Development of Social Identity

This article describes how categories from the curriculum can play a central role in the interactional construction of students' identities. Drawing on data from one ninth-grade English and history class across an academic year, the article describes an adolescent who was assigned and came to enact the identity of a disruptive outcast from the classroom community. It then describes how this student's identity development was facilitated by discussions of a curricular theme. The article traces the student's trajectory across the year and then analyzes one classroom discussion in detail, showing the interactional construction of her alienation from school and how this construction was mediated through curricular categories.