Discursive Stance as a Pedagogical Tool: Negotiating Literate Identities in Writing Conferences (original) (raw)
Related papers
Negotiating Ideologies About Teaching Writing in a High School English Classroom
The Teacher Educator, 2014
More research needs to examine how novice teachers successfully negotiate multiple ideologies with others in ways that allow them to construct preferred teaching identities. This qualitative study addressed that need by investigating how one high school English teacher negotiated contradictory ideologies related to writing instruction at her school. In particular, the study examined how the teacher negotiated ideologies with allies, students, and practitioner researchers. Implications suggested that practitioner research groups could provide support for ideological negotiations and teacher identity construction. Educators would benefit from teacher education that explicitly discusses and supports methods of negotiation through case study and video analysis.
Narrating and Performing Identity: Literacy Specialists' Writing Identities
Journal of Literacy Research, 2009
In this study, we explored ways that four literacy specialists who worked in three schools that were part of one state's Reading Excellence Act (REA) grant constructed their identities as writers and as teachers of writing. We also explored how they negotiated the performance of those identities in different contexts over a two-year period. Literacy specialists' writer's autobiographies composed during the first year and interviews conducted near the end of the second year comprised the major data sources that were analyzed through narrative analysis. Using Wortham's (2001) process of recording events and characters associated with those events allowed us to examine not only identity construction but also the performative nature of the telling of narratives through interactional positioning. The analysis explored complicated ways in which identities and contexts associated with schooled literacies aligned and conflicted, uncovering layers and intricacies of identity ...
Exploring the discursively constructed identities of a teacher-writer teaching writing
2014
In the light of international interest in teachers’ literate identities and practices, this paper addresses the under-researched area of teachers’ writing identities. It examines the multimodal interactive discursive practices at play in the writing classroom of a teacher in the UK who, in order to support the pupils, consciously positions herself as a writer in this context; seeking to model engagement through demonstrating writing in whole class sessions and composing alongside pupils in groups. Drawing on previous empirical work which explored the fluid identities performed and enacted by this teacher (Cremin and Baker, 2010), the paper, examining video material, affords detailed analysis of the multimodal interactive discourses indexed in demonstration writing and writing alongside. It maps specific instances of discursive practice onto a model for conceptualising teachers’ writing identities: a teacher-writer, writer-teacher identity continuum. It reveals on-going conflict between the teacher’s intended discourse positions/identities and the recognition (Gee, 2005) and acceptance of these attempts by the pupils. The paper, in contributing new understandings about the microscopic, fluid and conflictual dimensions of identity positioning in these particular practice contexts, highlights the importance of the embodied discoursal voice of the pedagogue. Additionally, it offers a new analytic tool for understanding how teacher behaviour opens and constrains identity positions and argues that multimodal interaction in teaching writing deserves increased methodological attention.
In this article, the researchers use the theoretical constructs of Bakhtin and de Certeau to examine how a fourth-grade teacher negotiated multiple and competing ideologies of literacy and teaching, and how these negotiations related to her professional identity. Data for this case study were collected during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and teacher development. The researchers used constant comparative analysis and microethnographic analysis of talk and visual data to investigate how the teacher positioned herself with respect to four different space-times impacting her literacy instruction (i.e., standardization, bilingual education, writers' workshop, novice teacher status). Findings demonstrate how her positioning involved the tactical recontextualization and creative adaptation of discourses across these space-times as she poached off institutional powers to refashion curriculum, classroom spaces, and her teacher identity. These negotiations illustrate the microscopic and everyday dimensions of power and how literacy instruction and teacher identities are coconstructed in the particulars of everyday practice. In tandem with the analyses, the researchers argue for a syncretic theoretical framing and micro-level analytic approach to literacy research to account for the particularities of discourse and classroom practice, and their potential to both reproduce and contest dominant ideologies of literacy and teaching.
What's brought along and brought about: Negotiating writing practices in two high school classrooms
Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction, 2019
This article presents two studies of students and teachers negotiating writing practices in two high school English classrooms in the United States. Both studies draw on a sociocultural framework of understanding writing as a social practice involving distributed, mediated, and dia-logic processes of invention. Each study presents a different approach to investigating how writing practices are negotiated and how writing is produced related to that negotiation. Across the two studies, findings illustrate how the written texts students produce are a result of negotiations among historical writing practices students bring along, the sanctioned writing practices the teacher is attempting to bring about, and a myriad of other possible related issues. Considered together, the findings of the two studies have implications for understanding student writing as a negotiated relationship among multiple writing practices, social interactions with peers and teachers, and objects and artifacts at work within the writing events.
Exploring teacher-writer identities in the classroom: Conceptualising the struggle
English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 2010
In the light of increased interest in teachers' professional identities, this paper addresses the under-researched area of teachers' writing identities and examines the factors which influence how primary phase teachers are positioned and position themselves as teacher-writers in the literacy classroom. It draws on case studies of two practitioners in England who seek to model their engagement as writers in order to support young writers; they undertake this through demonstrating writing in whole class contexts and composing individually alongside children. Data collection methods include classroom observation, interviews, video-stimulated review and examination of written texts. The data show that the writing classroom, in which the practitioners performed and enacted their identities as teacher-writers and as writerteachers, appeared to be a site of struggle and tension. The research reveals whilst institutional and interpersonal factors influence their identity positioning, intrapersonal factors are significant with regard to teachers of writing. Their situated sense of themselves as writers, relationship with their unfolding compositions and emotional engagement, personal authenticity and authorial agency all have saliency in this context. The paper presents a model for conceptualising teachers' writing identities and considers the pedagogical consequences of their participation as writers.
Reimagining Instructional Practices: Exploring the Identity Work of Teachers of Writing
2016
Understanding writing instruction, including whether or not teachers teach writing at all, has received considerable attention since the mid 1980s when scholars, such as Lucy Calkins (1984), Donald Graves (1983), and Donald Murray (1985), first promoted an understanding of the writing process as a method for teaching rather than as a cognitive process (Flower & Hayes, 1981). The plethora of professional books offered by publishers, such as Heinemann and Routledge, reflects these scholars' influence on the understanding of writing instruction and shows that there is no shortage of books that address how to teach writing. What is commonly overlooked, however, is that as teachers learn to teach writing, their own identities as writers (or non-writers) may be just as important to consider and address as the methods themselves. How teachers view themselves as writers may play an important role in how they help their students to think of themselves as writers, may shape the conversations they have about writing, and may influence the kinds of writing opportunities they provide. This study provides a cross-case analysis of three teachers who participated in a two-week professional development (PD) on the teaching of writing. Our analysis shows that teachers' understanding of teaching writing shifted in response to the construction and enactment of writing identities. In other words, when given the opportunity to write with specific kinds of support and instruction, teachers changed their beliefs about writing instruction. While we will describe the particulars of the PD in more detail later, it is important to point out that during this time we asked teachers to engage in the writing process, compose a final piece that was shared with the whole group, participate in writing groups, and apply their understanding of writing by teaching students in a oneweek writing camp. The first two of these strategies-having teachers engage in writing and participate in writing groups-are not necessarily unique attributes of this PD as these are strategies commonly used by the National Writing Project (NWP) and affiliates;
Negotiating a Literacy Curriculum: Issues of Ownership and Control
1993
Determining the appropriate amount and type of teacher and student input is a complex curriculum and instructional challenge for writing teachers. This paper describes a teacher-researcher's experiences while teaching a fifth-grade class and studying a developing writer's workshop approach to writing instruction. She investigated: (1) how students interpret literacy activities and how participation in social context stressing negotiation, shared responsibilities, student voice, and ownership influences students' self-images as writers, their writing, and their contributions to others' learning; and (2) how the teacher's role shapes students' interpretations. The paper discusses negotiation of the literacy curriculum in a writers' workshop, focusing on two female students' participation and development as writers. Writing conferences, group work, collaborative writing, and sharing shaped these students' growing sense of ownership and proficiency and transformed the teacher's own role. Certain experiences in the curriculum-negotiation process can be viewed as "sources for struggle" among teachers and students. Teachers can use these experiences as rich resources for learning about students' interpretations of curriculum, their participation in the learning community, and the teacher's role in shaping interpretations. Growing mutual respect for variant teacher/student interpretations transcends curriculum "control" concerns; teachers gain by learning how to foster writing proficiency in all students. Two tables and one figure detailing aspects of the classroom literacy environment and the writers' workshop are included. Contains 40 references.