Blog #9: Wardle and Work (Who Are You?)

NOTE:  Write Blog #8 or Blog #9 or both for extra points.

All semester we've been talking about identity kits and figuring out how to adapt to audiences and genres. Why?

Because when you leave SDSU, you will have to create an identity kit suitable for whatever job or role you play in your next life. 

And you have to figure out how to new audiences and write new ways and use new genres. 

In a way, all our experiments with op/eds and narratives and blogs and journals and reflections is about looking what other people do, feeling uncomfortable, and trying something new. Because that is what you will do when you leave this wonderful place. (Yes, I really do think it's wonderful. That's why I'm still here.)


When you leave here, you'll go to grad school or you'll get a job, hopefully in your desired career field, and you will have to figure out what it is that you need to be and how you need to be that. 

I can't teach you that. But I can ask you to think critically about what it takes to learn to do that. 

That's what Elizabeth Wardle talks about in "Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces."

Like Mirabelli, Wardle asserts that learning to communicate in new situations and new communities of practice is complex. It requires learning and conforming to "conventions, codes, and genres" (521). It requires a new way of being which can challenge your sense of identity as well as your values. It asks you to take on a way of being.  And that can cost you.

And if that sounds a lot like Gee and Devitt and Johns, well, that was on purpose. 

Take a look at what Wardle says about identity and authority and learning how to adapt in a new workplace. Talk about what you will have to do in your desired career or talk about the challenges of learning how to adapt in your internship or talk about what it will cost you. Or synthesize some of the ideas we've been working on.

Or something.