Formative Assessment

Intervention: ‘Prefer not to say’

Identity is both self-defined and socially negotiated, meaning it exists at the tension between how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others. In this intervention, I will be facilitating the process of dissecting the relational aspect of self-narration: defining a creative practice is a deeply personal, vulnerable process when we’re asking students to have that informed by their own identity, where the individual, the social, and the cultural intersect.

This workshop explores how the stories we tell about ourselves shift depending on who we imagine is listening, and we need to consider our own self as an audience too. The session unpacks identity as a relational process rather than a fixed essence. Students are guided through reflective writing tasks in which they craft versions of an autobiographical account: written for themselves and written for an institutional context. Through group discussion and collaborative reflection, the workshop examines how audience, power, and positionality shape the narratives we construct. The intervention foregrounds storytelling and dialogue as technologies of reflection, allowing students to surface learning edges and explore how their creative identities are negotiated across social contexts. Ultimately, the workshop encourages a more nuanced understanding of self-narration, highlighting its vulnerability, ethics, and potential for collective insight. It aims to promote inclusive learning by validating lived experience as an important site of academic inquiry, particularly for those navigating intersecting identities and systems.

First, students write a private narrative intended only for themselves, encouraging an introspective encounter with identity unmediated by external gaze. 

Next, they craft a version addressed to an institutional audience, such as a university, employer, or funding body, foregrounding how power and expectation shape self-presentation. 

They will ultimately develop a hybrid narrative that considers how the personal and institutional intertwine. This layered approach offers a structure for unpacking how identity is performed, constrained, and reimagined in different relational contexts. Through reflective dialogue, students begin to surface what parts of their story are amplified or silenced, by whom, and why. The process enables critical awareness of narrative as a tool for both representation and resistance, one that reveals how identity is not merely expressed, but co-authored.

Giving an Account Of Oneself

By investigating the way we have assembled a narrative account of a meaningful event, it becomes possible to observe the meaning we have taken from that experience. On a collaborative lens, engaging in a collective exchange about a story or a question, we build our learning of it and uncover the value of that story or question in the larger context of our work. It is through the exploration of stories and the practice of dialogue that we can unpack the richness of experiences and evaluate which issues emerging from that experience we need to pursue. It becomes possible to identify learning edges, questions or issues that an individual or group is seeking to understand. Reflective practice is fundamentally structured around inquiry. The most powerful “technologies” for examining experience are stories (narrative accounts of experience) and dialogue (building thinking about experience out loud). 

Cavarero wrote Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, in which she developed an original theory of selfhood as a “narratable self”. Cavarero claims that we perceive ourselves as narratable, as protagonists of a story that we long to hear from others. This desire for a story, for our story to be told, becomes the guiding element in the new approach to identity. Our identity is not possessed in advance as an innate quality or inner self that we are able to master and express. It is rather the outcome of a relational practice, something given to us by another in the form of a life story or a biography (Cavarero, 2000). 

In Giving An Account Of Oneself, Judith Butler analyses how social norms shape our sense of self and our moral obligations. Butler argues that ethical reflection requires acknowledging the social conditions under which we emerge and the norms we are asked to act under. Butler argues that ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory to understand the social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves. According to Mel Green, whose doctoral research focuses on the identities of distance educators and the experiences of Black mothers raising autistic children in the UK, personal narratives are important in academic discourse, highlighting methodologies that reflect and respond to the lived experiences of marginalised, racialised and gendered groups. (Green, 2025). Storytelling is not merely a pursuit of knowledge; it is a quest for representation. Autoethnography holds disruptive power, offering an ‘understanding of how experiences within cultures are enlarged and/or constrained by relations of power, oppression, and privilege’ (Jones & Harris, 2020). 

• Cavarero, A. (2014) Relating narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. 

• Butler, J. (2025) Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.  

• Green, M. (2025) Narrating self, narrating us: Autoethnography in Black Women’s Storytelling, BERA. Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/narrating-self-narrating-us-autoethnography-in-black-womens-storytelling (Accessed: 27 May 2025).