Your Academic Odyssey
How personal learning journeys are epic stories in the making
Homer's The Odyssey begins not with the hero setting out, but with a young person, Odysseus's son Telemachus, who doesn't yet know who he is or what he's capable of.
The journey, it turns out, isn't only Odysseus'. It belongs to everyone who has to figure out who they are in the middle of uncertainty.
That feels like August to me.
There's something that happens just about this time of year–this the second-ish week of August. Summer isn’t yet quite winding down, but something in the air is shifting.
School supplies are appearing in stores. Group chats are getting livelier. Rideshares are beginning to be contemplated. A kind of low hum starts up in the background of daily life (not quite dread, not quite excitement, something in between).
If you're a learner heading into a new year, or a parent or educator watching that happen nearby, you likely feel it. (I sure do, like clockwork, every year.)
I've been sitting with what it is we carry into a new school year (not literally the pencil cases and such), but what research calls “academic identity”.
What is Academic Identity?
Academic identity is, at its simplest, how a student sees themselves as a learner. It's the internal story a student carries about their own capacity, their right to take up space in a classroom or lecture hall, and if their ideas and questions belong there. It shows up in whether they raise their hand or stay silent. In whether they attempt a particularly tricky question or skip it. In whether a mistake becomes information or becomes confirmation of something they've believed about themselves for a long time.
Now, please know, academic identity is not fixed. (That's the first and most important thing to know.)
A learner's academic identity shifts and deepens across time, across experiences, and across specific moments where someone either received their contribution or dismissed it. In THIS Edutopia blog post, a student named Ricky, who offers a genuinely thoughtful observation about Macbeth, gets a brief, deflecting nod from his teacher, and decides in that moment: “I'm never doing that again.” A moment in time; a single interaction; a piece of academic identity closes.
But, the inverse is also true. One teacher, one class, one encounter where a learner feels genuinely received, can begin to shift something that's been stuck for years.
The Research
Given this movie blockbuster summertime moment…THIS paper by Brock University researcher, Trevor Norris, connects academic identity to Matt Damon. (Sort of ;)
The hero's journey isn't a straight line; it involves thresholds, departures, disorientation, unlikely helpers (thank heavens for mentors), moments of deep deep difficulty, and others that unlock us change everything.
Self-Reflection Prompt for Learners
For now, I want to offer this question to every learner in your life, and to you, if you're a learner yourself:
→ Who do you think you are as a learner? And is that story actually true?
So many of us are carrying academic identities that were handed to us by a single moment with one teacher, a single grade, a single instance in a classroom where we raised our hand or didn't. And we've been living inside that story ever since, without ever stopping to ask whether it was accurate, or fair, or whether it was ever really ours to begin with.
