Toward Wayfinding: A Metaphor for Understanding Writing Experiences

Abstract

In this essay, we map out four major approaches to the study of writing experiences: (a) worlds apart, (b) literacy in the wild, (c) ecologies and networks, and (d) transfer. We examine how the primary metaphors used in each approach have contributed to our field’s understanding of writing. In focusing on specific dimensions of writing, each framework privileges a different aspect of the writing process, writing development, and/or writers’ context(s). Building on these approaches, we propose the concept of wayfinding to emphasize how writers navigate their own writing development, skills acquisition, and changing knowledge about writing over time. Wayfinding offers a metaphor that resonates with recent work on lifelong learning and meaningful writing. Among other characteristics, wayfinding emphasizes how writers encounter a continuous potentiality in writing and how they navigate unanticipated challenges and opportunities.

Traversing Academic Contexts: An Egyptian Writer’s Literacy Learning Trajectory From Public School to Transnational University

“…I chose to elevate Farah’s perspectives in her use of resources across contexts—be they “local” or “global”—in order to best see what she was doing, how she was doing it, and why, based on the available data. This study is devoted to “an individual’s agency in determining what, when, and how to write, as well as defining what writing should be valued” (Alexander et al, 2020, p. 124). This was an important part of a study that re-created the environments and pathways Farah navigated.…”

“A Lot of Students Are Already There”: Repositioning Language-Minoritized Students as “Writers in Residence” in English Classrooms

“…Scholarship on classroom writing has often cited students’ out-of-school literacies to demonstrate how minoritized students, in particular, engage in sophisticated literacy practices and take up identities as writers and creators (Brooks & Frankel, 2020). By leveraging such writing/creating, school-based writing classrooms can challenge the “inside/outside dichotomy that is not always representative of individuals’ or groups’ experiences of the development and use of literacies” (Alexander et al, 2020, p. 113), and show students that their existing rhetorical understandings and translanguaging can be brought to classroom genres and even assessments that are ideologically positioned as “standard” or “academic.” By questioning monoglossic, raciolinguistic dichotomies of what counts as academic (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Seltzer, 2019), writing teachers can take critical approaches to curricula and instruction to communicate that students are already writers and need not be “remediated” to meet an intangible ideological standard.…”

“…In her metacommentary, there is also evidence of Faith’s wayfinding (Alexander et al, 2020), or how students, “confronted with an often bewildering ecology of writing challenges, tasks, technologies, and opportunities, attempt to orient themselves as writers” (p. 108). In drawing attention to certain elements of language and certain parts of her experience as a writer, Faith also draws attention to her “working, creating, and discovering process” (p. 122).…”

“…Faith’s metacommentary draws our attention to her wayfinding, a metaphor that Alexander et al (2020) use to theorize “an individual’s agency in determining what, when, and how to write, as well as in defining what writing should be valued—and how that agency is complicated by discourses, objects, dispositions, and other elements that participants and researchers identify” (p. 124). Faith’s wayfinding, articulated within classroom metacommentary about of her own languaging and writing, reflects her complex navigation of those monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers (Guerra, 2016).…”

Trayectorias para llegar a ser: la interacción con inscripciones en diferentes ámbitos del mundo de la vida

“…Desafiando consideraciones estrechas y limitantes de la escritura disciplinar, el aprendizaje y la socialización, algunos estudios recientes han defendido enfoques teóricos y metodológicos que abordan las complejas historias de producción de sentido que las personas construyen y amplían en sus mundos de la vida, en constante expansión durante toda su existencia (Alexander, Lunsford y Whithaus, 2020;Bazerman et al, 2018;Durst, 2019;Kell, 2015;Prior, 2017Prior, , 2018. Argumentando que "cuando nuestras descripciones del desarrollo disciplinar, enraizadas en modelos estáticos de enculturación disciplinar [...], se convierten en la norma, terminamos con prácticas descontextualizadas y abstractas que poco ayudan a comprender de qué modo y por qué la actividad de literacidad de las personas tiene utilidad para ellas a lo largo de sus mundos de la vida" (p. 473, cursiva en el original), Durst (2019) llama a prestar más atención a las formas en que el aprendizaje y la escritura de las personas están "densamente imbricados en el tiempo y el espacio, [están] mediados por una variedad de textos, prácticas y relaciones, y fusionan [los intereses disciplinares de las personas], con [su] vida cotidiana" (p. 473).…”