Thesis advisor: Dennis L. Shirley / The recent mathematics curriculum reforms in the United States resulted in various classroom initiatives and research on cultivating students’ mathematical identity. Among many dimensions of mathematical identity (Fellus, 2019), mathematical authorial identity is connected to how students leverage the interactional space and communicate their ideas about mathematical concepts while invoking authority, especially during students’ peer discussion in mathematics classrooms (Povey & Burton, 2003; Schoenfeld & Sloan, 2016). Despite the emerging importance of students’ mathematical authorial identity, most research on authorship and authority in mathematics classrooms has focused on the relationship between teachers and students, and not on the relationships of students with one another in small groups (Amid & Fried, 2005; Cobb et al., 2009; Wagner & Herbel-Eisenmann, 2014). More attention is needed to understand how the notions of authorship and authority work in students’ interactions with others, and what interactional patterns occur as students construct mathematical authorial identity through classroom discourses (Langer-Osuna, 2016, 2017, 2018; Langer-Osuna et al., 2020). The current study used an applied conversation analysis to investigate students’ interactional patterns of seven small group discussions. These students met virtually four times over one school year to exchange feedback on each other’s mathematical arguments. After transcribing students’ small group discussions, I focused on the occurrences of accounts, which are statements “made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior” (Scott & Lyman, 1968, p. 46). They are typically used by interactants when they offer additional explanation or elaboration in situations when they are accomplishing a dispreferred action. The results indicate that mathematical authorial identity was manifested in three different types of account turns. The first type of account turns was ‘missing accounts,’ which were expected to occur but were missing due to students accomplishing other interactional work. Students deployed this type of accounts as they accomplished various forms of disagreement. The second type of account turns invoked external authority. Students typically deployed this type of account turns towards the end of a sequence, and they were likely to use strong expressions of disagreement. The third type was account turns that invoked shared/internal authority. These account turns usually occurred at the beginning of a new sequence and when students expressed weaker disagreement. The various types of account turns and interactional environments suggest that students actively conceptualize and manage interactional work, such as facework and preference organization, when navigating mathematics classroom discourse. Based on the findings, this dissertation offers pedagogical implications for mathematics educators to actively cultivate group norms that could occasion more interactional affordances for students and be aware of interactional features and sequences that foster students’ construction of mathematical authorial identity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

This thesis presents an analysis of texts written for a child audience in Russia between 1990 and 2010 and characterized by humorous inversions of common sense, a tendency for jokes, puns and a cheerful narrative tone. These narrative features are associated with the concepts of playfulness and play. This thesis argues that, by addressing the implied child reader of the post-perestroika period in a playful mode, children’s authors tried to cope with profound social and cultural transformations which challenged their identities as adults and intellectuals. The new individual responsibilities concerning the upbringing and the education of children, on the one hand, and the crisis of written culture and of the intellectual as sources of moral guidance, on the other, occurred at the same time as the general structures of trust were collapsing in Russian society. The thesis argues that playfulness allowed children’s authors to explore their own identity, and even to express their own fears and doubts as providers of upbringing and education. At the same time, playfulness was a way to involve the child of the post-perestroika period in an attempt to re-construct culture, an attempt which required a strong pedagogical agency. Divided between the wish to guide younger generations and the need to re-define their own selves, children’s authors found in playfulness a field where these contradictory drives could be negotiated and their authorial personae could be re-worked. In the so-called post-post-Soviet period, which followed the election of Vladimir Putin as President of Russia, playful children’s literature is still engaged in this exploration of the adult self and of the possibility of providing guidance through literature. This exploration is further challenged by a generational gap separating adults with a Soviet background from children. The first chapter establishes the theoretical grounds and methods which inform the thesis, while chapter two provides a historical overview of the way in which play and playfulness, both as cultural phenomena and as concepts, intertwined with specific conceptualizations of childhood in Russian and Soviet children’s literature until perestroika. The last two chapters are devoted to the analysis of texts, and mostly focus on works by children’s authors Grigorii Oster, Artur Givargizov and Natal’ia Nusinova which appeared in the years 1990–2010.

Academic writing is an important part of undergraduate study that tutors recognise as central to success in higher education. Across the academy, writing is used to assess, develop and facilitate student learning. However, there are growing concerns that students appropriate written work from other sources and present it as their own, committing the academic offence of plagiarism. Conceptualising plagiarism as literary theft, current institutional practices concentrate on deterring and detecting behaviours that contravene the rules of the academy. Plagiarism is a topic that often elicits an emotional response in academic tutors, who are horrified that students commit these ‘crimes’. Recently, educators have suggested that deterring and detecting plagiarism is ineffective and described moralistic conceptualisations of plagiarism as unhelpful. These commentaries highlight the need for credible alternative approaches to plagiarism that include pedagogic aspects of academic writing. The authorial identity approach to reducing plagiarism concentrates on developing understanding of authorship in students using pedagogy. This thesis presents three studies that contribute to the authorial identity approach to student plagiarism. Building on the findings of previous research, the current studies used a sequential mixed-methods approach to expand psychological knowledge concerning authorial identity in higher education contexts. The first, qualitative, study used thematic analysis of interviews with 27 professional academics teaching at institutions in the United Kingdom. The findings from this multidisciplinary sample identified that academics understood authorial identity as composed of five themes; an individual with authorial identity had confidence; valued writing; felt attachment and ownership of their writing; thought independently and critically; and had rhetorical goals. In addition, the analysis identified two integrative themes representing aspects of authorial identity that underlie all of the other themes: authorial identity as ‘tacit knowledge’ and authorial identity as ‘negotiation of identities’. The themes identified in the first study informed important aspects of the two following quantitative studies. The second study used findings from the first study to generate a pool of questionnaire items, assess their content validity and administer them to a multidisciplinary sample of 439 students in higher education. Psychometric analyses were used to identify a latent variable model of student authorial identity with three factors: ‘authorial confidence’, ‘valuing writing’ and ‘identification with author’. This model formed the basis of a new psychometric tool for measuring authorial identity. The resultant Student Attitudes and Beliefs about Authorship Scale (SABAS) had greater reliability and validity when compared with alternative measures. The third study used confirmatory factor analysis to validate the SABAS model with a sample of 306 students. In addition, this study identified aspects of convergent validity and test-retest reliability that allow the SABAS to be used with confidence in research and pedagogy. The overall findings of the combined studies present a psycho-social model of student authorial identity. This model represents an important contribution to the theoretical underpinnings of the authorial identity approach to student plagiarism. Differing from previous models by including social aspects of authorial identity, the psycho-social model informs future pedagogy development and research by outlining a robust, empirically supported theoretical framework.

Since the 1975 publication of Newsweek’s article asserting that “Johnny” can’t write, many have continued to support the claim that students graduating from American high schools and universities can’t write. This criticism has led many students to believe the problem lies exclusively with them. Efforts to improve students’ writing have had little effect, as reflected in continually concerning scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Recently, researchers have begun to suggest that the problem should be addressed by working to change students’ identification as a bad writer. Two constructs have emerged from these efforts: writer and authorial identity. Research on these constructs, however, is relatively recent and therefore limited. Further, the constructs have been investigated in separate literature bases, divided almost exclusively between English composition studies (writer identity) and psychology (authorial identity). This study seeks to investigate students’ writer and authorial identities right at the entry point into college. Expectations for writing are different in college than they are in high school. College students, many of whom fall into the emerging adulthood phase of development, may experience difficulties writing in college if these different expectations aren’t made explicit. In addition, this study explores whether writer and authorial identity are two distinct constructs, or whether similarities between the two exist. Data were collected from a diverse sample of first-year undergraduates at a large, urban, public university in the southeastern United States. Using a mixed method research design, quantitative data on authorial identity were collected using a modified version of an existing scale to measure authorial identity; open-response questions provided the qualitative data. Mixed analyses of the quantitative and qualitative findings found areas of significant differences between the two constructs, but also areas of overlap. These findings suggest that authorial identity may be a more specific form of writer identity, one in which the writer’s authentic voice and knowledge are effectively represented in what is written. Although this study is a first step in trying to identify why “Johnny” can’t write, it provides evidence that viewing the problem through the lens of students’ writer and authorial identity warrants further investigation.

This paper examines online fan fiction communities as spaces for identity formation, collaborative creativity, and fan empowerment. Drawing on case studies of a LiveJournal fan fiction community, fan-written essays, possible world theory, and postmodern theories of the hyperreal and simulacrum, this paper argues that writing fan fiction is a definitive, postmodern act that explores the mutable boundaries of reality and fiction. It concludes that fans are no longer passive consumers of popular media—rather, they are engaged, powerful participants in the creation of celebrity representation that can, ultimately, alter reality.

This PhD thesis was set to examine newcomer teenagers’ identity as learners of mathematics and English as an Additional Language (EAL) in the context of their transition into the Canadian educational system. Drawing on Ivanič (1998) who suggests a four-part model for the conceptualization of identity as a co-constitutive multi-dimensional framework, and addressing Ricoeur’s (1992) etymological distinction between idem and ipse (identity as sameness and identity as selfhood), a research design was set up to allow for an exploration of newcomer teenagers’ identity as learners of mathematics and of English as an Additional Language (EAL). The theoretical framework of this study draws on Ivanič’s (1998) four identity-related dimensions of (a) autobiographical identities, (b) authorial identities, (c) discoursal identities, and (d) socioculturally available selfhoods. The research design comprised three sets of data collection through family and individual interviews and focus group discussions. Following a dissemination of a Call for Participants, six families who have recently emigrated from Israel to Canada expressed interest to participate in the research. In total, six sessions of 90-minute family-unit interviews, 16 sessions of 90-minute individual interviews, and two sets of all-parent and all-teenage focus groups lasting 90-minute each yielded 26 interviews of over 39 hours. Data were organized according to the four identity-related dimensions that are developed in the theoretical framework of this study. Multiple, iterative rounds of analyses were conducted to first examine how identity is formulated in and through each of the four dimensions identified in the research literature and later explore the inter-relationship between the four identified dimensions and emergent themes. Findings reveal that teenage newcomers’ identity as learners of mathematics and EAL is multifarious, multidirectional, and inter-animated. While the teenage newcomers struggle with their developing identities as speakers of EAL and learners of mathematics in a new educational system, their collective identity as Israelis who make it against all odds, their developing stances in relation to EAL and mathematics, and the socioculturally available selfhoods draw a complex picture that depicts identity work in its making. Given the findings, the study adds to our understanding of the multifaceted and multidirectional nature of identity as crucial in the learning of EAL and mathematics among teenage newcomers.

Studiens övergripande syfte är att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan olika bruk av förstapersonspronomen i tre olika ämneskategorier av studenters c-uppsatser och refereegranskade artiklar och, i så fall, hur sambandet ser ut. Därtill vill denna studie undersöka om detta samband kan bero på följande faktorer: skribenters erfarenhet, skilda skrivkonventioner och skilda skrivpraxis i olika textdelar (d.v.s. inledning, forskningsbakgrund, metod osv). Förutom att jämföra andelen förstapersonspronomen kommer denna studie också att undersökas författaridentitet med utgångspunkt i Tang och Johns (1999) modell. Resultaten visar att i akademiskt skrivande förekommer förstapersonspronomen olika ofta i olika ämneskategorier av c-uppsatser och refereegranskade artiklar, vilket troligen beror på olika skrivkonventioner inom olika ämnen. Generellt förekommer förstapersonspronomen mest i två textdelar av den examinerade korpusen: inledning samt diskussion och avslutning. Detta indikerar att på grund av olika skrivpraxis, tillåts författare vara mer eller mindre närvarande i olika textdelar. Slutligen visar denna studie att den representativa identiteten är den mest frekventa i alla ämneskategorier av både c-uppsatser samt refereegranskade artiklar. / The aim of this study is to investigate whether there is a connection between different uses of first-person pronouns in three different subject categories of students’ c-theses and peer-reviewed articles and, in that case, how this connection looks like. Also, if this connection may depend on the following factors: writers' experience, different writing conventions, different writing practices in different parts of text (i.e., introduction, research background, method etc.). In addition, this study aims to investigate the authorial identity based on Tang and John's (1999) model. The results show that, in academic writing, first-person pronouns occur differently in diverse subject categories of c-thesis and peer-reviewed articles, which is probably due to dissimilar writing conventions within different subjects. Generally, first-person pronouns occur mostly in two parts of text in the examined corpus: introduction and also discussion and conclusion. This pinpoints that, due to diverse writing practices, authors are allowed to be more or less present in different parts of text. To conclude, this study shows that the representative authorial identity is the most frequent in all subject categories of both c-theses and peer-reviewed articles.

Diese Arbeit untersucht die Konstruktion von Autoridentitäten am Beispiel eines Korpus aus 25 deutschen und 25 US-amerikanischen wissenschaftlichen Artikeln aus dem Fach Soziologie, die in den beiden führenden Fachzeitschriften der Länder veröffentlicht wurden. Am Gebrauch der ersten Pronomen der Person in Kombination mit den ihnen zugeordneten Verben wird nachgezeichnet und verglichen, welche Rollen sich die deutschen und US-amerikanischen Autoren in ihren Texten zuschreiben. Dabei werden sowohl quantitativ als auch qualitativ weitreichende Unterschiede deutlich, die auf grundlegend unterschiedliche Konventionen, wie in den beiden Wissenschaftskulturen wissenschaftliche glaubwürdige Autorenidentitäten konstruiert werden, hindeuten. Weitergehend wird an einer Fallstudie gezeigt, dass diese Konventionen zwar nachweisbar, aber dennoch nicht notwendigerweise bindend sind, da erfahrene Autoren dennoch in der Lage sind, eine glaubwürdige Autorenidentität zu konstruieren, auch wenn sie umfassend gegen diese Konventionen verstoßen. Dies wird anhand einer Fallstudie belegt. Weitergehend werden die Ergebnisse im Rahmen des Impression Managements in einem sozialpsychologischen Kontext betrachtet und abschließend in ihrem Nutzen für die Schreibdidaktik diskutiert.

De la Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549) au tombeau de Ronsard réuni par Binet (1586), la sociabilité littéraire mise en scène dans quelque trois cents recueils d’environ soixante-dix poètes est envisagée comme le support de constructions identitaires à la fois collectives et individuelles. En effet, le foisonnement des pièces de contact valorise l’émulation lettrée et donne de la visibilité à l’émergence d’un « champ poétique » où le positionnement de chacun est fait, tout à la fois, d’identification à des groupes et de différenciation pour défendre un style singulier. L’identité valorisée collectivement est celle de « Poète ». Dans un élan commun et à la suite de Marot, il s’agit de donner tout son prestige à ce « mestier » – dont la visibilité est favorisée par la publication imprimée – ainsi que de convaincre les grands de son utilité politique. L’étiquette fédératrice se subdivise en identités collectives aux contours plus restreints, par exemple autour d’un genre pratiqué (les « Amours »), autour d’une langue (« poëtes françoys »), ou encore autour d’une implantation géographique (les poètes du Clain, les poètes gascons, etc.). Ce morcellement s’accompagne de tentatives de classements de valeur. Cela provoque des mouvements d’humeur (des poètes de province contre le milieu parisien naissant, par exemple), voire des conflits (poètes nouveaux contre poètes vieux, poètes chrétiens contre poètes païens, etc.), ainsi qu’une démultiplication des figures de chefs de file. Dans le même temps, chaque auteur essaie de faire valoir sa singularité, notamment en développant l’ethos du poète solitaire ou du poète mélancolique, et s’attache à ouvrir des voies nouvelles, dans un mouvement collectif de valorisation de l’originalité. Entrent ainsi en tension la structure pyramidale hiérarchique et l’affirmation d’un droit à la différence qui rend inclassable. / From the Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549) to Ronsard's tomb texts collected by Binet in 1586, the literary sociability depicted in some three hundred volumes of poetry gathering together about seventy poets is regarded as the mean to construct identities both collective and individual. Indeed the flurry of common topics is at the origin of a literary emulation and makes the emergence of a "poetic field" noticeable; so the position of each poet is both defined with an identification to groups or with a differentiation to defend their proper styles.Being "a poet" is the identity collectively valued. Altogether on Marot's tracks, the point is to make this "craft" prestigious - printed publication makes it visible - and to convince the greats of its political importance. The unifying label is subdivided in collective identities with restricted outlines like a popular topic (the "Amours"), a language ("poëtes françoys") or eventually a location (the poets from the river Clain, the Gascon poets, etc). Therefore this fragmentation leads to an attempt of classification of value. This is at the origin of disagreements (some provincial poets against the emerging Parisian milieu for instance), even conflicts (modern poets against old poets, Christian poets versus pagan poets, etc), as well as an increase of leading figures. Meanwhile each author attempts to defend their own singularities, notably by working on the ethos of the solitary poet or of the melancholic poet and endeavours to open new poetic paths, within a collective movement defending originality. Hence the tension opposing the hierarchical organisation and the assertion of the right to be different and thus unique.

Les fins du voyage chez Peter Fleming sont entendues comme déclins, comme lignes de rupture, comme aboutissements, comme principes moteurs et comme finalités. Trois pistes sont explorées pour comprendre ces fins ; la première postule une volonté anesthétique de la part de l’auteur : la finalité de nier son expérience esthétique et en même temps de rechercher l’extrême en tant qu’anesthésique, en tant que palliation, reproduction et transfert d’expériences traumatiques. La seconde concerne son utilisation de l’art rhétorique pour reproduire et en même temps se jouer des conventions et des attentes du lecteur. On peut parler ici d’une psychologie inversée qui va lui permettre de brouiller ses pistes, de multiplier les interprétations potentielles et de réfléchir son identité de manière protéiforme. Enfin, la troisième propose l’étude des aspects dunamiques de ses récits – un néologisme faisant référence à la sphère de la potentialité. Ce modèle permet de construire une analyse littéraire et anthropologique des alternatives pensées, envisagées et narrées par l’auteur qui va complémenter celle des discours et des itinéraires actualisés. L’identité auctoriale est définie dans ce contexte comme un espace intermédiaire, trans-mondes et hétérotopique, qui se situe entre tous les possibles et ce qui est. / The ends of travel in Peter Fleming’s works are seen as declines, lines of rupture, outcomes, driving principles and goals. Three paths are explored to understand these ends. The first postulates an anaesthetic intention on the part of the author: the purpose of denying his aesthetic experience and at the same time of seeking extreme sensation as an anesthetic, as palliation, reproduction and transfer of traumatic experience. The second focuses on his use of rhetorical art to reproduce and, at the same time, to play with the conventions and expectations of the reader. His use of reverse psychology allows the creation of a broad spectrum of interpretations and the projection of his identity in a protean manner. Finally, the third aims at analyzing the dunamic aspects of his narratives – a neologism referring to the sphere of potentiality. This model allows the literary and anthropological analysis of the potential alternatives contemplated, suggested and narrated by the author, one that is meant to complement the study of his actual itineraries and discourses. Authorial identity is defined in this context as an intermediate, trans-world and heterotopic space which lies between what is and everything that could be.