Rhetoric of the future: Writing and identity at a school for pregnant and parenting teens Heidi L. Hallman 1 Department of Curriculum and Teaching University of Kansas Abstract Three cases of students’ writing at Eastview School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens are explored in this article. Through Bakhtinian concepts of rhetoric, heteroglossia, and genre, the article discusses the ways in which Eastview students responded to and refuted societal discourses of teen motherhood through their writing. The term rhetoric of the future is introduced as a way to characterise the link between writing and identity for a group of students considered to be ‘at risk’ of school failure. Keywords Writing, at-risk students, identity and writing, identity and literacy Star Pates (all names of people and places are pseudonyms) scribbled in her journal, jotting down combinations of first and middle names: Reginald D’Wayne, D’Wayne Andre, Marcus D’Andre, Diamonion D’Wayne. These names were all possibilities for her baby boy, and at 36 weeks pregnant, Star was anticipating that her baby could be born any day. After jotting down names, Star looked up and said, ‘Now, what did you say we should be writing about?’ Pregnant and parenting teens, like Star and her peers, have typically been ‘hidden’ from US mainstream education, and therefore, little has been written about these teens’ literacy and literacy development, and how this, in turn, affects their identity. During the year and a half I spent as a participant 1 Corresponding author: hhallman@ku.edu 38 ª 2012 The Author. English in Education ª 2012 National Association for the Teaching of English. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2011.01114.x English in Education Vol.46 No.1 2012