My Weary Query

Gee’s chapter on self-fashioning revealed some interesting differences in how teenagers narrate their lived experiences. The rich kids tended to distance themselves from their narratives. They often narrated experiences as if they were an outside observer, and often spoke of personal experiences in terms of how they might pay off later in their lives. Their narratives had a sense of trajectory, and revealed how they leverage experience for future opportunity.

The low SES kids foreground themselves in their narratives. Their accounts were more interactional. They conveyed what they and others said or did without taking a step back to interpret their experience, or frame it in ways that would provide them greater status.

I’m not sure if these youth are conscious of the positions they enact when narrating, though I suspect that the rich kids are probably more aware of how they need to talk and know when to take-up certain positions to gain status among the researchers.

Reading this chapter, it becomes apparent, yet again, that the divide between rich and poor is intertwined with language, culture, and identity.

Why does this matter? Gee helps me think about why these differences are important. In the new economy, were people have many jobs and acquire a diverse set of skills across a lifetime, it is necessary that we narrate our experiences in such a way they they emphasize the skills and identities required for new markets. So often a new job is just a stopping ground for gaining new skills. A job, in this respect, might be considered the quality school that situates learning in a context where skills and knowledge are acquired in doing authentic tasks that have social and economic returns. The repertoire of experiences we build over time allows us to “cut and paste” experiences, or to interpret them in ways that fit the diverse and changing needs of today’s workplace.

The rich teens in this study are already oriented toward fashioning themselves as a certain kind of person—one who’s ivy league bound. They make sure their narratives capitalize on lived experience (in and out of school), which they fashion to suit certain purposes (e.g., impress the researcher who’s conducting the interview, get in a ivy league school, etc.).

The low SES kids do not have equal access to experiences or social groups that would might help socialize them into into the kinds of self-fashioning the rich kids perform. Although all people (regardless of social class) act and talk in certain ways to get things we want, the rich kids know what narrative positions will win them access to the best schools and the best jobs.

I don’t know much about the theory of self-fashioning, but Gee makes it clear that it has economic/social rewards. Companies today care about creating and selling an image as much as they do the product. They are all about fashioning a product that appeals to the diverse range of identities that are out there. Just today when visiting Amazon.com, I found myself browsing books that the Amazon website had recommended for me based off my previous purchases. The site fashions itself to the customer’s needs/wants–even the customer’s identity (in my case, it recommends books appeal to my identity as an educator).

Of course this is hardly new—many web sites do this. But what I think most interesting is simply this:  Just as these interfaces are adaptive to our needs/wants/identities, we (the worker) must fashion ourselves to the  needs/wants/identity of the companies we aspire to work for. People are required now more than ever to fashion themselves in ways that their skills meet the particular demands of a workforce.

Gee says that we are becoming “Shape Shifting Portfolio People”. I think his article is telling us that the rich kids are already learning how to fashion themselves for future experience, while the poor kids are (once again) are further removed from the resources and cultural capital that would socialize them into a way of narrating experience that might give them clout. Many are left only with the limited experiences that public schools provide. Unfortunately, the basic skills so many low-performing schools impart are not enough to help students become competitive in the workplace.