What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Self-Construction in Indonesian Street Children’s Writing

Research in the Teaching of English May 2013

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Self-Construction in Indonesian Street Children’s Writing

Sophie Dewayani Bandung Institute of Technology

Abstract

The Education for All policy is one of the Indonesian government’s solutions to return children who work in the street to formal schooling. Unfortunately, access to higher education, which can enable vertical mobility for these children, is constrained by many factors, including financial opportunities. This study examines the constructions of future selves through street children’s writing about their future careers, or cita-cita, in a writing activity conducted on a street median in Bandung, Indonesia. Through analysis of four focal children’s writings and observations of and interviews with the children and their parents, the study juxtaposes the children’s imagined future selves with the “realistic selves” revealed through their accounts as well as through their parents’ understandings of higher education circumstances in Indonesia. This study hopes to enrich the New Literacy Studies framework by examining literacy practices in a setting of urban poverty and their role in the construction of identity within the reproduction of schooling discourse.

Journal: Research in the Teaching of English
Published: 2013-05-01
DOI: 10.58680/rte201323631
Open Access: Closed
Topics: literacy studies multilingual writers