Jeta's Response to Carbone and Orellana's "Developing Academic Identities"

In working on my own conceptual/ theoretical framework over the past few weeks, I've been struck by just how complex the task has become for me. Trying to account for every nuance of my research project in my framework begins to feel like the ever-expanding bubblegum in Willy Wonka--the more I blow, the larger it becomes. The more I try to articulate the particular beliefs that are grounding my study, the more beliefs seem to grow.

Reading Carbone and Orellana's article was most useful to me in that they covered a tremendous breadth and depth of theoretical foundations in a way that was both concise and logical. I was particularly drawn to their set-up of notions of identity because this is a topic that is pivotal to my own study but seems to be a behemoth for me. In three rather concise paragraphs, they were able to define identity as socially-constructed, the interrelationship between writing/language expression and identity construction, and academic identity as its own form of socially constructed identity that is affected and created by writing/language expression. Once I was able to squelch my envy for this cleanly written argument, I realized that my own argument about identity can be boiled down to a similarly lean outline: 1) language both reflects and constructs our socially-situated identities, 2) when we ask students to "switch" their language, we are asking students to assume new identities, 3) and thus, my question--what issues of identity arise for students' in various code-switching contexts?

Now, if I can just keep myself focused on that as I wade into the deep, deep waters of my word document...