ABSTRACT
Mining, as both Weese (ch. 3, this volume) and Greene (“Mining Texts”) developed the concept, provides a useful metaphor for understanding how students can interact with texts as writers rather than simply as readers-that is, when students mine texts, they engage actively with them to understand structure, language choice, and rhetorical strategies, as well as concepts, in order to inform their own writing. The text becomes a resource adaptable to the student writer’s own purposes. But whereas most of the research in this area concerns how students make use of texts by other writers, in this chapter I consider the ways students use their own texts. To that end, I am adapting the idea of mining and filtering it through M.M.Bakhtin’s theories about identity formation and on the development of one’s own voice in the presence of many other voices (Dialogic, Speech Genres, and elsewhere). Bakhtin’s framework provides a way to talk about how students can use their own writings to foster a sense of authority.
