‘Fashioning ourselves into our texts’: Exploring learner/teacher identity in an academic writing course

This article discusses a project on writing and identity carried out by a group of English-medium master’s students and their academic writing teacher (the present author) at the University of Helsinki. Drawing on concepts of second language and writer selves and identities (Dornyei, 2009; Ivanič, 1998; Mercer, 2011; Norton, 2000) and journal writing in second language learning (Casanave, 2011; Mlynarczyk, 1998) the study takes an Exploratory Practice approach (Allwright, 2003; Allwright & Hanks, 2009), prioritising understanding above problem solving and situating the research within a pedagogy for autonomy (Karlsson, 2008). Using learning diaries, the students reflected on their evolving academic writing selves, their academic writing practices, and the relationship between the two. As an academic writing teacher and practitioner researcher, I also kept a teaching diary, detailing practices, experiences and emotions and reflecting on the student diaries and my own evolving identity. The project uses ideas from ecological linguistics (e.g. Van Lier, 2006) and complex dynamic systems theory (e.g. Larsen-Freeman, 2002) to make meaning of the diaries and gain a deeper understanding of how students identify and develop as academic writers and how writing courses can support them.