Pull Up a Chair and Listen to Them Write: Preservice Teachers Learn From Beginning Writers

Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education

“…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).…”

“…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).…”

“…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.…”

“…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).…”

Ethnographic research: A significant context for engaging young children in dialogues about adults’ writing

“…Thus, our encounters were conducted in the spirit of learning from and alongside the children. This is not a criticism per se of the educators in those settings but recognition that as researchers we often had time to wallow in dialogues with children about the intricacies of fieldnote-writing in ways which would have been difficult had we had pedagogic responsibility for the group as a whole (cf Roser et al, 2014).…”