'Oh, What Will Miss Say!': Constructing Texts and Identities in the Discursive Processes of Classroom Writing

This paper examines the construction of children's identities as 'writers' through their positioning in the multiplicity of official and unofficial discourses available to them in the primary classroom. It uses ethnographic observation to focus on how identities are constructed in the process of text construction, and the intersections of ethnicity, gender and institutional identity in the production of 'the writer'. It illustrates the way in which classroom texts are jointly produced over time in social interaction; with 'school writing' as a distinct, routinised, discursive practice. The paper queries the model of the isolated author struggling to communicate with an unknown reader as this model is applied to the analysis of children's development as writers.