Voices in the Classroom

Educational Psychologist, 2018

This article argues for a conceptualization of school writing that emphasizes how cognitive and sociocultural factors interact. In academic, professional, and affinity-based communities, an emphasis on standards of quality drives the adoption of such practices as revision and peer and expert review. In school, everyday writing practices center around demonstrations of knowledge (taking notes, writing summaries, providing personal responses to readings, completing worksheets, etc.) where the teacher is often the sole or primary audience. This context tends to privilege knowledge-telling strategies and prioritize fluency and efficiency of expression. When these sociocultural factors interact with cognition, group differences tend to emerge, as knowledge telling provides few opportunities for disadvantaged groups to overcome barriers linked to differences in prior knowledge, fluency, attention management, or motivation. It also affects the efficacy of instructional practices, because cognitive ability and social identity affect how students internalize the metacognitive concepts and strategies characteristic of expert writers.

1987

A study examined the perceptions elementary school students hold toward writing and writing instruction, and questioned whether these perceptions vary by the kind and nature of instruction provided. A total of 96 students in grades three and four in a large midwestern middle class school took part in the study. The students were divided into two groups: (1) one group participated in a traditional approach to writing instruction defined in terms of separate, sequential skills being taught during an assigned period using a basal reader; and (2) the second group participated in a more informal approach allowing students to negotiate with the teacher concerning the choice of themes, book genres, writing and reading assignments, etc. Student answers on forced-choice questionnaires designed to probe their perceptions, interests, and their behavior toward writing indicated that students' perceptions do vary with the kind and nature of the instruction. Students in the informal classes appeared to have an advantage over their counterparts in the traditional :lasses across all prober employed in the study, and they saw writing as an enjoyable and meaningful activity that was initiated for their own purposes. Findings suggest that teachers and curriIlum specialists need to evaluate critically the methods and tasks used in writing instruction. (Five tables of data are included.) (NH)

1994

This paper explores the ways in which inner-city students' social, cultural, and political relationships and their thinking and behavior patterns that stem from the range of different situations outside the classroom can shape the classroom roles that they develop with their peers as thinkers and learners of English and writing. It presents a case study taken from 6 weeks of observing writing instruction in an inner-city classroom and explores students' classroom roles during a class discussion and writing exercise conducted the day after the events surrounding the jury verdict in the original Rodney King trial. Results show that all focal students played roles in relationship to three social realities: the classroom community, the world outside the classroom, and their impending texts. Furthermore, these three realities are sometimes critically interconnected. How these realities manifest themselves in the classroom discussions and exercises are discussed as well as the implications for research. (Contains 34 references.) (GLR)

Our paper offers two cases in which we examine the powerful literacy moves made by both a secondary high school English student and a secondary English preservice teacher. Through the case of the high school student, Reema, a young Iraqi refugee woman now living in Sweden, we show that student narrative writing actually limits teacher understanding of the student while simultaneously giving the semblance of empowering the student. It does so for two reasons: 1) the writing in which Reema is being asked to engage inadvertently privileges a private reflective stance by making it public and in doing so forefronts an affective rather than analytical stance toward a problem; and 2) the semblance of authenticity in the narrative writing masks important contextual and historical experiences which not only backgrounds critical thinking, but also backgrounds the multi-dimensional identity that Reema brings into her school context. Finally, our analysis of classroom academic talk and writing shows that linguistic features of academic and analytical language use are distinct from narrative ones (Schleppegrell, 2004) and are important to address in light of state and national achievement expectations. While Reema’s case illustrates the ways in which the narrative writing requirements promote a problematic effacement of the writer’s self, the case we present of the secondary English preservice teacher illustrates another expression of the writing curriculum in the Unites States: writing for testing. A preservice teacher in an urban teacher residency, Sam learned to teach in a school that required her to tether her entire writing instruction to the ACT, the standardized test intended to measure college readiness. Throughout the year, Sam struggled to find ways to help her students find authenticity in their writing within a context that was largely geared toward students “filling in the bubbles,” an orientation that bled into her students’ approach to writing wherein they routinely asked Sam, “What do you want me to put next?” Taken together, our analysis of these two case studies illustrates a bipolar writing curriculum in American schools--writing as reflection and writing as formula. Neither orientation emphasizes the kinds of critical and analytic thinking that ought to be foregrounded in writing instruction in schools.

Writing & Pedagogy, 2014

This reflection on effective writing practice is the result of a universityschool partnership focused on collaboratively investigating the work of a successful 5 th grade-writing teacher. The co-authors collectively present the work of Mrs. Hutchison, a veteran teacher who worked in a predominately low-income school with a high percentage of students labeled English language learners. Mrs. Hutchison's class was a space where each student was both a learner and a teacher and most students developed a great interest and love of writing. This reflective piece presents data documenting Mrs. Hutchison's success as well as a collaborative reflection on her work intended to provide a glimpse into Mrs. Hutchison's commitments and practices, and how these resulted in students' learning and productive writing activity and achievement. In so doing, we hope to provide some models of effective practices that others may wish to adapt or investigate further.

2017

This dissertation presents a case study of analytical writing and identity development among diverse, ninth grade adolescents enrolled in an alternative high school preparatory academy. Within the larger school context, the study examines the case of the writing classroom-specifically, the four-month literary analysis unit-and the students' writing development therein. First, I analyze the discourse of the writing classroom on developing interpretative statements about literature. Analysis shows that the teacher highlighted three aspects of literary reasoning to support five specific expectations for writing a literary interpretation. In particular, the teacher emphasized that students deepen their interpretative statements by analyzing literary techniques and themes. Second, I examine analytical essays to identify trends in student writing development over time. I show that students had to adopt a particular stance toward literary analysis in order to meet the teacher's increasing calls to make deeper interpretative statements-a stance that posed tensions for some students. Third, I analyze the data of eight focal students to explore those tensions. I show that students adopted one of three stances toward the discourse and use three focal students to describe vii those stances. Abraham ventriloquated through the discourse (i.e., he appropriated heuristics without full control over them) while Katarina passed on the discourse (i.e., she upheld personal observations of characters as points of connection to literary analysis), and Kianna made the discourse internally persuasive (i.e., she actively merged the discourse goals with her communicative goals). This dissertation further explores the cultural, historical, and social factors informing the students' stances and reveals how the internalization of a new discourse is highly variable and deeply personal. These findings complicate contemporary understandings of writing development as either the refinement of cognitive processes or the layered interactions of writer, culture and context. It also demonstrates the utility of using both sociocognitive and identity lenses to study the ways diverse adolescents take up dominant discourses within particular classroom contexts. Finally, the study raises questions about what it means when teachers ask students to adapt to dominant discourses without also providing them the space to adapt the discourse to meet their communicative needs. viii

1993

This paper reviews and summarizes research studies in writing and related language areas that help educators to understand how writing is socially based. The purpose of the paper is to cast classroom practice in the variously dim and gleaming lights of research and theory, linking practice, research, and theory by looking with a close-up lens at the ways in which writing and other language experiences inside and outside of school have been studied and explained. Using this lens, the paper first presents some theoretical perspectives on written language acquisition and development. Next, the paper reviews studies that investigate social contexts for writing development both in school and out. The paper then loons at studies of instructional practices in writing that are, from lesser to greater degrees, socially based. The paper concludes with a presentation of some "core concepts" which capture the ways in which some of the most promising instructional practices in writing are linked to social theories. Ten notes are included; 213 references are attached. (Author/RS

2017

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how instructional approaches to teaching developmental writing at a large urban community college foster the development of college students’ self-efficacy regarding academic writing and selfidentity as college students. The case study examined the perspectives of four instructors and six students. The research considered: 1) how students experience the development of self-efficacy related to their academic writing; 2) how students experience their selfidentity as college students; 3) how writing instructors foster students’ development of self-efficacy as writers; and 4) how writing instructors foster students’ self-identities as college students. The findings of this study provided a description of some of the specific ways students enrolled in developmental writing courses experienced the development of self-efficacy and self-identity. The study illuminated some of the practices that instructors use to facilitate both self...

2010

Using a reflexive lens, this paper discusses one teacher's journey into a Writing Workshop, - through a Critical Literacy perspective, - aimed for cognitively-challenged students. Along the way, teaching is disrupted and students' writing lives are transformed. This discussion also engages in a dialogue with research literature and examines that research vis-a-vis the actual students who are in this specialized class.

2020

As academic writing teachers, we are often faced with the challenge of teaching writing as a system or emancipating from its structures. In this reflective paper, we begin by examining our own experiences with writing for academic and creative purposes using co/autoethnography as a method of selfreflection. In addition, we invited three modern language students at a public university in Tunja, Colombia to share their reflections about their writing processes and the role creative writing could play in the academic writing classroom. Our reflections were a first step in rethinking our classroom from a critical sociocultural model, which revealed that students’ individual writing processes, motivation, feedback, and creative writing could help boost students’ self-confidence when writing for academic purposes.