Voice and Identity

I have been exploring identity as a research topic for several purposes, so I am very interested in different conceptualizations of identity. I hadn't really thought of identity in terms of voice, and after reading the articles, I am still not inclined to closely associate the two concepts. It seems to me that voice is more closely associated with positioning. When Hervela & Belcher discussed voice as identity, they seemed to be characterizing identity as a thing which can be owned and traded in. When they talked about voicing and conceptualized voice as social, they were speaking in terms of positioning. For example, the graduate students' voices as writers depended on others' perceptions of them. They were dealing with issues of voice and identity because their positions in U.S. academia differed so greatly from their positions in their home countries.

I also took issue with Hervela &  Belcher's claim that the graduate students had to learn to write in "an English voice." There is clearly no unified English voice. There is a  mulitiplicity of voices depending on a wide variety of identities and positions which can exist within any individual and shift based on social contexts. I thought that Prior addressed this mulitplicity of voices well in his article. I liked his idea of learning as a "process of becoming." I think that teachers and students can benefit from seeing learning as change. I think the problems arise when teachers try to micromanage the learning process. The "process of becoming" should be a negotiation between teacher and student, and students should have the ultimate ownership of their own learning. Furthermore, students should be let in on the process of coming to a voice. They could examine their own writing and try to identify the origin of certain phrases. This sort of metacognitive practice could help students to gain a deeper understanding of genre characteristics and to make specific choices about the development of their voice. It could give teachers a tool for hearing the individual voices of their students and help them to avoid ascribing voice.