Crossing Blocked Thresholds: Three Stories of Identity, Embodied Literacy, and Participatory Education

Labeling ourselves or accepting others' labeling our identities as less than or as in some way incompetent can become an embodied obstacle, physically preventing us from crossing thresholds, from moving through doorways of opportunities, and from fully participating in an environment. In order to discern processes of identity formation and transformation, the authors used autoethnographic (Ellis, 2004) and narrative writing (Bochner, 2002) to probe their concepts of self as literate beings operating within a literate milieu. Each of these three autoethnographic narratives drew on Gee's (2000) work on identity as a four-part construction and considered selfidentity as most audible only when heard against what Bakhtin (1981) termed social heteroglossia, which is a background of voices speaking counter to one's own developing convictions. Finally, each narrator addressed Taylor's (1989) thoughts about identity as the difference between doing and being and Bochner's (2002) claim that we, in effect, reshape our identities by changing the narratives we tell ourselves.