Writing and writer identity: the poor relation and the search for voice in ‘personal literacy’

Gardner, Paul

doi:10.1111/lit.12119

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…dipping a quill in ink, throwing away paper, thumbing through books or linking to websites). Despite these expansive contemporary and historical understandings of writing, though, our K‐12 writing pedagogies have remained stubbornly restricted (Cremin and Oliver, ; Gardner, ), exclusively bounding what counts as writing to using letters and symbols to produce print‐based texts. While it is not necessary or useful to see everything as writing, we must better understand the ways writing relates to multimodal composing/designing and making, and how that matters for teaching.…”

Section: Writing Making and Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, the US‐based National Writing Project (NWP), which has also been implemented on a smaller scale in the UK and New Zealand (Gardner, ), has been a leader in conceptualising understandings of writing‐as‐making and has supported both teacher writer communities (Nagin, ) and teacher maker communities (Smith et al, ). While writing educators are currently being encouraged to cultivate maker literacies, we are still articulating the relationship between writing and making and how/what we might learn about writing through engagements with making.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teacher–writer–crafter–maker: an exploration of how making mattered for one writing teacher

Woodard

2019

Literacy

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This qualitative case study documents a secondary English teacher's making, writing and teaching. The focal teacher engaged in diverse making practices – including composing, crafting and digital fabrication. She also participated in a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute that focused on both teacher writing and digital composing. Data include observations at this NWP Project Summer Institute and in the focal teacher's English classroom, as well as interviews and artefact collection related to her making practices. The findings describe how this teacher's making mattered for her understandings of writing and for her teaching (or not). The case offers insights into why it may be important to cultivate educator making, as well as potential tensions between experiencing making and incorporating it into writing pedagogy. Ultimately, it contributes to writing research interested in examining how various forms of production and making are enmeshed.

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Section: Writing Making and Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teacher–writer–crafter–maker: an exploration of how making mattered for one writing teacher

Woodard

2019

Literacy

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“…If teachers have low self-esteem as writers, are concerned that they have nothing significant to say and express disquiet about the possible value judgments of others, there may well be pedagogical consequences and ramifications for the dispositions and identities of younger writers. Gardner (2018) in a recent paper discussing the differences between personal and school literacy, highlights the not inconsiderable challenge of reshaping a young person's negative self-definition as a writer.…”

Section: Researching Teachers As Writers: Challenges and Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creative Writers as Arts Educators

Cremin¹,

Myhill²

2019

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education

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In the field of writing in education two strong, even common-sense, views exist, drawing largely on everyday logic rather than evidenced justification: first, that to teach writing effectively teachers must be writers themselves and second, that professional writers, those who are writers themselves, have a valuable role to play in supporting young writers. But rarely have these views been brought together to explore what teachers can learn about being a writer from those who are writers. Nor are these perspectives unquestioned. The positioning of teachers as writers within and beyond the classroom has been the subject of intense academic and practitioner debate for decades. For years professional writers have visited schools to talk about their work and have run workshops and led residencies. However relatively few peer-reviewed studies exist into the value of their engagement in education, and those that do, in a manner similar to the studies examining teachers as writers, tend to rely upon self-reports without observational evidence to triangulate the perspectives offered. Furthermore, the evidence base with regard to the impact on student outcomes of teachers’ positioning themselves as writers in the classroom is scant. Nor is there a body of evidence documenting the impact of professional writers on student outcomes.Historically, these two foci - teachers as writers and professional writers in education - have been researched separately; in this article we draw them together. Predominantly professional writers in education work directly with students as visiting artists, and have been positioned and positioned themselves as offering enrichment opportunities to students. They have not therefore been able to make a sustained impact on the teaching of writing. Moreover, while writers’ published texts are read, studied, and analyzed in school (as examples for young people to emulate), their compositional processes receive little attention, and the craft knowledge on which writers draw is rarely foregrounded. In addition, writing is often viewed as the most marginalized creative art, in part due to its inclusion within English, which itself has been sidelined in the arts debate. Notwithstanding these challenges, research and development studies have begun to create new opportunities for collaboration, with teachers and professional writers sharing their expertise as pedagogues and as writers in order to support students’ development as creative writers. In such work the challenges, constraints, and consequences of students and teachers identifying themselves as writers in school has been evidenced. In addition, research has sought to document the practices of professional writers, analyzing for example their reading histories, composing practices, and craft knowledge in order to feedforward new insights into classroom practice. It is thus gradually becoming recognized that professional writers’ knowledge and understanding of the art and craft of writing deserves increased practitioner attention for their educative possibilities; they have the potential to support teachers’ understanding of being a writer and of how they teach writing. This in turn may impact upon students’ own identities as writers, their understanding of what it means to be a writer, and their attitudes to and outcomes in writing.

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“…This approach divorces writing from the communicative contexts in which its characteristic structures evolved and are meaningful. A range of recent papers illustrate how writer motivation is dampened by such a regime (Lambirth 2017;Edwards and Jones 2018;Barrs 2019) while scope to develop writer voice becomes restricted (Fisher 2009;Gardner 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gateways into writing: a social-semiotic lens on eight to eleven year olds’ evolving modes of thematic progression

Bodger¹

2020

Preprint

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Children’s evolving use of sentential theme position reflects the emergence of an individual writing style differentiated from their spoken language. Choice of theme position indicates both the linguistic tools available to the writer and the structure being imposed across the text. Previous research suggests that manipulation of theme position can be challenging to learn but is important for ‘knowledge-transformation’ (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987). In the light of social-semiotic research suggesting that young writers ‘re-make’ (Kress 1996, 228) those conventions which become socially or intellectually meaningful to them, this article reports on longitudinal research which used an analysis framework informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to chart the evolution of theme use and modes of thematic progression in the writing of 24 children from the age of eight to eleven years. In particular, the research sought to identify potential ‘gateways’ (Halliday 1993) into new worlds of meaning afforded by alternative modes of thematic progression. Findings reveal interdependence between writer motivation, linguistic knowledge and content knowledge in the appropriation of established conventions for thematic progression. Writers’ active engagement with, and analysis of, content knowledge was identified as the driving force behind these transformations.

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Writing and writer identity: the poor relation and the search for voice in ‘personal literacy’

Cited by 16 publications

References 42 publications

Teacher–writer–crafter–maker: an exploration of how making mattered for one writing teacher

Teacher–writer–crafter–maker: an exploration of how making mattered for one writing teacher

Creative Writers as Arts Educators

Gateways into writing: a social-semiotic lens on eight to eleven year olds’ evolving modes of thematic progression

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