Identity Texts: The Collaborative Creation of Power in Multilingual Schools

Effective and inspirational pedagogy has been achieved through identity texts in multilingual school contexts, engaging students around the world. This book shows how identity texts are used.

The term identity texts was first used by the Canada-wide Multiliteracies Project to describe a variety of creative work by students – collaborative inquiry, literary narratives, dramatic and multimodal performances – led by classroom teachers. The identity texts produced held up a mirror to the students which reflected their identities back in a positive light.

Jim Cummins and Margaret Early describe the nature of identity texts and how they relate to broader orientations to pedagogy, and consider several pedagogical frameworks within which they have been integrated. Brief case studies follow of identity text construction by educators and students in schools in parts of North America and China, in Burkina Faso and Uganda in Africa, and in Italy, Spain and Greece. The closing chapter elaborates on the ways in which identity text construction can promote powerful forms of learning among culturally and linguistically diverse students.

Identity Texts is essential reading for everyone concerned with developing appropriate pedagogy for schools and for all who work with multilingual children.