Journey to becoming a writer: Review of research about children’s identities as writers

In the early years of schooling, children represent themselves as writers in diverse ways. Writers write to communicate with audiences but they also construct their social and literate identities as they write; writers write their lives (Richardson, 2000). I maintain that writers write to learn and to learn about themselves. They also learn to write as they write. In this way, writing practices, which include social and discursive practices, have transformative potential. Writing at school can be preparation for future academic writing but it also can be a site for dialogue with oneself (John-Steiner, Panofsky & Smith, 1994; Street, 1984). The goal of this review of research is to examine how children‘s identities as beginning writers are constructed through writing practices, as represented in empirical studies of writer identities. Literacy and identity are inextricably linked (Bourne, 2002, Lewis & Fabos, 2005; Moje & Luke, 2009). Through literate practices (i.e., reading, writing, drawing, and other forms of interaction with multimodal texts), one draws on identities and constructs new ones. Through the making of texts, writers are able to remake themselves and their relations with the world. Writing is a dialogic process wherein one takes up the words of others and creates new hybrid texts. One‘s utterances always reflect traces of other utterances. Our texts borro