“I Don't Need Your Help!” Peer Status, Race, and Gender during Peer Writing Interactions

Abstract

This article relies on year-long ethnographic data to examine how the intersection of peer status, gender, and race influenced the role stances children took in one urban fifth grade classroom while participating in three different writing pedagogies: peer tutoring, cooperative peer editing, and collaborative writing. Informed by the sociocultural theories of writing development and literature on peer pedagogies, the study explores the following research questions: (a) How do children enact peer status, gender, and race as they negotiate with one another during peer editing? (b) How do peer editing pedagogies shape opportunities for negotiation? (c) What are the consequences of these peer negotiations? Findings show how peer statuses related to perceptions of achievement, friendships, race, and gender complicate peer writing events. By focusing on how peer status, gender, and race intersected during various peer editing pedagogies, the present study contributes to understandings of how peer social worlds shape the classroom writing experiences of diverse students.

Writing Workshop Revisited

“…Although the broad principles of traditional workshop pedagogy ostensibly make room for the sorts of collaborative, critical engagement with a popular genre that we document in this article, so too do far less collaborative and far less critical practices proceed under the moniker of "workshop" (Christianakis, 2010;Donnelly, 2010;Henkin, 1995;Lensmire, 1994Lensmire, , 1998McCarthey & Ro, 2011;Rowe et al, 2001). This study helps address the need for research that examines the sorts of pedagogical choices that foster particularly engaged classroom communities and engagement with rich, complex issues at the heart of writing.…”

“…Second, they invite teachers and peers to challenge each other's work critically, putting into dialogue both their responses to the ideological content of students' writing (Kamler, 2001;Lensmire, 1994) and their norms or expectations for good writing in the genre (McCarthey, 1994). Exploring a genre as a community, one in which teachers are active participants but not dominant authorities, has the potential to mitigate some of the social positions and risks that have limited peer interaction in some traditional workshops (Christianakis, 2010;Henkin, 1995;Lensmire, 1994;Rowe et al, 2001), as the emphasis shifts from the vulnerable sharing of (often) personal writing in disparate groups to a collective effort to be effective in a genre.…”

“…Critics have charged that traditional workshop pedagogy's emergent (McCarthey, 2007) or expressivist (Faigley, 1986;Snaza & Lensmire, 2006) theory of composition ignores cultural and political dimensions of classroom interaction and writing for an audience. A pedagogy built around giving students freedom over how they reveal themselves in writing does not adequately account for how strongly the classroom writing environment is mediated by, among other things, teacher norms for acceptable writing (McCarthey, 1994) and social relations among students that are inflected by social status, race, and gender (Christianakis, 2010;Henkin, 1995;Lensmire, 1994;Rowe, Fitch, & Bass, 2001). In rejecting overly individualist and expressivist notions of writing, some of these critics called for a pedagogy that more strongly emphasizes peers and teachers responding to or challenging the perspectives that students express in their writing (Kamler, 2001;Lensmire, 1998).…”

Identity negotiation within peer groups during an informal engineering education program: The central role of leadership‐oriented youth

“…Although many educators and scholars have promoted the benefits of collaborative peer groups (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, ; Mitchell, Ippolito, & Lewis, ; NRC, ), the social dynamics of these contexts can also make learning more complex. Research outside the field of STEM education indicates that disagreement, status, hierarchical role differentiation, competition, power and control, and management of expertise and knowledge are all common characteristics of peer group interactions that can have important implications for the involvement and roles of group members and their learning experiences (Cekaite & Björk‐Willén, ; Christianakis, ; Jakonen & Morton, ; Jordan & McDaniel, ).…”

The Case of the Missing Childhoods

“…Indeed, children's interest in each other's activity may help situate their writing within, and contribute to the maintenance and development of, peer cultures (e.g., Christianakis, 2010;Dyson, 1989Dyson, , 2013bWohlwend, 2011). For example, an official assignment to write about a personal experience may be transformed into an occasion for collaborative play on a textual playground, as in the example soon to be shared.…”