ABSTRACT
Building an identity means coming to see in themselves the characteristics of particular categories of people and developing a sense of what it feels like to be that sort of person and belong in certain social spaces. Identities such as researcher-in-a-research-community are an important accomplishment of schooling, but also a tool for shaping children’s participation in the classroom. There are two ways to explore own teaching in terms of children’s developing literate identities. The first is to tape-record some class conversations around books and around writing, such as writing conferences, and to listen to them in terms of the issues the author have raised in this chapter. A second, perhaps more direct, way is to have conversations with a couple of students in class around questions such as these: Are there different kinds of readers in this class do the people think? and How do they see themself as a reader (writer)? What kind of reader are the people?
