Crossing the Divide Between Writing Cultures

This chapter examines the different writing cultures in secondary and upper secondary Danish schools and investigates the issue of transitioning between these two writing cultures by focussing on the experiences of one adolescent student writer, Sofia.
The study elucidates the writing cultures and the “possibilities of selfhood” (Ivanič, 1998) experienced by Sofia, and examines her responses to these shifts in her written papers as well as in interviews. A focal point in the shift in subject writing culture is the use of texts in assignments; in the study of Danish as a subject at lower secondary texts are meant to provide models for student writing whereas in upper secondary Danish, close analysis of texts is expected. Further, whereas lower secondary students are positioned as personally reflective writers, in upper secondary, they are positioned as objectively reasoning writers.
Through close analysis of two selected “constellations of writing” comprising prompt, student paper and teacher response, combined with interviews, Sofia’s transition between the two writing cultures is explored. The analyses document that Sofia is a proficient writer with extraordinary textual resources who identifies strongly with the possibilities of selfhood as a writer offered in lower secondary school Danish. In her first upper secondary paper, she draws on these resources only to find that they do not promise success in the new context, as she fails to decode the new text analytical genre expectations. Whereas the lower secondary paper is interpreted as a key incident in Sofia’s trajectory as a writer in Danish, representing what may be termed a long term ‘Bildung’ experience, the transition paper is interpreted as an experience of unsuccessful institutional and disciplinary transition which may have contributed to limiting Sofia’s potential for writing and writer development.