We know that writing is intimately connected with issues of authority, identity, power, and confidence, and that if students are to become more sophisticated thinkers and writers, they should be both challenged and taken seriously.

(Brueggemann et al., 379, emphasis mine)

While I would have to question some of the ethics and ideologies concerned with some methods of deliberately constructing knowledge of the self in a writing studies classroom, I believe (and hope) that many writing studies skills can equip students criticize self-constructions in a way that is illuminating and empowering. Constructions of the self are—at least in part—rhetorically informed, and much of writing studies has to do with developing the skill to inform rhetorically. Can identifying those techniques help us understand the often false ideologies that been imposed rhetorically on conceptions of ourselves? I, certainly, have learned a lot about myself through my experiences in the Humanities and particularly through my readings and writing as a student of English literature. I’ve specifically learned to criticize the origins and ends of the ideological values that inform who I believe I am. But is this too big a task for a 101 class? How can we equip and lay groundwork for continued rhetorical criticism—not just teach the tools for employing rhetorical devices?

In psychology, there is a concept called the Johari window. It’s a model of self-knowledge that tries to identify the ways the known and unknown, and the public and private intersect. It is comprised of four areas of knowledge about the self:

• What is known to the self and to others
• What is known to the self and not to others
• What is known to the others and not to the self
• What is known by neither the self nor the others

How do these areas of self-knowledge and identity inform each other? We often focus in writing studies on how to make the self known to others: how to formulate your ideas and express them—through different genres and mediums—to the outside world with authority, clarity, and confidence. Perhaps there is also room in writing studies to examine the rhetoric of how others perceive us, and how that can shape what we believe about ourselves.