From Being Figured to Figuring the World: Identity Work in Young Girls’ Aspirations

Defining Identity, and Valence of Identification

This paper defines identity as stated by Holland et al. (1998), as “self-understandings” (p. 3) that people use to describe themselves to others and then acting according to those self-understandings. Further, identities signify what the person values and cares for as it is a “higher order psychological function that organizes sentiments, understandings and embodied knowledge relevant to a culturally imagined, personally valued social position” (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007, p. 113). This definition of identity is meaningful to, and regulates the person (Holland et al., 1998; Valsiner, 2007). Identification has been referred to in literary scholarship as readers’ identification with the character(s). It is a process of empathizing with the character(s) in the story with whom the reader sees a reflection of herself. The greater the degree of similarity, the stronger is the degree of character identification (Altenbernd & Lewis, 1969). I frame valence of identification as persuasion held in those ideas or categories with which an individual identifies herself.

Holland et al.’s Theory in Literature

This section reviews some of the research work dealing with students, their school education, and their identities that have used the theory of figured worlds by Holland et al. (1998). Figuring the world of school subjects or disciplines offers “precursors to participation” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 51). Certain aspects of disciplinary practices are cultural resources in becoming legitimate members of such practicing communities. For example, in the literature and language arts, using language in material and non-physical forms such as recitations and oral presentations, are part of the identity formation process and Bartlett (2007) refers to these as “cultural artifacts” (p. 55) that allows an individual to engage with the practices as a worthy practitioner or learner. Teachers may set these cultural appropriations as markers of identity within the language arts and use these to evaluate learners’ progress (e.g., Dagenais et al., 2006). Further, language can be discipline-specific and its use can be challenging for students in identifying themselves in the science and mathematics classrooms also. Using interdisciplinary and innovative ways for students to appropriate mathematics and science use helps them in figuring the worlds of mathematics and sciences (e.g., Horn, 2008; Jurow, 2005; Price & McNeill, 2013; Tan & Barton, 2010). Using Holland’s identity and figured world lens, researchers have been able to unpack nuances of students’ learning while they are figuring the school practices, and the sociocultural interactions between students and teachers that are important in successful identification with the subject practices. For example, student autonomy that may be enabled either through the choice of learning materials (Glenn & Ginsberg, 2016) or with the use of technology (Brown, 2017; Quinlan & Curtin, 2017) have been proven effective in studies using this identity framework. Culturally responsive teaching has been understood as a useful tool in integrating students in the figured worlds of schools by Glenn and Ginsberg (2016), Ryu and Tuvilla (2018), and Tucker-Raymond and Rosario (2014). Students’ transitioning into college or the next level of education have also been studied through the figured worlds theory. The cultural aspect of identity helps researchers in appreciating the unique position it occupies as disadvantaged or minority students negotiate their way from stereotypical or expected identities to ones which they imagine for themselves. Chang et al. (2017) show the shaping of the identities of undocumented students’ as they tap into their cultural resources and find identity in higher education dreams in the United States. Roth and Erstad (2016) discuss the complexities in the positional identities of two adolescent girls from immigrant families who make different decisions about moving into the next school level. Using positional identities as the basis for understanding, Roth and Erstad (2016) conclude that, although both the girls were expected to be future breadwinners, each had different lives that had varying demands on their positions within the family and community. This significance of “non-academic cultural and social factors” (p.70) in the positional identities of the girls illustrates the need for the teacher to understand and direct students’ identity, interest, and learning. In the Roth and Erstad (2016) study, the influence of social and cultural factors in shaping students’ identities and their learning trajectories is not the same for all immigrant students. This finding challenges the idea of high achievement expected to be seen among children of Asian immigrant families (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). Although the emphasis in their study is on how students’ interests might be supported or compromised by social and cultural factors, it seems that the positional identities are also undergirded not simply by certain values and morals embedded within cultures but also guided by social structures within cultures. Holland et al. (1998) theory has been extensively applied, even in conjunction with other theories of identity to study different aspects of students’ worlds. For example, “designated identity” (Sfard & Prusak, 2005, p. 18) and figured worlds theory applied in Solomon et al. (2011) study. Using Holland et al.’s (1998) framework, this paper proposes that viewing identity through figured worlds can provide another perspective for sociologists to understand how students make life choices and the significance such choices hold for them. With Vaisey’s (2009) suggestion of identities as cultural tools, and Dewey’s (1922, 1934) perspective that a view of the future can shape the present, Frye (2012) brought an understanding of Malawian girls’ ambitious “imagined futures” (Mische, 2009, as cited in Frye, 2012, p. 1566). Her grounding of the girls’ aspirations in moral values was further explored by Baker in his (2017) study of disadvantaged young students in East London. Baker introduced the social categorization and “boundary work” (Baker, 2017, p. 1206) that arose in his participants’ discussions of their choices within aspirations. Ljunggren and Orupabo (2020) lead this work further in identity formation and value-driven aspirations among students studying occupational courses. Through this study, I take the argument further for the figured worlds theory as a more comprehensive lens for viewing identities and how these identities are being shaped. The theory allows for significant exploration of forces in the identity formation and agency within sociocultural practices. Past studies with the disadvantaged groups in India have assumed a critical position. This study seeks to view identity as the space of claiming agency, and hence holds value for the seeker of the agency.

Methodology

This study is based on interviews with adolescent girls studying in Mumbai’s civic-run schools. Approval for the study had been granted by the Research and Recognition Committee of Mumbai University, institution the researcher was affiliated to at the time. The study drew on different methods, including observations of participants in their homes and school environments, and interviews. Some of the interviews were noted manually while some girls agreed to be recorded on tape. Interactions that went over a year forms the basis of the understanding on the lives, school, and problems of these girls. Memos and field notes created post interactions were also included in the data analysis process. The study progressed through snowball sampling approach. I had permission from the civic education office to visit schools. One of the intentions was to familiarize myself with the environment of these schools. The other intent was to seek out a girl student from grade 8 or 9 who would be willing to participate in the study. After finding one such student, I started visiting the neighborhoods, and this girl introduced me to another possible participant. I had to approach several girls and explain to them the purpose of my presence. Willing participants started referring me to others, and thus the sample grew. Since these girls were minors, I sought their parents’ consent to interview the girls, assuring them of confidentiality and their right to withdraw at any time of the study. The consent process and the girls’ willingness brought the number to seventeen participants. The girls belonged to different religious and state communities, with gender and poverty as more common factors among them. These girls were aged 13 to 14 years and studied in civic-run schools closest to their neighborhoods.

Keeping in mind the lens of identity through access to education, the questions I sought to ask were semi-structured and open-ended, beginning with their everyday home and school life, whether they liked going to school, etc. Some of the questions arose from interactions in the moment. Hence a strict list of questions was not followed but after a couple of visits, I maintained cues I had gathered from previous interviews to help me move forward, and to ask similar questions of all the girls. The process of data gathering or the interviews was thus an active process, co-led by the researcher and the participants. Daily transcription of the recorded interviews, re-writing the hand-written conversations, memoing, and planning for follow-up were part of the data gathering cycle. Data were analyzed using the six-step thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) approach, searching in the data for answers to the research questions. The approach was partly inductive, partly theory-driven constructionist as I tried to make meaning of the data. First level codes were semantic, and derived from the girls’ description of their behaviors at home and at school, with the contrast this seemed to provide as they described those who drop out early from school. These codes were segregated to form clusters showing how their identities were reflected. One of the clusters of codes showed their leaning toward what they wanted and what they did not wish to do, and this was put together under valence of identification. Thus, themes were created to answer research questions and make sense of the girls’ need to access higher education.

Findings

Discussion and Conclusion

In the findings, one can see the values in identities from the figured present to a future imagined. The participants described themselves as girls who like going to school and follow expected social-communal norms. The cultural worlds that they live in shape their identity as good school-going girls who help at home and go to school, staying away from unwanted behavior. There is very little agency in their lives except in going to school, which is granted to them as long as they are good girls. Such figuring of girls as good girls/women in traditional societies is not surprising as did the Naudadan women and girls follow the life path of a good woman in Skinner’s (1989, 1990) studies (as cited in Holland et al., 1998, p. 53). According to Shweder et al. (1998), community culture provides “for how to participate as a member in good standing in one’s cultural community” (p. 896), and here, the value of good behavior for school-going girls is scripted by what is valued in the community. Committing to this behavior shows that the rewards (of making an educated self) are intrinsic and the value invested by the girls in such an identity (McCall & Simmons, 1978).

They are authoring their future or imagined identities as educated women, capable of looking after themselves and appropriating some agency under their status as educated women. While they assess what opportunities are available to them, they are building expectations of their future identity. This identity is one that they imagine will earn them some respect just as they have seen educated people being respected by others. Within this imagined world, they position themselves as girls who will be capable of functioning outside because they can speak English and are educated, and possess some skills and qualifications. The girls are creating an imagined identity where they live lives acting as a “particular kind of character” (Holland, 2009, p. 273), an educated character. Possessing a certain level of educational qualification will enable them to socialize with other educated people, transcending class differences, and position them above ridicule within the existing community.

The valence of their identification with the world of the educated is cast in opposition to the ones who have dropped out of school. The segregation of opportunities and behavior of the educated and uneducated is informed by their socialization into present lived identity, the influence of the parents and teachers, and also what they have witnessed. All the girls referred to the uneducated boys and other people but did not refer to their own parents’ lack of education in any negative way. The perception of imagined identity is also informed by the job opportunities that teachers seem to be talking to students about in their attempt to motivate them to study. Manual labor does not command respect, although a large number of people in these urban slum areas may be working labor-intensive jobs as domestic help, sanitation staff, floor workers in automobile repair workshops, and autorickshaw drivers. Students seem to be naturally drawn toward “cleaner” jobs that are also seen as respectable (Baker, 2017). Moreover, some of the figuring of the educated identity is anchored in the communicative abilities of an educated person. This shows the habitus that they are constructing partly lies within the notion of “speaking, to encompass one’s sense of the value that is likely to be attributed to what one has to say in a particular situation” (Bourdieu, 1977, as cited in Holland et al., 1998, p. 128). The girls described verbal and non-verbal behaviors that differentiated educated from the drop-outs or uneducated. The figuring of non-verbal and verbal cues, by the girls, as indicators of social class helps us understand two aspects of the creation of their future identity. In creating a self even though in an imagined world, “the others are critical for social comparison and self-validation” (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 227), and second, the construction of their world in the making and sense of social class is related to the non-verbal and verbal social class signaling processes (Kraus et al., 2011, p. 247). In imagining themselves as educated in the future, the girls are interpreting culture not as a product of community or religion but an active form of interaction among humans based on common values and shared understanding of how to talk to each other. Linguistic choice, here in the form of speaking English and being able to communicate ideas, is “an indexical system to claim social relationships” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 127).

When asked what they meant by wanting to be an educated person, the girls described various behaviors of educated and uneducated as types of people. They also spoke of becoming something as the outcome of their journey to college, and as a manifestation of their parents’ wishes. The vagueness of the word, something, as used by the parents telling their young daughters, leaves room for interpretation and no commitment toward a certain kind of future. Yet, it seems sufficient for girls to imagine their future selves and the something of this future self is based on what is good and acceptable to the relational others, drawing from “the words of others to which she (they) has been exposed” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 170, word within parentheses added), and is therefore limited to choices offered only in their interpretation of known presumptions and principles. However, I would like to emphasize the intrinsic value all of them placed on college-going through their hopes of learning how to interact with others in more valued ways. Parental involvement, even though it is in the form of simply recruiting the girls into a normative world of good women, and the intrinsic benefits of education held in their self-figuring seem significant outcomes at this stage. The girls held expectations of going to college even within challenging circumstances as it is easier for girls, compared with boys, to have an educational expectation (Wells et al., 2011), and the intrinsic orientations may be still, one might argue, more a product of the gender role socialization of girls (Herzog, 1982; Lueptow, 1980; Marini et al., 1996).

Although the identity in the making is imagined in social contexts, it also signals a readiness to appropriate what is held as meaningful to the self in time. To the girls, communicating in English, making friends in college, being included in the social circle of the educated are “meaningful as acts” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 55) in the figured world of educated people. The dispositions and skills amassed by girls while authoring their identities have significance to their lived realities and are also determined in these realities. The girls value the ability to speak to others fluently, and in transacting in the outside world without any problems. Each interaction, I argue, builds their inner confidence. They discussed imagining a position in which they could set limits over their thoughts (“no one can tell us what to do”), building an identity that will offer some respect, and differentiating themselves as possessing an identity marker, a qualification that raises their relational position. From a standpoint of cultural psychology, these girls may be seen as agents initiating change in their relations with others and their cultural settings (Shweder et al., 1998) when they choose those with whom they want to interact. Going to school and transitioning to college then becomes an important space for authoring this new identity to reality.

To answer the question of how the identities and valences of identification affect the perspectives of the girls, this paper can only state that the girls who have expectations of going to college are appropriating small changes in their interactions with others around them. While the girls did elaborate on what they could achieve instrumentally, the focus here was to see if there is any unifying identity that can be observed among girls with different religious and communal backgrounds. One can see the desire to challenge and negotiate some space for freedom as they grow older and are educated. They are young and do not possess the instruments with which to critically examine the classification of good and desirable from bad and unwanted or to look at the forces that are responsible for the reproduction of uneducated-ness and the consequent reproduction of class differences. This partly reflects upon the existing school influence, implying a need for more engaged pedagogy to enable girls to create social categories with critical understanding of social and class differences. They are drawing upon parental support for being able to continue education, and this parental support comes with certain expectations of moral codes that are specified by family and society. The girls’ ideas of morality, however, seems to rest upon simple binaries of good and bad, such moral reasoning connected to social affiliations and identities (see Haidt, 2001). The cultural model of reasoning toward imagined identities provides the “emotional force” that can be “highly motivational” (D’Andrade, 1995, as cited in Frye, 2012, p. 1598). Although there may be the forces acting against the young girls’ aspirations, this study has reason to believe that these girls might not be setting themselves up for major disappointment. Just as there is ambiguity in “becoming something,” so do their ambitions also sound flexible. While changes are needed to support a different kind of aspirations, for these girls it is more important to focus on the persons they will become, and the people with whom they will be able to socialize. The moral boundaries that the girls drew while discussing the educated and uneducated also shows their conceptualizations of how they think the other “educated” world lives. Thus, the “moral boundary” (Baker, 2017; Ljunggren & Orupabo, 2020), I believe, seems to be occurring whenever disadvantaged students encounter either white educated classes (in Baker’s study, the educated and affluent London society, and in Ljunggren & Orupabo’s study, the native, more advantaged society) or western educated classes (in this study, urban India). This, Archer and Francis (2006) had reflected, was indicative of the normalization of the western or white middle-class life in contemporary society. In this study, the schools seem to be serving to this end in creating social categories. The girls were extending their understanding from school constructed categories to their conceptualization of good and bad. Since identity is an ongoing process and this study took place within a certain frame of time, this study cannot claim how deeply the categorization and moral-based perception of the educated were entrenched in the girls. However, the influence of classroom discourse in shaping ideas of social categories should not be ignored. Teachers must acquaint themselves more empathetically with the students’ lives, their relational positions in their society, and their future possibilities (Roth & Erstad, 2016). Girl students could also benefit from a more engaged pedagogy, discussed in hooks (1994), as one that enables reflective and critical thought on normative class and social structures, and gendered role expectations.

The girls’ desire to avoid manual labor and their description of working-class occupations points to how young students may be judging social classes. This might prevent them from bringing the value of manual work into the classroom unless the teacher has a sensitive and integrative approach when discussing the value of such work. One of the other concerns immanent in the girls’ discussions is the need for becoming and to be accepted by the other. Such issues may be of interest to sociologists of education investigating the divisions that access to education itself contributes to, and the constitution of students’ ideas of a good life, and the moral ideas they associate with being educated (Baker, 2017).

Although this paper presents identity through Holland et al.’s (1998) lens, the size of the cohort that the author was able to observe and interview places constraints to extensive interpretations. This study also does not claim to have explored all possible social forces that influence the valence of identification, and those explorations could offer further areas of research. Larger studies with young girls in different contexts might provide useful insights into how girls appropriate such motivational verbal and non-verbal cues to form their understanding of themselves. It might be useful for future research to investigate similar identity formation, cultures, and cultural influences among schoolboys within challenging landscapes. However, this study highlights the understanding of identity through the valences of identification. More significantly, this paper also demonstrates the analytical lens provided by Holland et al.’s framing of identity. For some students, educational choices are informed by values ascribed to higher education within the context of integration (as seen in Ljunggren & Orupabo, 2020), while this study demonstrates the choices made for the self in the process of transforming their sphere of influence, that is, their own self, with some need for expanding their social interactions.