The Mentored Multigenre Project: Fostering Authentic Writing Interactions Between High School Writers and Teacher Candidates

Abstract

This article describes the Mentored Multigenre Project, a virtual writing collaboration experience between high school writers and teacher candidates. Our goal was to create an authentic opportunity for our high school students to receive writing feedback from virtual writing mentors, while also creating an opportunity for our teacher candidates to practice the craft of teaching writing. In this article, the authors outline the ways in which they prepared and supported the high school students during the project. Then, the authors highlight an emergent case from the project to demonstrate the virtual writing collaboration experience in action and evaluate the extent to which it created an authentic writing experience for one high school writer. Finally, the authors share their reflections on the experience and suggestions for others interested in using a learning management system to connect high school writers with teacher candidates.

Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research About Literacy Teacher Education

“…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).…”

“…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).…”

Centering the How: What Teacher Candidates’ Means of Mediation Can Tell Us About Engaging Adolescent Writers

“…In addition to writing strictly to fulfill a course requirement or as a form of self‐expression and reflection, participants also discussed uses of writing outside of their school‐based and reflective purposes. Although the descriptor authentic is a contested term with a host of conflicting meanings, I use it here to refer to writing that is not done strictly for a teacher, a grade, or personal reflection, but for an audience outside of the school or the self (West & Saine, ). Generally, participants found writing for an authentic purpose or audience to be enabling.…”

Revision as Dialogue: Exploring Question Posing in Writing Response

“…The challenges that mentors face encourage them to critically examine their beliefs about writing (Nail & Townsend, 2010). Online writing partnerships also support cultural competence (Friedman & Herrmann, 2014), fostering meaningful relationships and writing experiences (West & Saine, 2017) as students are given the opportunity to write to authentic audiences for authentic purposes.…”