposition for my parents—surviving as they were on my father’s missionary salary and the part time/temporary jobs my mother took on when we moved from Piñon to Flagstaff—were it not for those gifts from family, along with garage sales, hand-me-down books, and the public library. According to my mother’s calendar journal, the “first time to library for a story time” was on Wednesday, October 1, 1986, when I wasn’t yet two years old. The next visit to the library was the following week—for another story time, and also happened to be the second or third time my mother took me to “campus”—the Northern Arizona University campus where she and my father ran a bible study group for Native American students. The first visit to NAU’s campus had been on September 10, 1986, and my mother recorded that I “was very friendly to all we met.” Those visits to campus often coincided with visits to the library, and became more and more common as my mother enrolled in classes and began teaching composition to English as a Second Language (ESL) students while she was enrolled in the MA program in Literature at NAU.

In the fall of 1986, library visits apparently occurred for most of the rest of that year’s Wednesdays. Whether the weekly tradition lasted through 1987 as my mother’s pregnancy with my brother progressed, I don’t remember (and there is no 1987 annotated calendar). But libraries themselves became and stayed a big part of my childhood in Flagstaff (ages 2-7; 8-9), Pasadena (7-8), and then Albuquerque (9 and on). It seemed that as we moved around, the library—whether it was a public library or a university library—quickly became a place for frequent visitation. By the time we moved to Albuquerque in 1994—I was nine and Avram was just about six—we had both already mastered the alphabet and our numbers well enough to find the books we wanted to check out in the library stacks. I distinctly remember being let loose in the Wyoming Branch of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County public library (where we used to go to spend time reading in the lovely rose garden) and using the ancient computers, struggling against the green, blinking cursor, with various search terms, and then wandering the library to find the children’s, then the young adult, then just the fiction section. Trips from the library yielded us literary loot—five or six books apiece each time, and then sometimes we’d switch and read each other’s books if we didn’t get to the library soon enough to replenish our supply.

The frequent trips to the library, along with the gifts of books from friends and family in my very early childhood were two ways that I learned the value of reading—and that I learned my own value as a reader: as I grew up, I was often asked about what I had read, what I had thought about the books that were given to me, what kinds of things I liked to read. In retrospect, this kind of interaction with adults over written material is very similar to the kind of recall and discussion I was expected to perform in school, and my very early experience with such conversations is probably a great deal of what made going to school an easy transition for me. What this means, in thinking about my “comfortable spaces,” is that institutions of books and higher learning—the public and university libraries, the college campuses themselves—were early on imprinted on my internal map of comfort zones. They were places where I belonged, worlds into which I could enter and within which I could move without question.

In addition, in the context of my language acquisition, what these early experiences with literacy and books mean is that during my very early childhood, my parents and many adults I encountered filtered aspects of their own language—as teachers, counselors, educated persons, and former students—into their discursive interactions with me. I, then, was able to filter these aspects of dominant secondary Discourses (as Gee calls them) into my own early language and literacy acquisition. Thus I was able to practice in my home life, without anybody really knowing it, a kind of literacy that would be expected and rewarded in subsequent school settings. In fact, this kind of filtering, Gee notes, “is a key device in the creation of a group of elites who appear to demonstrate quick and effortless mastery of dominant secondary Discourses, by ‘talent’ or ‘native ability,’ when, in fact, they have simply practiced aspects of them longer” (15). This insight from Gee is telling: my parents themselves may have even attributed my language development and later voracious reading to “talent” or precociousness, but their own modeling of a positive stance toward reading certainly had a great deal to do with my own attitude toward and development in a particular type of literacy (see Farr 486).

Anne Dyson, in her examination of early pedagogical work on transfer, notes that “in educational psychology circles, transfer has been set firmly within an official school frame” (141), and that particular notions of transfer have persisted in educational practice despite evidence that learners do not simply or easily transfer knowledge gained through a “designated ‘learning task’” to a “targeted ‘transfer task’” (142). Dyson explores the literature that has led to this view on learning transfer, and points out that far too often, researchers on transfer made “assumptions that children from ‘culturally privileged homes’ were interacting with and learning through and about language, including written language” (151) whereas children from so-called “culturally disadvantaged” homes supposedly did not bring any prior knowledge to the classroom. Dyson is right to push back against the language of cultural disadvantage, language which is “no longer professionally acceptable” (152), and to propose that schools must reconceptualize both transfer and the value of students’ home literacies in reconceiving the “literacy route” that allows children to acquire dominant discourse practices. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that I, the daughter of college-educated, middle class, white English-speaking parents, who was taken to the library weekly as a two-year-old, and who received gifts of books from family and family friends, would certainly fall into that category of children referred to by early child language researchers as “culturally privileged”—that is, with some prior knowledge of “the inner workings of the system, the awareness of words and the alphabetic principle” (Dyson 152). Furthermore, since “early school composing is … linked to a narrow definition of academic competence (e.g. knowledge of letter names and sounds)” (154), it is clear that the emphasis placed on these things in my home is contiguous with what would have been considered demonstrations of literacy and mastery in school. After all, as my mother’s careful recordkeeping indicates, this kind of competence was noteworthy, and by two years old, I was recognizing letters and verbally “composing”—putting together strings of words in comprehensible, sentence-like fashion. The value placed on recognizing letters, “reading,” and on my language development during my first years of life foreshadows an ease of entry into school. Because my parents paid attention to and encouraged the same sorts of language development and literacy activities as would be valued in school, I easily transferred discursive practices between my home environment and the classroom.

The Construction of Institutional Identities

As suggested by Gee’s reference to elitism and Dyson’s recollection of the language of the culturally privileged child, it is really no surprise that my early facility with the language practices of school were recognized as “talent.” No later than October of my kindergarten year, I was tested and placed into the “Gifted/Talented Program” at Sechrist Elementary in Flagstaff, Arizona. My scores on the standardized test (the goldenrod copy of which I still have, with the principal’s, test administrator’s, gifted teacher’s, and my father’s faint carbon-copied signatures on it) were: 86 verbal, 99 quantitative, 92 nonverbal. These numbers mean relatively little to me now except for the somewhat interesting fact that they mirror the scores on my SAT, ACT, and GRE tests—always better with numbers, never as good with words. At the time, however, those numbers were important enough to give me an “institutional identity” not only as a student, but as a particular type of student—gifted (Gee, “Identity” 102-103). Although I did not realize it at the time, I enacted this identity spatially each day, for it was manifest in my daily routine as a kindergartner. Each day, I would arrive to Ms. Muns’s class but then would leave, at a designated time, and walk down two hallways until I arrived at Mr. Huntington’s classroom for the gifted program. I was, at the time, the only kindergartner in the program, and so the gifted hour consisted of interacting with students as many as two or three years older than me.

Kindergarten was also the year that I began another language adventure (and sometime love affair) with French. For all the copious note-taking that occurred during my childhood, no one really remembers exactly how I heard about the exchange program that Sechrist Elementary had with Maurice Ravel Elementary in Epinal, France. But I did, and at five years old, I informed my parents that I planned to participate in the exchange program to France (which was reserved for the fifth and sixth graders) and that I wanted to host a French student. Whether or not my parents actually believed they would eventually allow me to go to France, I do not know. Nevertheless, they found a small private school offering French lessons, and I began attending a couple of days a week after school. My mother would drive me to the blue house, and I would learn and practice basic vocabulary with the instructor for about an hour. I don’t remember how much of my French vocabulary I incorporated into my every day conversations, but I was able to name basic objects and respond to short and simple questions. I never lost the desire to travel to France, and even eventually persevered in my quest to participate in the exchange program, though my French studies were temporarily interrupted after that first year.

Before I was to begin first grade, we moved to Pasadena, California, so that my father could attend Fuller Seminary. I had to discontinue the French lessons, but I learned a number of things that became imprinted on my identity, my impressions of education, and my literacy development. The first lessons had to do with the move itself. As we moved so that my father could be in school, I learned that adults could continue their education, and not only that, but that education itself was a reason to become mobile. (This was a lesson repeated when my mother finished her Master’s degree in literature at NAU three years later, and we then moved to Albuquerque so she could continue in the PhD at UNM.) I also learned the layout of yet another campus, since we lived close to Fuller (in student family housing) and spent a great deal of time on the campus grounds, which I remember to be white and green, with a number of tree-lined walkways.

Additionally, I learned the importance of correspondence; writing to and receiving letters from Sharon, my next-door neighbor and best friend back in Flagstaff, was a major milestone in my own writing and reading development. Correspondence had already been part of my literacy learning and burgeoning understanding of the world, as my mother’s sister’s family lived in Australia. Throughout my childhood (before and after the move to Pasadena), we had exchanged letters and cassette tapes with our cousins. They sang songs, told stories, and told us about their days, and Avram and I would play these tapes over and over again, giggling at the Australian accents and funny words that they used. We, too, would read stories, perform skits, and tell impromptu tales on tape to send back. This practice started because phone calls were too expensive (not to mention the impossibility of frequent overseas visits), and at first we were too young to write comprehensible letters. After a while, though, especially after we moved back to Flagstaff and I no longer had to write to Sharon, my cousin Ben became a regular pen pal.

While the family correspondence had always been facilitated by my parents, in Pasadena, I had additional, personal motivation to read and write. Motivation (in literacy development) is “the nexus at which reader or writer, context, function and text join” (Swzed qtd. in Farr 476), and depends on a “combination of factors” to emerge, rather than being an inherent quality of a person (Farr 476). Knowing that we would only be in Pasadena for a year, and that we would be moving back to Flagstaff (back to the same house, actually), meant that maintaining my friendship with Sharon was extremely important to me, and our letters became so as well. As Marcia Farr asserts, motivation can determine performance in literacy-based tasks, and certainly my motivation to maintain a friendship with Sharon motivated me to filter my school-based literacy learning (cursive, vocabulary, and new knowledge) into my home discourse practices (corresponding with a friend) even more so than I had already been by my parents’ encouragement.

Finally, the event that created what would become an enduring identity happened about two weeks into my first semester at James Madison Elementary in Pasadena. While there was no gifted program at this public school, my first grade teacher recommended that I be moved up from first to second grade, because my reading and math abilities were advanced compared to the other students. Thus, I was placed in Mrs. Koutras’s second grade classroom where I remained for the rest of the year, and did well. From that first day in Mrs. Koutras’s class, I was the youngest person in my grade up until high school, and yet I always maintained the highest standard of academic achievement. While being younger meant that I was smaller than my peers and sometimes considered by them to be very smart, I never received special treatment (in terms of academic expectations) from my teachers, who, after that first year, may not have even known that I was one grade advanced. Nevertheless, the fact that I had skipped a grade—something that I usually revealed to peers as an explanation for our age gap—acted throughout the rest of my school career as a kind of “identity artifact” that operated to fix my identity in the minds of peers, and to some extent, myself (Leander). This event of skipping a grade, and subsequently, being a person who had skipped a grade—an institutional identity and position conferred by the Pasadena Unified School District—also made me into, in the minds of others, a “certain kind of person,” and thus operated in some ways as a natural identity (Gee, “Identity”). Rather than being understood as an institutional identity by my peers, my skipping a grade was seen to be a reflection of natural aptitude or ability, as an essential part of who I was. The development of this identity, it must be noted, is as much a function of place as anything else; had I not begun school in Flagstaff prior to our move to Pasadena, I would not have had access to the education that prepared me to skip ahead in school.

One other fact of my childhood that proved to be a kind of identity artifact as I was growing up, as well as created a particular kind of home learning environment was that I grew up without a television. If I had been asked as a child whether I was “culturally privileged,” I probably would have responded with a matter-of-fact no; with no TV, I knew nothing of the cartoons, after school specials, or made-for-TV movies that many of my friends were watching and talking about at school. I couldn’t understand my peers’ references to popular culture, and as I grew up, it became clear that while I had read many more books than most of my friends, I could be very easily left out of conversations about favorite movie or TV characters or episodes of various shows. This also meant that despite the fact that I was a child of the videogame generation, I grew up without a controller in my hand. The computer games that Avram and I played, when we finally got a computer after moving to Albuquerque, were educational games—we played Reader Rabbit, Sim City, and the Mind Maze game that came with MSN Encarta’s CD-ROM set of encyclopedias. There were not a lot of schoolyard conversations about these games.

The lack of entertainment in the form of television and video games meant that our entertainment revolved more around books and games—cribbage, chess, and card games—that we either read alone or played with family members. The same attention that had been focused on our early years of literacy and language development (and so diligently recorded by my mother) was lavished by my father (a Certified Public Account, as well as a missionary) on Avram and me with the intent of developing our critical thinking and math skills. Recently, my father pointed out to Avram that “wanting you guys to think” was his real motivation for teaching us cribbage and backgammon and chess as soon as we could pick up the game pieces. In the drive to get us to think, not having a television became a crucial part of the way that my parents were able to raise us. In addition to giving them a great deal of control over the kinds of entertainment to which we had access (many times their Christian sensibilities dictated that they object to the content—usually magic and representations of the supernatural—in popular children’s entertainment), not having a television also meant that we spent a great deal of time interacting with our parents and with their adult friends, and that we became quite adept at amusing ourselves with our imaginations.

In elementary school, not having a television did not seem to separate me from my friends too much, as many times our play dates consisted of playing dolls or board games, or spending time outside. However, as I entered middle school, still without a television, this became a topic of fascination for many of my classmates. I became “the girl without a television” as well as “the girl who skipped a grade.” In some ways, I am still marked by these various identities. The former serves as a prefigured explanation when my husband asks, incredulous, “What do you mean, you don’t remember [insert classic 1980s television show here]?” The latter identity—skipping a grade, along with that of being a “gifted” child (the past enrollment in gifted classes operates in much the same way as having skipped a grade: it is an identity artifact conferred by an institution and yet interpreted as a natural quality by others), is still operational; two telling examples illustrate this. The first: On my latest birthday two of my friends from high school (one in medical school and the other about to finish law school) both cooed that I am still “so young!” and that they are so impressed with my progress in the MA program at UNM. And the second: At a recent get together at another high school friend’s house, I intently arranged a set of dominoes into a pattern while carrying on a conversation. My friend said, “You’re…. how should I say this? You were gifted, weren’t you?” The fact that these identities are still referenced by my old friends illustrates how naturalized they have become in these individuals’ understandings of me. Perhaps this is why even I at first found it so surprising when I encountered MA and PhD students in the halls of the English department who are younger than me—the identity of the “young, smart one,” as Sharon put it to me not long ago, is something I had enacted for so long that it seemed essential even to me. Yet in the face of younger, smarter, and more motivated peers in the English department, this particular identity revealed itself to be not only institutionally conferred, but also extremely situated in times and places long past.

In her reference to me as the “young, smart one” in that recent conversation, Sharon was actually quoting someone whom we both knew in elementary school, and who had been a part of our exchange program to France in 1994. Despite their many understandable reservations about letting me actually participate in the program I had been invested in since I was five, my parents let me go after all. It turned out to be another event that cemented my identity as both “young” and “smart” in the eyes of peers, parents, and chaperones. Because we would be moving to Albuquerque so that my mother could begin the PhD program at UNM in August of 1994, I was only in fourth grade when I participated in the program that was usually reserved for fifth and sixth graders, and was therefore the youngest participant, ever. There was a real family commitment to the program; for most of my fourth grade year, my parents and I took part in after-school classes with the other participating families, including Sharon’s. This meant the families learned basic French, and the students created and rehearsed ad nauseam a cultural program that we then performed for the students we hosted (and then for their families, when we finally got to France). The program included demonstrations of square dancing, the National Anthem, and performing an American Sign Language version of “America the Beautiful.”

Defining a Self among Others: Changing Places and Maintaining Identities

In the same way that I had learned to model my stance toward reading and schooling on my parents’ attitudes (Farr 486), I also learned from their attitude toward my interest in French lessons and travel that these curiosities were legitimate pursuits. In the same way that their early attention to my language and literacy development shaped my attitude toward books, reading, and education, their encouragement of my interest in other cultures and peoples and places helped to legitimize my curiosity and to shape an attitude of openness toward others. Additionally, because my mother taught ESL during her MA coursework at NAU, and because my father’s missionary work put him into contact with many Native American and international students, my brother and I were constantly exposed to the accents, languages, cultural traditions, and foods that our parents’ students brought to potlucks and other gatherings that our parents sponsored. Through our interactions with these many others, we were predisposed to be interested in and accepting of those who spoke, thought, and acted differently. 

My parents made manifest just how important it was to them to raise my brother and me in an environment of cultural and social diversity when they chose to relocate to Albuquerque for my mother to enter the PhD program. She had been accepted to two PhD programs to study Native American Literature—the University of New Mexico and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The demographic make-up (and probably the weather) of the surrounding community is what really made the decision for my parents, and they were explicit about their choice. We were moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we were moving there because my parents loved the diversity that inheres in the Southwest. Plus, my mother would have the opportunity to continue working with Native American students, something she had grown to love during her time at NAU.

So, in the fall of 1994, just a month or so after returning from my three-week home-stay in France, our family moved to Albuquerque and I began fifth grade at Bel-Air Elementary. For the fourth time since kindergarten, I was in a new class with a new group of peers. I coped with the changes, once again, by writing regularly to Sharon and maintaining my friendship with her, but also by performing the identities that were quite familiar to me. Bel-Air was the third elementary school I had attended, and I quickly became—predictably—the good student, the young smart one among my peers. While I have traced the events that led to the creation and maintenance of these identities, it is important here to note that in retrospect, it seems that part of the reason that I was so motivated to exist as the “good student” is rooted in the many changes of place that I encountered as a young child. From kindergarten through fourth grade, I had attended only two different schools, but had jumped around in classrooms—from gifted to regular, from first to second grade, from Flagstaff to Pasadena and back again—and among diverse peer groups, many times. While in Flagstaff most of my peers were white and middle class; in Pasadena, I encountered much greater cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity among my classmates. I remember, for example, encountering black students and slang words for the first time on the playground in second grade. I remember being embarrassed by my lack of ability at common playground games, such as the double-dutch jump-roping and accompanying rhymes. Then I was placed back into the white middle class atmosphere of Flagstaff, where my access to diversity was through my parents’ acquaintances, but not necessarily my own playmates. Then, in Albuquerque, I experienced yet another radical change in the demographics of my peer group.

From my current, temporally removed vantage point, it appears that each time I encountered a different playground dynamic, a different set of racial or cultural or social rules among my peers, I wasn’t necessarily equipped by my own familial and cultural upbringing to just fit right in among my classmates—as interested as I might have been in other cultures and traditions, I still struggled to root myself in well-defined social settings that were unfamiliar and confusing to me. Instead, I found my niche within the classroom dynamic that we all shared. I didn’t have the same cultural references in music, television, or toys that my classmates shared. I didn’t speak the slang in Pasadena, not having had lengthy access to schoolyard games or older siblings that would have filtered particular rhymes or slang words into my primary discourse. I didn’t have access to the Spanish or other cultural traditions that many of my peers in Albuquerque shared. So, I created my identity among peers from my most available resource—my comfort and ability within a classroom setting. I may not always have known how to completely mesh with my peers, but I did know how to achieve good grades and to be the smart, young one, and how to stay out of the way of class bullies and other difficult peers. Having had a great deal of practice interacting with adults who took me and what I had to say seriously, I was also able to interact with my teachers without being afraid of them, and yet without appearing to my peers to be the dreaded teacher’s pet.

When I was in fifth grade, Avram was in second grade, also at Bel-Air. There weren’t any after school programs, and on Wednesdays we were released at noon, after only a half day of school. On these days and days we were sick or didn’t have school for one or another reason, we often accompanied my mother to classes (that she took or taught) at UNM. Weekends, too, would find us tagging along to Zimmerman library where my mother had a study carrel. It wasn’t until her second year in the PhD program that she was offered a teaching assistantship, and so when I was in sixth grade, trips to UNM began to include my mother’s office in the English department—the same second floor of the same Humanities building where I for two years made near-daily treks—the duck pond, the library, and the student union. I met the undergraduate advisor who would later control my teaching schedule and copy code, and eagerly helped her with making copies and sorting the department mail, completely unaware that the future would bring me back to the same hallways. During that time, we tagged along as a family to English department social functions at the homes of faculty members and my mother’s fellow graduate students. We acquired a new computer so that my mother could write her papers and access email at home. In many ways, my family’s life seemed to revolve around my mother’s teaching schedule and scholastic endeavors, and UNM quickly became a familiar and comfortable place to Avram and me.

In sixth grade, I had switched schools yet again—twice, in fact, because I started at McKinley Middle School (where all my Bel-Air friends went), and then switched to Grant when my parents bought a house in that district. Again, I excelled in school, continuing to perform as the good student, and this time also being placed (once again, thanks to the magic of standardized testing) into Grant’s gifted program. Since sixth grade is middle school in the Albuquerque Public Schools’ model, meaning lockers, passing periods, and different teachers for each subject area, I didn’t enact the gifted identity by leaving the regular classroom, as I had done at Sechrist in kindergarten, third, and fourth grade; instead, I just attended an accelerated math and a gifted history class during fifth and sixth periods.

It was my sixth grade math teacher who suggested to my parents that they send me to the Albuquerque Academy, that perhaps APS was not the “right place” for me. This suggestion led to the application process, the interview, more standardized testing, and my eventual acceptance into the Academy as a seventh-grader. This was my last school-change until college; for the next six years, I attended college preparatory classes at the Academy, retained more-or-less the same friends within a class of only 140 total students, and explored identities other than that of “good student”—experimentation made possible by the fact that for the first time, I attended a school for more than two straight years and that school was populated almost entirely by other “good students.” Thus began the experience that I have long thought of as the obvious and only real reason that I am so comfortable in academic settings—the private school education among students who all knew they would be going to college, getting higher education, and very likely, leaving Albuquerque to do it. In fact, Albuquerque became infused with new meanings—it was a place we were expected to leave, and many of us developed a complicated relationship to the city, a curious feeling of nostalgia combined with anxiety to move on.

Of course, the private school education, with its emphasis on critical thinking, advanced and accelerated curriculum, media literacy, personal responsibility, and creativity certainly didn’t hurt my chances of being comfortable in academia. I learned to do library research and write sustained arguments in eighth grade, was able to begin studying French again, and took courses in world religions, ethics, and Latin as electives. I was required to participate in experiential education—backpacking trips—as well as chorus, drama, and visual arts at various times during the six years at the Academy. I was given opportunities to participate in school government and access to a world-class school library, and encouraged by every adult and student around me to assume that college was in my future. Tellingly, all 137 eventual graduates of my class of 2002 were accepted to universities, and only one didn’t immediately go on to attend college.

Examining the Conventional Narratives of Intelligence, Literacy, and Education

It is easy to assume that my attendance at the Academy is the “real” reason that I had a relatively easy transition to the work and study habits required when I went to college. What I hope that I have shown through this investigation of the environments of my early language and literacy development, however, is that long before I was exposed to the college-preparatory environment that propelled me into a private East Coast university, I had developed a very strong sense that my worth as an individual was bound up with my ability to read and write well, to perform the identity of the good student, to make my parents proud by engaging in literacy and scholarly activities that they considered important. Put another way, long before I entered the world of private school education, I had developed motivation in a scholastic context that was bound up with my own understanding of who I was as a person. I understood myself to be a reader, a writer, a student, and I was comfortable with the idea of continuing my education beyond high school, having been introduced at a very young age to the idea that adults, too, could be students, and that remaining in school was not only a perfectly acceptable thing to do, but might also be preferred over just getting any old job. In fact, I always believed that education was a way not only of ensuring eventual economic success, but also of developing into the kind of intelligent, thinking person that my parents and family had raised me to believe were the most respectable.

Sir Ken Robinson, in his “Changing Paradigms” address to the Royal Society for the Arts, describes the narrative of education in which I was raised to believe, and claims that this narrative is based on an economic and an intellectual model of society that is both outdated and incorrect (6). He notes that this Enlightenment model of education, on which our current public education system is based, was founded upon a particular “model of the mind,” which insists that “real intelligence consists in the capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning … what we come to think of as academic ability” (Robinson 7). Ronald and Suzanne Scollon argue that this emphasis on deductive reasoning, or “rationality, componentiality, and plurality,” which are essential components of the “modern consciousness,” are also “strikingly like the attributes of essayist literacy,” which requires “self-effacement … of the author … as well as the fictionalization of the audience in the concept of the reading public” (49-50). The fact that there is a kind of association between the “reality set” (Scollon and Scollon) defined by the performance of essayist literacy that academia requires and academic achievement is perhaps unsurprising. But as Robinson points out, this association goes one step further in our education system, to virtually equate performance of essayist literacy/academic achievement with intelligence itself. As Robinson notes, “This [belief] is deep in the gene pool of public education [—] that there are really two types of people, academic and nonacademic. Smart people and non-smart people[;] and the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they are not because they have been judged against this particular view of the mind” (7). In other words, our education system has worked to convince those who do well in school that they are smarter, and those that do worse in school that they are less smart. Robinson believes that “this model has caused chaos in many people’s lives. It has been great for some. There have been people who have benefited wonderfully from it[,] but most people have not[,] and it has created a massive problem” (7).

It is clear, from my own scholastic and familial history, from my parents’ insistence on the importance of education, from their attendance both to my literacy and intellectual development, and from my own early belief, adopted from my parents and teachers, in the narrative that education will bring both economic and personal rewards, that I am one of those who has “benefited wonderfully” from my encounters with the education system. I have come to find within education a comfortable place and a comfortable identity—I have been allowed to achieve and to believe in myself as one of those “smart people.” This identity has been supported from all angles and by many institutions and people, beginning with my early childhood language acquisition within my own family, and being reinforced time and again by educational institutions.

As a student on the right side of the fictitious smart/non-smart divide that pervades our education system’s understanding of intelligence, I have to admit that I was never too much bothered by, or even reflective about, the way in which students—myself and my peers—came to be seen by our teachers, parents, or other institutions. At times I did notice that standardized testing reduced my very intelligent peers to numbers that didn’t seem particularly reflective of their abilities, but rarely did serious critical thoughts about the structure of the educational system at large encroach on my consciousness. As a teacher, however, the systemic problems with our country’s public education confronted me on a daily basis.

From Student to Teacher: How Do My Narratives Apply?

My students all travelled very different literacy routes, so to speak, to end up in the English composition and technical writing classrooms in which I encountered them. Very few students have stories like mine; instead, most students I taught had very little idea of the rigorous demands they would encounter in a college environment and few of them seemed excited to be intellectually engaged by the subject matter of the English class. Some emphatically asserted that they were “not writers” or were “bad writers” or “just don’t like English” or “don’t read” and many expected to be able to get by with what seemed to me to be the least amount of effort and thinking. I don’t think that this is because they were lazy; instead, it is merely because they did not regard the classroom, or the educational sphere, as an integral part of their identity—going to college is something that they do, but it is not something that they are or that they have truly identified with. In addition, many students think they have nothing to say—perhaps having never been earnestly asked what they think; or else they believe that what they are asked to say in the classroom bears no connection to the reality of the lives they have lived or the ones they hope to construct. 

I imagine that for many of them, these statements—“I’m not a writer”; “I’m no good at this”; “I hate English”—that seem so natural, so obvious, are built in the same way that my supposedly obvious journey was built: one small, innocent incident after another, reinforcing a particular understanding of oneself as not a student, not a writer, not good at this task. If I want my students to come to think of their writing as an integral part of who they are and what they will eventually do and be in the world, I have to try to understand how they have constructed their relationships to school, writing, and reading, and what identities they have chosen to foreground. I have to accept that their literacy legacies, their family and institutional histories, their prior encounters with reading and writing and what it means to be a student, will be very different, even antithetical to my own experiences. I have to accept that the literacy landscape defined by the experiences of the students in my classroom includes many places from and within which I can neither speak nor write. But, I also have to realize that my own critical reflection, readings of theory, and interest in identity construction, language, and education, give me perspective that my students likely do not yet have. 

What conducting this reflection has given to me is the understanding that my comfort within academia, my ability to claim authority as a student, teacher, and mentor within the English department is the result of a decades-long journey through a number of literal and metaphorical places. When I ask myself, “how did I get here, today?” I confront the myriad dimensions of the answer in my own life. I hope that, whether I speak it aloud in its entirety or not, I can use my own story as a starting point to give my students the necessary critical vocabulary to reflect upon the ways in which their identities have been shaped, subtly, slowly, inevitably, by institutions and systems. I believe that sharing with my future students the notion that academia is a place, literal and metaphorical, and by using the question, “how did you get here, today?” to frame the inquiry we will conduct in the classroom space, I can help them to add this place to their map of comfort zones within the world. By helping them to critically reflect on the journeys they have already taken within corollaries to this world, I hope that I can help my students to see the ways in which they can bring to bear their expertise and experiences from other realms within the scholarly one. With critical reflection and guidance, I hope that my future students might be able to start unpacking their primary identities, and choose to build for themselves new identities as writers, readers, and students that do not replace, but help to supplement and refine their existing conceptions of themselves.

Works Cited

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Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Print.

Moskowitz, Breyne. “The Acquisition of Language.” Scientific American 239.5 (1978): 92-106. Print.

Robinson, Sir Ken. “Changing Paradigms: How We Implement Sustainable Change in Education.” RSA/Edge Lecture. Chair Matthew Taylor. 16 June 2008. Scribd.com. PDF.

Scollon R., and S. Scollon. “The Modern Consciousness and Literacy.” In Narrative, literacy, and face in interethnic communication. By R. Scollon and S. Scollon. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 1981. Print. 41-56.

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