Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education

Abstract

This review of empirical research focused on the preparation of writing teachers synthesizes findings from 82 articles published between 2000 and early 2018. The new understandings generated through this analysis are presented in two sections. First, we provide an overview of how the studies we reviewed draw from and circulate dominant discourses of writing, leading to a call for more transparency and clarity on the part of scholars who study writing and writing pedagogy. Then, we explore experiences in literacy teacher education that may shift the writing identities, beliefs, or teaching practices of prospective writing teachers. We position these shifts as being potentially disruptive to the often uninterrupted circulation of powerful discourses in important and generative ways, since the teaching of writing in the 21st century must break from inherited traditions to best prepare writers to use their voices actively and confidently in the world.

We begin this review of the research on writing teacher education by acknowledging teaching writing as a contested term—in higher education, in K-12 education, and outside school. Literacy has always been a social construct (Cook-Gumperz, 1986), taking the shape of its varied uses, with very specific and constrained uses dominating in schooling. We suspect most teacher educators who teach about writing pedagogy have found themselves in late stages of a conversation, suddenly realizing their interlocutor has a different definition of writing in mind. The teacher educator was, perhaps, speaking of writing as composing whole texts, inventing meaning, while the student or layperson had in mind handwriting, spelling, or writing a paragraph in response to a test question. To further complicate matters, during the last quarter of the 20th century, perspectives on the teaching of writing proliferated, as composition studies came into its own and communities of educators, such as the National Writing Project, expanded the range of practices students might encounter. And as most readers will recognize, writing outside schools has changed during the beginning of the 21st century to a greater degree and at a faster rate than at any time in human history. Importantly, these changes are not simply technical and diverse in form and mode; they are social and political, as writing becomes more democratized, publishing more widely distributed. At a time of such change, different discourses of writing circulate, claiming the perceptions and subjectivities of prospective teachers (PTs) and teacher educators.

Indeed, writing teacher education receives much of its shape and many of its dilemmas from the wider societal and educational context. That complex and contradictory context includes pressure for divergent views of literacy: traditional foci on text, skills, and ability right alongside literacy practices emerging in digital environments; literacy practices rooted in the everyday; multimodal literacy; literacy as an element of sustaining students’ cultures of origin; and literacy as a tool for examining society and promoting more equity among different social groups. Even as the conceptions of literacy continue to expand, some research on teaching writing in schools highlights narrow practice: students not spending much time writing at all, writing being assigned but not taught, writing in secondary schools restricted to response to literature, writing limited to short and formulaic work, writing focused on discrete skills such as spelling or grammar, or writing driven by preparation for standardized tests (e.g., Applebee & Langer, 2011; Gilbert & Graham, 2010). Moreover, while some research literature has, at times, argued that teacher education neglects the robust preparation of teachers to teach writing (e.g., Myers et al., 2016), over the last two decades we have seen an increase in the number of research studies inquiring into writing teacher education.

For this review, we considered a total of 82 articles published between 2000 and 2018. Analyzing these articles, we kept in mind the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR) editors’ call for academic writing that disrupts the status quo in literacy research (Sailors, Martinez, Davis, Goatley, & Willis, 2017). We thought it might be generative, perhaps somewhat disruptive, to foreground the discourses that appear to shape the studies’ stances toward the teaching of writing—to place some pins in a map indicating where research in this domain has so far ranged, as well as the regions that need more exploration.

Within these reviewed studies are questions about the knowledge and attitudes toward writing that PTs bring to their teacher education programs and the types of course experiences, including fieldwork, that can influence them. In their valuable review of 31 writing teacher education studies published between 1990 and 2010, Morgan and Pytash (2014) organized their findings around PTs’ attitudes and beliefs about writing, interactions with student writers or writing samples, important course experiences, and application of writing methods in student teaching or early career. In our current review of 82 articles published between 2000 and 2018, our included studies overlap some of those Morgan and Pytash (2014) reviewed, and our initial synthesis (Bomer, Land, Rubin, & Van Dike, 2017) yielded categories similar to those they constructed (more on that below). However, throughout our previous synthesis, we noted that our focus on the structures for and experiences in teacher education might really be less important than an analysis grounded in the divergent ways writing was shaped by the discourses and theoretical orientations of the researchers or teacher education practices they studied.

In this review, we aim to critically explore conversations teacher educators are having about writing and teaching writing, while also examining ways research and teacher education might interrupt entrenched patterns of disconnectedness among schools, literacy researchers, and teacher educators to better prepare students for writing both in and beyond schools. We turned to scholarship about theories of discourse, and discourses of writing more specifically, to inform and structure our analysis. Discourses, according to Foucault (1972), are more than a “group of signs” but instead are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 49). That is, discourses are ways of using language that also construct knowledge, define practices, and create subject positions.

Liquid-like, writing takes the shape of its discursive containers. Discourses of writing and writing instruction shape texts, the processes engaged in producing and studying them, and the practices assumed to be involved in their production, circulation, and reception. These discourses also mold the politics of how students are acculturated into literacy. Individuals draw upon discourses in which they have been participants, also to signal affinity and articulate political membership. To account for the shifting meanings of writing and teaching writing in the teacher education research literature, we turned to the work of Ivanič, who has, in much of her work, helped scholars coordinate conceptual tools for looking at writing from multiple dimensions. One of the British theorists of literacy as social practice, she has been especially helpful in maintaining a focus on power in practice (Clark & Ivanič, 1997) and in the social positions available to writers when they address their readers (Ivanič, 1998). She has also provided a taxonomy of discourses about writing and writing instruction that permits a clarity of categorizing, particularly for our corpus of research studies that focus on variant levels of discourse available for focus in a writing event (Ivanič, 2004). For us, this taxonomy works similarly to the way many scholars have used Luke and Freebody’s (1997) four “reading resources” model—to acknowledge the work of those who stay very close to texts-in-themselves, while also making visible that texts have contexts and exist in sociopolitically dynamic transactions. Drawing upon Ivanič’s work, therefore, allows us to build a central argument in this review: that scholars unavoidably draw upon discourses of writing that to varying degrees make visible or invisible the situatedness of writing within wider social relationships. We argue for a higher degree of visibility for the social situatedness of writing as a process, medium, and technology because PTs, when they are teachers, will have to navigate those same discourses and their accompanying decisions about how to represent writing to their own students.

Method: Data Collection and Analysis

The studies reviewed here were located through CITE-ITEL, a web-based, consistently updated literature review focused on bringing together and promoting dialogue around research about literacy teacher preparation (Maloch & Dávila, 2019, provide detail on the CITE-ITEL process). As with the larger project, all the articles are empirical studies that were shared in peer-reviewed journals, were focused on initial certification teacher education, include sufficient information regarding methods, and were published in English between 2000 and April 2018. Studies (n = 82) were included in the writing category if they directly attended to preparing PTs to teach writing to students from early childhood through the end of high school (EC-12).

Our initial review and synthesis (Bomer et al., 2017) for the CITE-ITEL system provided an overview of the content of the articles included in our category. For that synthesis, our research team read each of the articles identified and used inductive coding to expose common patterns in the articles. We compared individually created codes, collapsing and organizing them into two main focus areas: studies investigating PTs’ attitudes and beliefs about writing or teaching writing and studies looking at experiences in coursework and field experiences designed to prepare PTs to teach writing. Within that second focus area, we identified five subareas. These included PTs’ learning about writing and writing pedagogy (a) as a body of knowledge, (b) through practicing their own writing, and (c) by observing, planning, or implementing writing instruction in field experiences or early careers. The last two subcategories were focused on how PTs learned about teaching writing through approximating teaching practices, like (d) examining student writing and (e) working alongside individual student writers.

These focus areas and subareas served as a way of sorting and discussing the findings of the articles (see Appendix A in the online supplementary archive for a complete list of reviewed articles and assigned focus areas). However, these divisions were less helpful in disrupting the illusion that researchers are all using writing in the same ways or in interrupting the inherited and often uninterrogated traditions of school writing that are disconnected from writers’ authentic purposes and audiences. So, for this new examination, we also developed these questions: How are writing and writing pedagogy discursively constructed, implicitly or explicitly, across this corpus of studies? What experiences and thematic emphases in teacher education contribute to the disruption of discourses that position writing as disconnected from writers’ social, cultural, and political purposes?

Our first question led us to analyze variant practices and theories about writing represented by the articles in this review, and we recognized this analytical concern as a question of discourse. By paying particular attention to researchers’ language, theoretical traditions, and methods, we attempted to identify discourses explicitly or implicitly mobilized across researchers’ conversations about writing and writing pedagogy. We read each article with Ivanič’s classification scheme in mind a second time to test out the fit of the categories and, through discussion, further refine definitions and sort articles into appropriate areas/subareas in a central data table (see Figure 1 in the online supplementary archive for an example). In this table, we collected evidence from each article to test our category development and to note particular teacher education experiences, especially those related to our second research question, while also developing additional themes. In meetings, we refined categories, cross-checked understandings, and discussed notes about the research questions. Periodically, we drafted memos regarding observations related to our questions about PTs’ coursework and field experiences. This reading/analysis and discussion contributed to a recursive cycle of development, definition, and analysis that produced the findings we share in this piece.

Findings

Our findings begin with a description of the discourses of writing circulating among the studies, and then we highlight teacher education experiences designed to disrupt static understandings of writing that influence PTs’ beliefs, knowledges, and practices.

Identifying Discourses of Writing

The identification of a writing category in the broader CITE-ITEL project seemed to assume writing as a single, self-evident referent; however, the studies actually employed distinct, if sometimes overlapping, meanings for writing and writing instruction. The gaps between these meanings led to our first research question: How are writing and writing pedagogy defined, implicitly or explicitly, across this corpus of studies?

Skills discourse

Ivanič (2004) defined a skills discourse as an emphasis on learning and using linguistic patterns: phonics and word formation, followed by an emphasis on formation of sentences, paragraphs, and whole texts. Across our review, several studies identified knowledge about language or grammar as important to be effective writing teachers (e.g., ¹ Carey, Christie, & Grainger, 2015), sometimes simultaneously offering critiques of traditional grammar instruction as too decontextualized or standardized. Other scholars aligning with this discourse focused on learning to write as a predictable development of skills (e.g., Davenport, 2006). Several studies argued PTs had limited understandings of the skills their students needed to be good writers (e.g., Abbate-Vaughn, 2007). Ivanič (2004) notes education policy makers often take up a skills discourse when developing standards or accountability measures. The power of these resulting skills-based policies is often felt in schools, creating difficult situations for teachers to navigate as they balance their beliefs about writing and their school contexts (e.g., Athanases, Wahleithner, & Bennett, 2013). Across the 82 studies, researchers rarely invoked policy documents as a rationale for their work, yet across the corpus of studies more generally, authors instead often situated their work as a divergence from skills discourse or from specific policies that reify this discourse (e.g., Flint, Van Sluys, Lo, & East, 2002).

Creativity discourse

A creativity discourse of writing focuses on content and style rather than “correctness” of form. Teacher educators who aligned with this discourse often focused on supporting or building positive individual writing identities (e.g., Certo, Apol, Wibbens, & Hawkins, 2012) and on helping writers find their “voice” (e.g., Gerla, 2010). Many of the findings in these studies stressed the importance of all writers having choice and agency in their writing decisions (e.g., Morgan, 2010) and of attending to affective dimensions of writing (e.g., Zimmerman, Morgan, Kidder-Brown, & Batchelor, 2012). While PTs in these studies were preparing to teach various grade levels, many early childhood scholars drew on a creativity discourse, which may be seen as overlapping with some emergent literacy theories (e.g., Roser et al., 2014) and language experience approaches (e.g., Wake & Modla, 2010).

Process discourse

Process discourse refers to both mental processes that constitute the writing act and practical processes of producing a written product (i.e., planning, drafting, revising). Within this discourse, people get better at the processes of writing by practicing them. In our categorization of articles, we ascribed process as a dominant discourse for those studies that talk about “the writing process” as something PTs and their future students needed to learn as a generalizable set of actions. These teacher educators often focused on specific practices within a writing process—such as planning (Ballock, McQuitty, & McNary, 2018) and revising (e.g., Fong, Williams, Schallert, & Warner, 2013)—or on supporting writers in developing awareness of their own processes (e.g., Moore, 2000). Within this discourse we also noted some explicit and implicit tensions in valuing process and evaluating final written products using rubrics that positioned skills as discrete and measurable within a written piece (e.g., Dempsey, PytlikZillig, & Bruning, 2009).

Genre discourse

A genre discourse emphasizes that different types of texts serve specific purposes in specific contexts. Ivanič (2004) suggested that while in everyday life, genres arise from social contexts for social purposes (p. 233), in school, these contexts and purposes may be artificial. For example, teachers might assign a task that includes a hypothetical situation or might structure units of study to learn more about specific genres. “Good writing,” when described within this discourse, is measured by the match between the choice of linguistic features and the articulated conventions of the genre (West & Saine, 2017). Teacher educators drawing on genre discourse often rely on models of text types and learning to read like writers, or inquiring into genre features through immersion in examples, as key parts of instruction (e.g., Batchelor, Morgan, Kidder-Brown, & Zimmerman, 2014; Pytash, 2012).

Social practices discourse

Positioning writing as a social activity, scholars taking up a social practices discourse foreground the importance of building a community of writers (e.g., Dutro & Cartun, 2016; Norton-Meier, Drake, & Tidwell, 2009; Wickstrom, 2013) and developing a sense of self-efficacy or writing identity, often motivated through the availability of choice and exploring authentic writing purposes (e.g., Gardner, 2014; Martin & Dismuke, 2015). Teacher educators who foregrounded this discourse often worked explicitly to disrupt a conception of writing as a collection of isolated skills (Flint et al., 2002) or to note shifting contexts and purposes for writing beyond schools (Garcia & O’Donnell-Allen, 2016; Hundley & Holbrook, 2013). Some scholars talked about language as social practice, asking PTs to consider linguistic variation and language-in-use as they responded to student writing (Sherry, 2017).

Sociopolitical discourse

While several of the studies reviewed included direct theoretical or practical connections to teaching as a sociopolitical act (e.g., Bacon, 2017; Mendelowitz, 2017; Simon, 2013), these studies did not as strongly position writing as sociopolitical or consider ways to prepare PTs to teach writers to use writing for sociopolitical purposes. According to Ivanič (2004), a sociopolitical discourse of writing extends a social practices discourse by also considering power relations and broader social forces. In addition to being members of communities, Ivanič positions writers in this discourse as “social agents” (p. 238). While we did categorize one study (C. Clark & Medina, 2000) as activating a sociopolitical discourse, none specifically discussed how PTs might introduce sociopolitical purposes for writing or position their EC-12 students as social agents.

Significance: Discourses of Writing

As many scholars demonstrated, PTs will encounter different, often competing, ideas about writing across coursework, field experiences, and teaching positions. Across the 82 studies examined here, social practices and process discourses were most prevalent. Yet, while literacy scholars may rarely conceptualize writing as a set of discrete sequential abilities, skills discourses—buoyed by influential standards and high-stakes tests—nevertheless persist. By talking with PTs about the different discourses they may encounter and the ways those discourses position writing and students, teacher educators may better prepare those PTs to negotiate competing priorities and to potentially disrupt persuasive discourses that do not align with their beliefs (e.g., Vetter, Myers, & Hester, 2014).

Potentially Disruptive Experiences in Teacher Education

In this section, we attend to our second question, exploring ways course content and activities might help to interrupt the experiences and discourses of writing that college students have learned through their experience in schooling and that might be reproduced as those PTs begin to educate their own students. In keeping with Kennedy’s (1998) insights, this reform orientation in teacher education was at the root of many of the studies we reviewed, implicitly or explicitly. This idea supported our question about what kinds of in-course and field experiences contribute to the disruption of powerful traditions and policies that work to maintain static definitions of writing.

In 39 of the 82 studies we reviewed, PTs’ beliefs or attitudes about writing emerged as an important factor. These studies showed that PTs often approach writing with negative attitudes that may be attributed to receiving harsh criticism as EC-12 students (e.g., Hall & Grisham-Brown, 2011; Norman & Spencer, 2005), a lack of ownership in their writing experiences (e.g., Morgan, 2010), not feeling like they had supportive writing instruction or feedback (e.g., Gallavan, Bowles, & Young, 2007), or not believing they have natural ability as a writer (e.g., Mathers, Benson, & Newton, 2006; Street, 2003). Furthermore, few PTs indicated writing for pleasure or writing in extended ways beyond academic purposes (e.g., Gardner, 2014). Throughout this section, we discuss experiences in teacher education, particularly seeking to highlight those that work toward disrupting persistent discourses of writing and writing instruction that are disconnected from writers’ social, cultural, and political purposes in and beyond schools.

Experiences that position PTs as writers

Several studies suggest the importance of asking PTs to reflect on their writing histories. By reflecting, PTs can make stronger connections between theory and practice and begin to recognize how their beliefs and attitudes might shape their teaching (e.g., Draper, Barksdale-Ladd, & Radencich, 2000; Hall, 2016). Through reflection, PTs may begin to see the social, cultural, and political contexts and implications of literacy practices, including writing (C. Clark & Medina, 2000). For example, by reflecting on their writing histories, three preservice teachers in Street’s (2003) study recognized the detrimental effects negative approaches to teaching writing—specifically approaches emphasizing “prescriptive correctness over meaning”—had on their attitudes and development as writers (p. 42). In contrast to negative writing experiences in EC-12 school settings, many PTs in Street’s (2003) methods course expressed an increase in confidence and enjoyment toward writing through their participation in supportive writing communities.

In addition to reflecting on writing histories, many researchers also found that asking PTs to compose their own writing within a literacy methods course helped them reframe or expand their understandings of writing. Many of these researchers inquired into ways of creating positive writing experiences and strengthening writer identities that PTs could then draw from as teachers of writing, or perhaps more important, as teachers of writers. Within this body of work, researchers found that specific types of writing experiences improved PTs’ attitudes toward writing. These experiences include participating in writing workshops (e.g., Araujo, Szabo, Raine, & Wickstrom, 2014; Wickstrom, 2013), engaging in genre-based units of study (e.g., Batchelor, 2014; Morgan, Zimmerman, Kidder-Brown, & Dunn, 2011); using a creative drama method (Erdogan, 2013); establishing collaborative writing circles (Roberts, Blanch, & Gurjar, 2017); employing writing portfolios (Bintz & Shake, 2005); participating in wiki poetry projects (Dymoke & Hughes, 2009; Hughes & Dymoke, 2011); and creating how-to books (Daisey, 2009). Kaufman (2009), besides inviting PTs to write within his courses, also modeled how they might live literate or “writerly” lives.

Across these studies, researchers worked from the belief that adopting a writer identity and corresponding practices is beneficial to both prospective teacher-writers and their future student writers. Course-directed writing experiences were often designed to help PTs grow strong relationships with writing and to give them insights into how to teach writing, increasing confidence in their abilities (e.g., Ciminelli, 2014). For example, Morgan (2010) used a workshop approach in an early childhood writing methods course to engage her PTs in writing in several different genres. While just six of her 42 PTs initially claimed to have enjoyed writing in the past, by the end of her writing methods courses, PTs “articulated or demonstrated growth in three areas: an increased sense of confidence and sense of self as writer; an understanding that writing takes work; and development of and comfort with voice” (p. 359).

Researchers have also shown how experiences in methods courses can change PTs’ beliefs about what counts as writing. Contrary to many of their reported experiences with writing in school contexts, through their firsthand writing experiences in teacher education courses, PTs may center their ideas about writing around meaning-making, process-oriented pedagogies, and the importance of student choice and ownership (e.g., Hall, 2016). Prospective teachers may also expand their understandings of writing to include digital or multimodal text composition (e.g., Hundley & Holbrook, 2013 or broaden definitions of writing as an individual act to writing as a social practice (Roberts et al., 2017).

Experiences with student writing

Besides asking PTs to practice their own writing, many teacher educators designed experiences through which PTs could approximate instructional writing practices. In particular, several studies focused on responding to student writing as a large part of teaching writers and thus examined PTs’ experiences with authentic EC-12 student writing. Student writing, in these studies, was collected from PTs’ field placements (e.g., Simon, 2013), generated by EC-12 students through e-mail or letter correspondence (e.g., Moore & Seeger, 2009), selected by teacher educators as part of a structured course activity (e.g., Bacon, 2017), accessed through online interactions with EC-12 students (Fey, 2004; West & Saine, 2017), or introduced through contact with a local school (DelleBovi, 2012).

With respect to our second research question, we found that the use of student writing is not inherently disruptive. Indeed, in some studies, course activities may have served to prepare PTs for structures of assessment, response, and evaluation that reinforce the status quo in the teaching of writing, apprenticing PTs toward a smooth transition into the broader institutional ideology of school-disciplined composition. In these studies, PTs interacted with student writing to increase their general familiarity with it (e.g., Ballock et al., 2018), to learn and practice assessment and evaluation techniques structured by rubrics or state standards (e.g., Davenport, 2006), or to practice responding to student work and planning future instruction that attends to growth in specific skill areas. Researchers who focused on rubric-based assessment found that with practice, PTs increased their fidelity to these criteria.

In other cases, although, teacher educators used exposure to authentic student writing as a means of unsettling traditions and powerful policies by practicing personalized student feedback that was “encouraging and critical” (Sherry, 2017, p. 370), formative (Keen, 2005), attentive to “content and craft” (West & Saine, 2017, p. 636), or purposefully descriptive and appreciative (Athanases et al., 2013). Several scholars also emphasized the importance of providing opportunities for PTs to collaborate with their peers around topics of student writing and response (e.g., Zuidema & Fredricksen, 2016), and a few had PTs adopt an inquiry stance to address these topics from a complex nonevaluative perspective (Simon, 2013). Some scholars demonstrated that course activities centered on student writing may become opportunities to recognize, critique, and perhaps disrupt some of the ways inequitable societal power structures are reinforced through literacy education (e.g., Sherry, 2017).

We paid particular attention to studies that were overtly and generatively disruptive in how they framed experiences for PTs to practice responding to student writing with attention to linguistic diversity (Bacon, 2017) and to positioning all students as “authors with intentionality and purpose” (Simon, 2013, p. 115). Sherry (2017), for example, developed an online database of student work along with classroom teachers’ responses to the work, and then investigated the ways the PTs responded to “culturally and linguistically diverse” students’ writing. He found that PTs identified with student writers as they read examples of teachers’ responses. Yet, when they provided feedback to students, many PTs gave the same types of responses they found unhelpful; the PTs, generally, tended to take up the same types of “externally authoritative practices” (p. 358) they experienced in schools. Sherry (2017) also highlighted how two PTs—both from culturally and linguistically nondominant groups—drew upon their own experiences as writers and upon teacher models to move beyond authoritarian responses to give specific, individualized, and encouraging feedback.

In a different study, during which PTs were introduced to a collaborative, descriptive review of student writing, Simon (2013) found that by slowing down the “rush to judgment that commonly marks evaluation of student work,” PTs “increased attentiveness, questioning, and analysis” toward students’ meaning-making (p. 139); began to see student work as a “surplus of possibilities rather than a collection of deficits” (p. 140); came to see culturally and linguistically diverse students as “agents, creators, rhetors, and authors” (p. 141); and recognized the political nature of teaching and assessing writing. These studies (Sherry, 2017; Simon, 2013), along with Bacon (2017), support the possibility that activities in teacher education that require PTs to respond to student writing, in addition to increasing PTs’ confidence and ability to provide feedback, can be occasions for asking broader questions about the sociopolitical layers of language, literacy, and evaluation.

Experiences and interactions with student writers

Several studies focused on PTs’ interactions with student writers, providing perspectives on how field experiences related to the teaching of writing should be purposeful. Sending PTs into classrooms did not necessarily disrupt systemically ingrained and policy-supported practices to make room for more thoughtful, theoretically sound, and socially just teaching. Across the studies reviewed, while there seemed to be widespread agreement that field experiences are significant in teacher preparation, conflicting priorities around the complex and overlapping contexts of field experiences revealed tensions and questions about teacher preparation.

Experiences with EC-12 students during their teacher preparation can give PTs a chance to try out or approximate the practices, approaches, and theories they learn about in coursework, and explicit discussion directly following field observations can help to guide PTs’ subsequent interactions and make clear connections to theories (e.g., Donovan, Rovegno, & Dolly, 2000). However, since field experiences bring PTs physically outside of the university in some way, the potential influence of outside factors—such as CTs’ beliefs and practices (Benko, 2016; Johnson, Thompson, Smagorinsky, & Fry, 2003; Wang & Odell, 2003), school norms, or expectations for test prep (Smagorinsky, Wilson, & Moore, 2011)—must also be a consideration. Field placements can be dominated by traditional rule systems if a cooperating teacher prioritizes formulaic, rule-based writing (Johnson et al., 2003) or if writing is not a curricular focus (Grisham & Wolsey, 2011). Prospective teachers are especially inclined to be influenced by outside factors and internal instincts, including conflicting paradigms, if their preparation program lacks coherence or adequate attention to the teaching of writing (Nguyen & Brown, 2016; Smagorinsky et al., 2011). This might explain why some PTs choose not to try out ideas learned in coursework within their field experiences (e.g., Smagorinsky et al., 2011).

As other researchers pointed out, the pull of past experiences can be strong; time in field placements is not necessarily enough to effectively encourage PTs to teach differently from their own teachers, even when they express negative feelings about their schooling (e.g., Hall, 2016). Some scholars spoke directly or obliquely to themes of interrupting PTs’ preconceived ideas about students (Flint et al., 2002; Roser et al., 2014) and encouraging PTs to look from different perspectives at the impressions about teaching they brought from their school experiences (e.g., Barnes, 2018). Working alongside individual students can interrupt preconceptions and reframe PTs’ attitudes about students to be more appreciative (e.g., Donovan et al., 2000). In some studies, these experiences helped PTs to understand the complex composition processes students engage in (e.g., Colby & Stapleton, 2006; Kelley, Hart, & King, 2007) or to position students as decision makers in the writing process (e.g., West & Saine, 2017).

Some of what produced deep understandings and even transformations for PTs in their field experiences included a thorough and transparent theoretical perspective on teaching and learning as established and supported through coursework (Donovan et al., 2000; Roser et al., 2014), collaborating with other PTs (Flint et al., 2002), and working with individual or small groups of students rather than focusing only on whole-class instruction (e.g., Colby & Stapleton, 2006; Wake & Modla, 2010). We found several studies that used PTs’ work alongside student writers to destabilize some structures or ideas that limit PTs’ understandings of writing pedagogy.

Examining their own elementary writing methods course, Dutro and Cartun (2016) focused on the interactions among PTs and third-grade students in a writing group, emphasizing the “complex histories each third grader brought to the small group, both their lived experiences and their relationships with writing” (p. 123). Over a semester, the emphasis was on communicating shared knowledge about the students as writers, knowledge meant to inform writing instruction that “position[ed] each child positively as a valued participant in the classroom” (p. 124). Rather than focusing on categorizing students or delivering externally determined instruction, working with these students was an opportunity for collaboration and building relationships through writing activities.

The study by Roser and her colleagues (2014) was similarly focused on student writers with whom the PTs worked during their field-based, elementary writing methods course. Each PT worked alongside a pre-K or kindergarten “writing partner” for a semester, and researchers noted that the PTs approached this partnership with “deep appreciation (and even wonderment)” (p. 158). They learned from witnessing children’s composition as it occurred, and through the connected course, they were supported in considering how individualized instruction might influence young writers. The researchers positioned field experience as an opportunity for PTs to learn “from a learner” about the teaching of writing rather than emphasizing written products or evaluation. A participant explained how she didn’t see how “anybody could learn about a young writer without sitting next to them” (p. 160). Both of these studies show teacher educators using PTs’ work alongside student writers to create potential disruptions of traditional writing instruction priorities, priorities that do not center the individual student writer or attend to the nuances of relationship building.

Significance: Potentially Disruptive Experiences in Teacher Education

What struck us, overall, in this analysis of studies was the significant—if sometimes unrealized—possibility for disruption and transformation in literacy teacher education programs. In the areas we noted here, there was no single teacher education activity that emerged as being more important than others. Experiences that position PTs as writers, that encourage PTs to thoughtfully (and often collaboratively) examine student work, and that are structured to position students as capable readers and writers are all important elements of a literacy teacher education that might move the field forward through purposeful disruption of inherited traditions.

The potential for reframing any negative experiences or struggles with writing in EC-16 contexts as resources for teaching should not be confused with assuming a deficit-based view of PTs, their teachers, or teachers in general (Ell, Hill, & Grudnoff, 2012; Sherry, 2017). Rather, using reflection to examine past experiences from many perspectives can be an opportunity to counter the deficit perspectives to which PTs have been subjected; to think critically about writing, teaching, and learning; and ultimately to plan instruction that keeps writers at the center. Reframing writing as being not an individual activity but a social practice can complement a reframing of teaching as collaborative (e.g., Zuidema & Fredricksen, 2016), as shown by researchers who emphasize building a community of writers among PTs in their coursework and those who encourage PTs’ community building in their fieldwork. Building communities of writers and teachers may be an important (re)framing of writing as both a social and potentially sociopolitical practice—a possible disruption to cultures of individualism, competition, and achievement-driven evaluation that are pervasive in schools and, in our view, restrict social aspects of meaningful writing instruction and can undermine students’ development of positive writer identities.

Conclusion

The field of writing teacher preparation has grown impressively across recent years; in Morgan and Pytash’s (2014) review of 31 studies published between 1990 and 2010, they highlighted just seven articles published before 2000. Our team found 82 studies published between 2000 and early 2018, generating a relatively large corpus of articles compared to the previous review and even to other content areas reviewed across the CITE-ITEL project. Yet, perhaps the field continues to feel underdeveloped because there is so much variety in the ways researchers and teacher educators define writing and teaching writing, as shown by the distribution across the discourses defined by Ivanič (2004). We argue for a more widely accepted understanding that writing takes different shapes in different discourses, and therefore, the field needs more explicitness from researchers about what is meant by writing in a particular study. We expect discourses and definitions to be in flux, but we believe that one of the most powerful things that all writing does is hold ideas and other ephemeral things still long enough to talk about them and, hopefully, permit layered understandings that might support researchers as they continue to ask questions.

As the field continues to grow, we hope to see more studies that look across contexts (e.g., university and field placement teaching, university preparation and early career) and provide more insight into the ways ideas are taken from coursework into PTs’ future teaching. With few exceptions (e.g., Benko, 2016; Grossman et al., 2000; McQuitty, 2012; Morgan et al., 2011; Smagorinsky et al., 2011), most studies in this corpus were focused on single courses or course experiences. In addition, very few studies looked at ways we might prepare PTs to enact critical or sustaining writing instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse EC-12 students. Some recent studies (e.g., Bacon, 2017; Sherry, 2017) may help us begin conversations about writing as sociopolitical by encouraging PTs to consider how power and privilege play into EC-12 students’ language and teachers’ responses to that language. Other studies seemed to help PTs to recognize and value students’ writing, languages, and experiences (e.g., Athanases et al., 2013; Roser et al., 2014; Simon, 2013). We hope to see more research that works to amplify the voices of teachers and teacher educators whose experiences and backgrounds have historically been marginalized and undervalued in education research.

In fact, we hope to see disruptions in the field lead to many dimensions of expansion, including working to position writing as sociopolitical (Ivanič, 2004). While the studies we reviewed are from as far back as 2000, we cannot ignore the current moment and the significance of new teachers entering the field ready to support students as sociopolitical agents in a tumultuous, and in many ways dystopian, context. This is part of the reason we so appreciated the editorial call to consider disruption in teacher education—if we are committed to the transformation of schooling and to the amplification of the voices of young people through the teaching of writing, we must be willing to disrupt the status quo and accept changes in discourses, privileges, and pedagogies that grow from those disruptions.

Supplemental Material

OL_SUPP_APP_A_Rubin – Supplemental material for Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education

Supplemental material, OL_SUPP_APP_A_Rubin for Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education by Randy Bomer, Charlotte L. Land, Jessica Cira Rubin and Laura M. Van Dike in Journal of Literacy Research

Supplemental Material

OL_SUPP_APP_B_Rubin – Supplemental material for Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education

Supplemental material, OL_SUPP_APP_B_Rubin for Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education by Randy Bomer, Charlotte L. Land, Jessica Cira Rubin and Laura M. Van Dike in Journal of Literacy Research

Supplemental Material

OL_SUPP_FG_1_Rubin – Supplemental material for Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education

Supplemental material, OL_SUPP_FG_1_Rubin for Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education by Randy Bomer, Charlotte L. Land, Jessica Cira Rubin and Laura M. Van Dike in Journal of Literacy Research