I don’t think my students think of themselves as writers. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, but I know professional people who write and have PhDs in writing studies related fields who don’t think of themselves as writers and none of my students have revealed themselves as believing themselves to be writers.

I think that if we did more identity work in our classes to try to pinpoint the ways the identities and identifications of our students really interact in this way. I think back to the time I spent working through Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening theory, we really tried to dig into the ways our identities work and the ways we can try not to silence others. This has gone on to inform my work as a writing center tutor where I presented at two conferences about identity driven approaches to tutoring (one on brave/safe spaces and the other on working in a WC funded for undergraduates, staffed by mostly undergraduates, and not catering to graduate students and their writing). From these experiences, I find it most important to be in tune with yourself and your own personal identifications while having an openness to the identities others want to share.

I think something that would be more interesting to think about rather than the identification as writer as it relates to my students would be thinking about the ways they’ve learned writing and their experiences there. We have some evidence of this in the letters from the beginning of the semester (at least I felt like I learned a little bit about it then). This gave me a little bit more to think about, and it was really interesting being able to reference it back to a book we read in my senior capstone by Deborah Brandt called The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy. Brandt does (without much surprise) some case studies of the ways people learned to write and are learning to write in a more contemporary context of today.

I think if we wanted to have any of the answers to this, we would need to ask our students. 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️