Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

This research is a project that I have been working towards since the summer of

1998. It is the latest incarnation of a decade-long series of questions about the nature of

writing and how students envision themselves as writers in academic spaces. In this

research project, I wanted to work with students to challenge the skills-based approach to

writing that pervades current educational policy and practice. This has been an area of

focus in both the pedagogy of my teaching life and the scholarship of my masters and

doctoral work. In this vein, my dissertation explores what happened when my students

and I subverted traditional expectations of an English 4 course by engaging in an inquiry

into academic writing.

In this introductory chapter, I aim to describe my past teaching experiences and

their impact on both my teaching and scholarship. Specifically, I explore my academic

experiences in graduate school as well as my past practitioner inquiries. I describe the

impacts of both on my pedagogy and research interests. Additionally, I explain how the

educational and political climate of accountability partially disrupted the inquiry

frameworks supporting my “research pedagogy” (Nichols, 2008), a term from the

dissertation of a fellow practitioner inquirer that suggests the reciprocal and mutually

shaping nature of academic experiences, scholarly research, and teaching.

1

Statement of the Problem

A perception exists that many high school teachers and students use the term

essay to describe teacher-assigned academic writing tasks, no matter the context,

audience, or purpose of these writings. In this way, essay writing is frequently viewed as

an imposed, sometimes rote, and often joyless task. In this model of writing, high school

teachers ready students to complete essay sections on standardized tests and work with

other teachers to develop course-specific essay prompts for students to demonstrate

content understanding. High school students talk about the essays they need to write for

history class or the English essay due next week. They talk about preparing for the essay

questions on their math tests and how cumbersome the essay section of the SAT seems to

them. In each of these examples, the content and textual products are different, yet the

students’ purposes are strikingly similar. In cases like this, students write largely to

demonstrate content knowledge or de-contextualized writing skills.

In fact many high school writing assignments construct academic essay writing in

these fixed ways: as a mechanical creation of text that contains an introduction, body, and

conclusion (Dombek & Herndon, 2004, p. 10) and/or as a form that holds structure and

mechanics as more important than content and purpose (Winalski, 2006, p. 304). This

static definition reinforces a particular notion of secondary writing as a set of fixed skills.

This particular and narrow conception of writing as fixed skill, although derived from

social practices, has been institutionalized over time (Reder & Davilla, 2005). These

largely normalized notions shape how writing is taught, assigned, and assessed in high

2

school and impact teaching and learning in four important ways that are not often

questioned because they are so central to established conceptions of literacy in secondary

schools: (1) They lead to the belief that the essay, as if it is some monolithic entity, can

be explicitly taught through a series of sequential pre-determined steps (Salahu-Din,

Persky, & Miller, 2008.) (2) They lead to the teaching of the essay as the development of

interchangeable structures and strategies where the same general knowledge and

processes are applied to all writing tasks (Applebe, 1984; Smagorinsky & Smith, 1992;

Hillocks, 2006). (3) Because these conceptions of essay suggest the presence of

concrete, stable and measurable qualities, they assume an essay can be assessed using

pre-determined criteria and rubrics that often function as little more than checklists of

elements students should include in an essay to earn high marks (Andrage & Boulay,

2003). (4) Lastly, the climate of standardized testing has initiated a return to supposedly

objective conceptions of what constitutes good writing, highlighted in formulaic and

easily scoreable forms (Hillocks, 2002). These conceptions of academic writing do not

correspond to the underlying sense of “essay.”

In fact, these conceptions of academic writing betray even the etymological

origins of “essay.” Deriving from verb forms, “essay” is always active, mutable, and

dynamic. In fact, the word essay comes from the middle French essayer and the ancient

French assayer—to try—and the Latin exagium—the act of weighing. So each time

students write in an academic content, they should be “trying to weigh” ideas through a

questioning and reflective stance. But that is not often the case as high school students

write papers for English classes that catalogue teacher presented literary themes but do

3

not develop student-generated ideas or questions (Weinstein, 2001, p. 10). History

classes sometimes require essay responses on a test or a research paper on a historical

topic. But these pieces of writing are mostly a means to assess the factual knowledge that

students possess, not necessarily the ideas that students generate (Fitzhugh, 2007).

Science classes require lab reports, entailing a summary of procedures followed and

results obtained, with discussion sections often no more complex than a single paragraph

(Singer, Hilton, & Schweingruber 2005, p. 78). Math classes sometimes require students

to both show and explain solutions but emphasis is placed on finding correct answers and

written explanations are used to help a teacher understand where a student went wrong in

attempting to find this singular solution (Drake & Amspaugh, 1994). In each of these

instances, the act of writing functions as an assessment vehicle, largely facilitating

teachers’ scoring rather than students’ learning processes.

This insistence on the measurable and objective assessment of writing is

heightened in the current era of accountability, which largely evaluates students’ learning

based on what can be objectively measured and ranked. Beginning with the 2002

reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, scores on standardized tests became a central,

public measure of student and school achievement. Little changed after Race to the Top

was unveiled in 2009 as a means to overhaul the No Child Left Behind regulations. The

policy, like its precursor, relies almost exclusively on test scores as the primary measure

of students’ learning and schools’ success and continues to insist on skills-centered

remedial work when students and schools do not make Annual Yearly Progress goals.

The four stated aims of Race to the Top are described on the United States Department of

4

Education Website as (1) adopting rigorous standards and assessments, (2) tracking

student progress to foster continuous improvement, (3) fostering high quality instruction,

and (4) providing support to schools and students (United States Department of

Education, 2009). Yet the programs developed to support and measure these goals are

enacted in ways that narrow the curriculum, evaluating only elements that can be

objectively assessed as defined by psychometricians. This program, which frames itself

as encouraging educational reform, actually reinforces deficit stances and skills-centered

instructional models by utilizing frameworks that include broken schools, unsuccessful

teachers, and unknowledgeable students who need to be fixed in measured and

measurable ways.

Couched in the language of high standards for all students, the writing demands of

Race to the Top actually cultivate low expectations by focusing on de-contextualized and

remediable aspects of students’ writing. For example, according to the Executive

Summary of Race to the Top grant guidelines, a successful grant proposal demonstrates

“rapid time” between assessments being given and results returned to teachers so they

can target instruction to students’ weakness. This criterion creates a continuous data

cycle: externally assessing writing to find a problem, fixing the problem, showing

growth through an assessment, using that assessment to identity another problem. The

contentious issue is that the literacy experiences resulting from strict adherence to testing

cycles and measurable growth models limit the opportunities for high school students to

develop as writers who view literacy as a deeply contextualized practice (Hillocks, 2002;

Miller, 2002; Finn, 1999).

5

Yet many states including Pennsylvania continued to vie for the funding that

came with a successful Race to the Top grant application. To comply with the program’s

criteria, on July 1, 2010 the Pennsylvania School Board unanimously adopted the

Common Core State Standards along with plans to fully transition from the current state

standards to the Common Core by 2013 (Pennsylvania Department of Education, 2010).

In a positive sense, the Common Core State Standards align with current Pennsylvania

state standards, are more specific in their explanations, and positively frame writing as

dynamic and meaning-creating processes for learning and not simply for demonstration

Figure 1. Common Core Standards for Writing. This figure illustrates

6

the Common Core Standards as they are specific to writing. This particular

detailing of the Common Core Standards was found on the Standards Align

System (SAS) developed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (2010).

of content mastery. To some degree these standards, drafted in consultation with middle,

secondary, and university teachers, honor writing as both a means of learning and a

vehicle for demonstrated learning.

Yet complex understandings of how students write are lost when the Common

Core State Standards are translated into eligible content on standardized assessments.

This process is occurring at this exact moment in Pennsylvania1. This suggests that the

Common Core State Standards themselves are potentially useful to teachers and students

but how they are being taken up and measured on standardized assessments is

problematic.

In May of 2010, I sat on the Cut Scores Committee of then-recently field tested

Keystone Exams, the assessment vehicle for Pennsylvania students’ learning based on the

Common Core State Standards. At this meeting I received information on the design and

format of the Keystone Exam in Composition that was field tested in the spring of 2011

and will likely be operational in the spring of 20132. During this same month, 1 In July and August 2010, development of assessment questions based on eligible content was completed by the Data Recognition Corporation in anticipation of field testing of Keystone Exams that occurred in April 2011. As I learned from my time on the Pennsylvania Department of Education Set Scores Committee, eligible content was determined by identifying the concrete elements in students’ work that suggest proficiency. Only skills that evidence concrete results are assessed on standardized measures. Stances or dispositions cannot be measured so they are not assessed or considered in the assessment design.2 In Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett’s FY 2011-2012 budget beginning July 1, 2011, the line item spending for Keystone Exam development and implementation was “zeroed out”—i.e. funding for the program was completely eliminated. Yet in a June 24, 2011 meeting with representatives from both the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Data Recognition Corporation, the testing company contracted to develop and oversee the Keystone Exams, both parties were confident that the Keystone Exams would be operational in 2012, considering the “massive monetary and political investment that has

7

information about the upcoming Keystone Exams and the Common Core State Standards

was made public through the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Standards Align

System (SAS). According to SAS, the Keystone Exam in Composition was initially

structured to weigh student responses to multiple-choice questions as 60% of the score

and a timed writing section as 40%. This meant that students’ construction of prose

counted as only two-fifths of the students’ score on this composition exam. Based on

teacher feedback from practitioners like myself who sat on these development

committees, the Keystone Exam in Composition was ultimately restructured to include

greater emphasis on actual student writing.

Yet the kinds of writing tasks assigned on this assessment continue to be

prescriptive. For example, the psychometrically eligible content for this composition

exam includes eleven of twenty-nine descriptors that include versions of the phrase

“demonstrate the correct use of” and six of twenty-nine descriptors that include

characterizations of students’ abilities to “revise” appropriately. This suggests that both

the multiple-choice questions and the written responses will likely focus on issues of

grammatical and mechanical correctness, a conclusion confirmed by the Cut Scores

Committee facilitator from Data Recognition Corporation, the testing company

contracted by the Pennsylvania Department of Education to design, implement, and score

Keystone Exams.

This view of writing as a discrete, teacher-imposed skill rather than a student-

invested project presents an overly simplified view of writing. So while many educators

been made in them.”

8

who participated in the development of the Common Core State Standards may have

conceptualized writing as contextualized practice, the psychometricians who designed the

Keystone Exams translated these practices into de-contextualized skills for the purpose of

objectively assessing them. In this way, teaching in light of the standards may or may

not be rewarded on the Keystone Composition Assessment. In fact to ensure that

students are successful on the Keystone Exams, representatives from the Pennsylvania

Department of Education present at this particular Cut Scores Committee Meeting largely

encouraged districts to teach in light of the eligible content for the Keystone Exam. The

guiding principles supporting the Common Core State Standards are not necessarily

honored, instead their psychometric counterparts are. These reified conceptions of

composition more firmly entrench skill-based notions of writing within the classroom,

especially for the high school students in this study whose entire secondary school

experience had been shaped by a testing culture that began to take its current shape when

they were in the seventh grade.

Purpose of the Dissertation

If writing in academic contexts is widely perceived to be the acquisition of

discrete and measurable skills, what alternative framework for academic writing in high

school exists? Constructed as a practitioner inquiry, this dissertation describes and

analyzes how a group of twelfth grade students and I worked to challenge traditional

notions of academic writing by re-imagining a senior year English course as inquiry. In

the case of this research study, inquiry did not simply imply students posing or

9

responding to open-ended questions or adhering to a delineated sequence for engaging

with ideas and responding to them in writing. Instead, academic writing as inquiry

suggested the thoughtful, messy, and recursive engagement with ideas and experiences in

light of academic texts through student-driven creations of text informed by course

readings. It recognized that students write and read to accomplish particular ends that

shape and are, in turn, shaped by the discourse of a particular academic classroom in a

particular moment. It involved explicit attention on the part of both students and me, the

teacher, to the negotiation of positions students took and assertions students made in their

writing and thinking. Writing as a mode of inquiry, a phrase used by Richardson and St.

Pierre (2005), means students were invited to figure out what they wanted to write about

and then seek to understand why they wrote in the way they did and consider how this

impacts how they will write in the future. This means writing is not defined as a product

demonstrating content mastery of someone else’s imposed ideas. Instead, writing is a

project and process through which students question and engage with ideas meaningfully,

on their own terms, and then question the very terms of their engagement. In this way,

imagining academic writing as a mode of inquiry holds the potential to serve students’

purposes and interests.

Senior year in high school is an ideal space to deconstruct the normalized and

narrow notions of writing that often reinforce students’ positions as receivers of

classroom knowledge and teachers as disseminators of writing strategies. Liminally

positioned between high school and college, the context of the senior year provides a

space to question these fixed notions for four specific reasons: (1) Most students apply to

10

college during the first quarter of senior year; only grades from junior year and the first

semester of senior year are sent to the majority of colleges. With the prospect of grades

not weighing so heavily on students, they are often willing to take risks in their writing

and in their positioning of themselves as writers. They are more willing to move away

from the safe strategies for completing assignments that have served them throughout

their secondary careers. (2) Many students who have previously had great success in

assigned academic writing tasks find themselves struggling to respond to essay questions

on college applications. These struggles raise questions about how students represent

themselves and how they respond to open-ended questions when formulaic writing

structures employed to demonstrate content mastery are not useful in articulating an

original argument, an idea, or a position. (3) The senior year of high school in

Pennsylvania is largely absent of the high stakes testing that currently punctuates junior

year. For seniors, the SAT and state-mandated PSSA writing tests are complete and the

satisfactory completion of these assessments no longer guide school district required

classroom writing agendas. (4) Seniors wonder and worry about what writing and writing

assignments will look like in college. They know from friends who graduated previously

that writing in college is “different” than in high school but are unsure of how these

“differences” will impact their writing and how they position themselves as writers.

These four circumstances place seniors in a wonderfully empowering and simultaneously

overwhelming space where the rules of what is expected of them as writers can be re-

imagined, where writing as a mode of inquiry is possible.

11

Story of the Question

Teaching as an Inquiring Practitioner

This research interest emerged during the summer of 1998 when I became a

member of the Philadelphia Writing Project and as I began a Masters Program in

Reading/Writing/Literacy at the University of Pennsylvania that fall. At the time, I was a

second year teacher at a comprehensive urban public high school in North Philadelphia.

During the summer before I began the Masters Program, I developed my first

piece of teacher research grounded within the framework of practitioner inquiry as a

member of the Philadelphia Writing Project. My first practitioner inquiry question

—“How can difficult yet essential discussions of identity be opened through writing?”—

became the center of a 1999 Penn Ethnography Forum presentation. More importantly, it

raised questions about the way I taught and learned as a teacher in the secondary

classroom. This particular inquiry project coupled with my participation in a community

of teachers who valued this work positively disrupted my, until then unexamined, notions

of writing as a set of fixed skills, notions that I unquestioningly carried into my

classroom.

While I was introduced to the concept of inquiry-based pedagogy and curricula in

my undergraduate education classes, I did not internalize what it meant to engage in

inquiry until this point. This conception of inquiry shifted the frameworks that guided my

teaching practice. Because of this, I came to consider the possibilities for classrooms as

spaces where knowledge was constructed rather than as spaces where information was

12

disseminated. I attempted to honor the knowledge and experiences students brought to

the classroom as a way to understand text, not as an obstacle to understanding.

In the years that followed, my questions about writing, learning, and identity

formation continued to evolve. During the fall of 1999, I took my first Masters course, a

collaboratively taught, inquiry-based “methods course” framed by its “Greek root

methodos, meaning a following after or journey” (Lytle, Portnoy, Blackburn, Browne &

Staples, September 1999). This methods course did not focus on strategies for teaching;

it focused on developing a pedagogical framework that included a range of approaches to

guide instruction. This class marked the first time that I considered the distinction

between an educator’s implementation of strategies and an educator’s pedagogical

decisions informed by guiding frameworks, a distinction my fellow graduate students and

I came to understand through inquiring collaboratively into our understandings of

teaching and learning. The course was the first, but not the last, inquiry-based course I

would take at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2000 after a year of graduate coursework and two summers with the

Philadelphia Writing Project, I returned to the Penn Ethnography Forum to present a

different, yet related teacher research question: “What are the implicit messages about

writing that I send to my students and how do students make sense of these messages?” I

presented my findings about the differing expectations students and I brought to the

writing classroom. I shared my evolving understanding that writing is a source of power

and that strong writers possess a kind of agency because they create ways of

understanding and making sense of the world, dispositions that are valuable in adult life.

13

I suggested that writing well was personally and critically advantageous; writers had

access to ideas, people, and positions. Students understood this message, yet they wanted

me to give them this power or to tell them explicitly how to get it, as if writing prowess

were some object passed from teacher to student. The challenges students and I

encountered as we thought about writing, agency, and access suggested that students

wanted access to school and out-of-school success in and through writing, yet they feared

they would need to surrender parts of their identities to get achieve this access. I tried to

assure them they didn’t have to; they didn’t believe me.

After three years, I left the urban classroom and began teaching in a well-reputed

highly academic public high school in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. The classroom

context was very different: resources were abundant, student expulsions were rare,

lateness rather than truancy was the central problem of the attendance office, homework

completion was largely assumed, and parental involvement was extensive. But the

driving questions of my practice remained strikingly similar. Like Linda Cleary (1991), I

too wanted to know why “so many secondary students avoided, resisted, or even refused

to involve themselves in [the act of writing], an act that has so much potential for

satisfaction?” (p. 22). Over the next two years from 2001-2003, I crafted questions about

the practices of academic writing at work within my classroom. During this time, I

participated in project PorTRAIT, an acronym standing for “Practitioners or Teacher

Researchers as Inquiring Travelers,” an Arthur Vining Davis Foundation funded research

grant that provided for cross-country classroom visitations. During this time, John

Staunton, then a professor in English and Education at the University of Indiana, and

14

Gloria Reeves, then professor of Education at the University of Alaska, Joanne

Wisniewski, a Massachusetts middle school teacher, and I visited each others’ classrooms

and inquired into our own and each others’ practices. 3

My imaginings of collaborative inquiry models, defined as social contexts where

teachers and students learn from each other, begun in my engagement with the

Philadelphia Writing Project and furthered through my coursework at the University of

Pennsylvania, were again reshaped by this practitioner inquiry experience. During these

three years, I found my thinking about practitioner inquiry frameworks informed by

Britton’s (1987) notion of teaching as a “quiet form of research,” by Erickson’s (1986)

directive to “make the familiar strange” so student- and teacher-researchers can trouble

what is often taken for granted, by Geertz’s (1973/2000) anthropological emphasis on

“local knowledge,” by Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1993) understanding that teachers and

students co-construct teaching and learning, by Fine’s (1994) notion of “working the

hyphen” between teacher and researcher so that formal as well as practical knowledge

can be honored, and by Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1999) notion of knowledge-of-

practice. Over time, knowledge-of-practice frameworks, where “teachers make

problematic their own knowledge and practice as well as the knowledge and practice of

others and thus stand in a different relationship to knowledge,” became a central aspect of

my teaching (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 273). This framework informed my

“research pedagogy,” defined by Nichols (2008) as the reciprocal and mutually shaping

3 Some of my contributions to this inquiry were cited in John Staunton’s 2008 book Deranging English/Education: Teacher Inquiry, Literary Studies, and Hybrid Visions of “English” for 21st Century Schools, published by the National Council of Teachers of English.

15

nature of research and pedagogy. Within my classroom, students and I created

knowledge that informed my pedagogy and understanding of writing in complex and

dynamic ways.

As I taught, I continued to wrestle with my own teacher research questions

centering on how students came to see themselves as writers in academic contexts. In

2005, I assumed teacher-leadership positions within the school district, becoming a

member of both the Technology Mentor Program and Differentiated Instruction Cadre,

offering workshops, and providing mentoring and inquiry opportunities to colleagues in a

teacher-to-teacher format. In addition to this work, I continued to engage in my own

teacher-driven inquiries within the literacy-based classes I taught. I did this, not to be

published, but for the reason that most teachers engage in teacher inquiry: “to become a

better teacher” (Lytle, 2008).

I also continued to share insights and findings through presentations. I facilitated

a session entitled “How do writers in secondary classrooms work within and against the

constraints of school assignments?” during the PhilWP Celebration of Literacy in May of

2006. And in 2004 and 2007, I presented papers at two different teacher leadership

conferences on the integration of differentiated instruction frameworks, writing curricula,

and educational technology resources. Both presentations centered on the question: In a

digital age, how do students construct themselves as writers? Through these inquiries, I

found that students’ writing identities—the ways they made themselves known as writers

through the authorial choices they made—shifted from essay to essay as well as among

drafts of a single essay. There were moments during these inquiries when I thought I

16

understood why a particular student selected a specific topic or why they wanted to

rework a specific paragraph when the rest of the essay remained unrevised or why I

thought a particular student would find a specific assignment worthwhile. Each time, I

believed I had some kind of an answer, my questions about students’ writing and how

they represented themselves as writers became more complicated. These practitioner

inquires pushed me closer to what would become the research topic of my dissertation,

questioning how students’ identities were constructed within and through the process,

content, and context of academic writing.

During this same time, I continued my graduate studies at the University of

Pennsylvania, taking courses with Dr. Brian Street that positively troubled my

understandings of literacy and taking courses with Dr. Susan Lytle that informed my

understandings of inquiry and identities formation. As I structured my dissertation

research project, I drew heavily from my experiences with both of these professors,

especially the latter.

External Pressures on Pedagogy and Practitioner Inquiry

Yet a series of powerful and influential changes that would profoundly impact the

nature of my practitioner inquiry work and scholarly research were beginning to take

place within the larger context of education in the mid 2000s. The increased emphasis on

accountability and attainment of No Child Left Behind’s unattainable and unsustainable

Annual Yearly Progress goals seeped into the suburban high school where I taught. This

district, until recently, had remained largely unaffected by the rhetoric and sanctions of

17

the national education reform movement’s emphasis on accountability because of its high

overall test scores. Yet the district’s strikingly high aggregated test scores could not

cover gaps in achievement when data was disaggregated. The district found itself in the

unusual and precarious position of planning to remediate basic and below basic students’

achievement, especially within African-American and Special Needs students’ sub-

groups.

By 2007 a well intentioned, yet, in my view, deficit-centered emphasis was placed

on teacher implementation of scientifically-proven Response to Intervention Strategies

(RTI). New PASS (Pupils Achieving School Success) classes were taught by reading

specialists to assist “at risk” students. Math Labs were developed to remediate students

who scored basic or below basic on the PSSA. Achievement Teams were organized and

“at risk” students, who eventually came to be termed “not yet achieving” students, were

targeted for academic interventions. New protocols and programs were implemented to

allow for the remediation of special education students who were unsuccessful on

standardized or curricular measures. For the lowest achieving readers, scripted reading

programs like the Wilson Reading System (2009) were put in place in the high school.

These moves suggested that academic failure could be remedied by adopting a series of

explicit strategies. As a teacher and researcher, I worried that the more salient questions

about literacy, identity, student success, and academic engagement were left unexamined.

Along with the increased attention on remediation through increased academic

programming, the district heightened its emphasis on “data-driven instruction,” with the

implication that data would inform teachers as to which products and strategies would

18

best remediate at-risk or struggling students. Teachers in the English department were

trained to use data-management and aggregation applications like Performance Tracker

but were offered little time to make sense of voluminous amounts of data in light of

instruction or curriculum. For my colleagues and me, the potentially rich supply of

information about student achievement became a stream of numbers with which teachers

armed themselves to prove they were using appropriate strategies in meeting students’

needs. Interestingly in the majority of initial teacher trainings on data systems, I found

conversations of students’ needs were rarely discussed; instead, as a school we focused

on what students needed to do to meet the districts’ needs of attaining AYP.

During this time, I recall sitting in a parent-teacher-administrator meeting for a

student who was struggling on traditional measures of school success. As I sat in this

meeting, special education teachers and administrators shared PSSA scores, followed by

DRP scores, followed by PSAT scores. When one of the parents asked what these scores

meant, the response provided by a member of the team was that the student would be

placed in a program specially designed for him so that he could be more successful. I’m

not convinced this is the answer to the nuanced and complex question the parent asked.

Even more concerning, there was little time allocated during the official meeting for

teacher narratives about the students’ progress, strengths, and struggles, although there

were three classroom teachers, myself among them, who hoped to speak to this particular

child’s experience. These conversations occurred after the meeting officially concluded.

In the midst of this meeting, and others like it, about strategies to meet students’

needs, supposedly expert and objective knowledge generated by standardized tests

19

superceded the local knowledge of educators who engaged daily with the student. In this

and other comparable contexts, characterizing classroom contexts or students as deficient

yet remediable in terms of their literacy skills seemed more manageable than recognizing

classrooms and students as socially complex. As a teacher and a researcher, I often

witnessed the complexities of students and classrooms marginalized in light of objective

measures and de-contextualized research-based interventions.

By the point in my teaching and academic career when I began to formulate this

dissertation, I had characterized myself as practitioner who attempted to embrace inquiry

as a stance. Because of this, the institutional emphasis on objective measures of student

success created tension for me as a teacher and as a researcher building an inquiry-based

research project. The institutional position of the school seemed antithetical to my

practitioner inquiry stances because it “posit[ed] teachers as the recipients of other

people’s knowledge” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 11). In my estimation, the school

district’s well-intentioned systemic embrace of scientifically-proven models assumed

knowledge about what might best serve students was outside the classroom context.

Grounded in radically different set of assumptions from the knowledge-of-practice stance

embraced in practitioner inquiry, these protocols and programs reinforced a model, where

“good teachers” were “wise consumers of products and selectors of research-based

strategies to boost students’ achievement” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 11).

The negative impacts of education policy on practitioner inquiry—what Cochran-

Smith and Lytle (2009) describe as the focus on means not ends in education, the

reemergence of transmission models of teaching and learning, and the exclusionary view

20

of knowers and knowledge—impacted my own pedagogy and sense of inquiry by

narrowing both. This occurred even as I was aware and openly resistant to it. In many

ways the increased difficulty of working against these deficit models was my most

sobering challenge of the last ten years.

I was not the only one impacted by this. As a classroom teacher, I recognized that

these shifts seemed to have had a detrimental effect on many of the most hard-working

and inspiring teachers within my school and department. For many, curriculum came to

be viewed as a tangible thing rather than a guiding idea or framework. Largely divorced

from its etymological origins as a “running course/current,” curriculum assumed a more

autonomous sense of what must be covered in a course by a teacher instead of what

students acquire through deep engagement with a teacher, classmates, and course

resources. Deluged by externally-created curriculum packages and required common

activities, texts, and assessments, teachers, myself included, struggled to stay true to the

fact that a curriculum focuses on what students gain from learning contexts, rather than

what teachers give within learning contexts.

Some individual teachers, building-level administrators, and central office

administrators worked to counter this trend towards effacing the importance of

knowledge generated by students and teachers. For example, between 2004 and 2006, all

district English teachers in grades 7-12 were provided five school business days per year

to work together to vertically align curriculum. A curriculum coordinator who

understood the value in teachers uncovering, questioning, and articulating practices with

colleagues provided this dedicated time for intellectual and reflective collaboration

21

facilitated by and for teachers. This notion of learning with and from fellow

practitioners, what Susan Lytle (2008) describes as “the power of local practitioners to

pose the right problems and seek solutions in context,” marked a rich opportunity for

professional development and pedagogical reflection (p. 379).

As an English department, we reviewed Heidi Hayes Jacobs’ (2004) work on

“backwards mapping” and Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s (2005) work on

“understanding by design.” As we discussed these texts, competing foci for what was

valued in the school’s writing curriculum became evident. The department fractured,

with some members viewing curriculum as the articulation of what teachers would

present to a class and other members viewing curriculum as what students would learn

through the experience of class. For example, in the secondary English department,

many discussions largely centered on the tangible curricular resources to be used to teach

writing. In this vein, we devoted substantial portions of our collaborative time to

discussing and debating what explicit writing strategies would be taught instead of

working to articulate the literacy practices students would be invited to experience.

Conceptualized by some members of the department as the content taught to students,

curricular development became synonymous with listing the scope and sequence covered

in the course of a given school year and the common assignments that would be inspired

by engagement with these texts. Teachers in the department, myself included, who

embraced “inquiry as stance,” a phrase used by Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) to

describe inquiry as a worldview, found our ideas about curriculum out of alignment with

the dominant institutional view.

22

Yet even in this climate, “inquiry as stance” remained the subtle undercurrent of

the pedagogical and curricular work in my classroom; in many ways, it had to be an

undercurrent. The school faced the challenges arising from failing to meet AYP for the

first time, while simultaneously moving through five principals and two administrative

teams in seven years. Easily portable information about student achievement and teacher

responsibilities that fit neatly into grids, graphs, and data boxes became what was valued,

out of sheer necessity. So after a decade of looking deeply at students’ work and

inquiring with them about writing and how they saw themselves as writers, I found

myself falling away from some of the very dispositions underlying “inquiry as stance”

that had buttressed my prior teaching. Yet I realized I could use my dissertation as an

opportunity to re-engage myself in the kind of inquiry that has the power to influence

systems. This dissertation, then, was an opportunity for me to return to and solidify my

own inquiry stance, a worldview that continues to inform both how I teach and research.

Research Questions

The research question guiding this study is built upon a two-fold premise: (1) that

students’ identities as writers, like all identities, are constructed, complex, and fluid and

(2) that writers come to understand writing and themselves as writers deeply when they

recursively examine the writing practices they embrace. With these precepts at the

23

forefront, this dissertation was built on the foundation of my previous practitioner

inquires and sought to answer the following overarching research question: How do high

school seniors take up an invitation to explore writing as a mode of inquiry and, in light

of this invitation, how do they construct themselves as writers?

The sub-questions that follow framed the ways my research question was broken

into its component parts.

1. How do high school seniors take up the invitation to inquiry? What happens

when twelfth grade students are invited into inquiry stances regarding academic

writing, stances that work in opposition to fixed notions of academic writing that

exist in secondary school contexts?

2. How do twelfth grade students construct understandings of what it means to be

a writer? How do they construct writerly identities—that is

read/interpret/annotate assignments, develop questions, engage in writing

processes, and negotiate perceptions of audience and decisions around self-

representation?

3. How do high school seniors talk and write about writing outside of the

classroom context in light of their in-school experiences?

These component parts frame my data analysis chapters. Question 1 concerns itself with

students’ reaction to the curricular framing of an inquiry-based course and to students’

sense making of the notion of inquiry. Question 2, which is discussed across two data

analysis chapters, centers both on how students used annotation as a mode of inquiry as

well as how students engaged in inquiries into writing and what they uncovered through

24

these inquiries. Question 3 concerns itself with how students’ newly framed

understandings of inquiry and heightened awareness of constructed identities impacted

students’ writing practices inside and outside of the classroom.

Overview of the Dissertation

In Chapter 1, I have described the nexus of this research project in light of my

experiences as a teacher-researcher whose work is grounded in practitioner inquiry

frameworks. In the parlance of practitioner inquiry, it illuminated “the story of my

question.” The remaining chapters address the following:

Chapter 2, “Framing the Inquiry,” situates my work as a teacher-researcher within

the frameworks of and research grounded within socio-cultural theories of literacy,

research on composition pedagogy, digital literacies, and theories of third spaces,

especially as they apply to new literacies. In addition to offering an overview of the

empirical research that frames this work, the chapter also underscores gaps in the current

bodies of literature that this particular research study aims to address.

Chapter 3, “The Interwoven Nature of Research and Curriculum,” describes my

research methods and the inquiry curriculum that supported it. Framed as an inquiry into

writing, the curriculum ultimately invited students to read primary texts within the field

of literacy studies and the humanities and to develop their own inquiry projects around

topics of writing and writerly identity. These inquiry projects and the processes that led

to them underscore the complexly intertwined, and often entangled, nature of this

particular research design and the curriculum.

25

Chapter 4, “Initial Images of the Classroom,” describes the different ways that

students engaged and resisted invitations to the notion of inquiry and the possibilities of

writing as a mode of inquiry. It describes how, over the semester, this particular group of

students became more open to the possibilities of dialogic ways of thinking and learning

girding their experiences in an academic classroom.

Chapter 5, “Annotation as a Mode of Inquiry,” describes and analyzes particular

students’ initial dispositions towards annotation and how the practice of “talking back” to

scholarly texts challenged these initial dispositions.

Chapter 6, “Re-imagining Academic Writing,” describes the writerly moves

students made as they positioned themselves as writers, reflected on their previous

academic writing experiences, and engaged in their own inquires into writing. It

accomplishes this by detailing struggles, tensions, and successes of several focal students

as they read and wrote in response to excerpts from published scholars in the field of

literacy studies. Describing how students’ socially constructed themselves as writers and

how these constructions influenced the dynamic of the class.

Chapter 7, “Academic Writing Practices that Travel Outside of the Classroom,”

describes how students’ ever-evolving, self-representation as writers are made more

complex as they bridge home and school literacies. Unsolicited and unassigned by me,

several students re-imagined the purpose of academic assignments by making them

publicly available online or sharing them in various modes with people outside of this

particular class. This chapter details how these published and public texts expanded some

students’ conceptions of academic writing.

26

Chapter 8, “How and Why This Work Matters,” begins with a summary and

discussion of my research findings. The second part of the chapter examines my role as a

teacher engaged in practitioner inquiry within my own classroom. And the final part of

the chapter suggests implications of this practice, research, and policy.

27

Chapter 2

FRAMING THE INQUIRY

This chapter situates my work as a practitioner-researcher within multiple

intersecting theoretical and empirical frameworks. Among the theories in contemporary

literacy education that influence this work are: (1) socio-cultural approaches that

understand literacy teaching and learning as occurring in specific, local contexts (Street,

1984/2000; Barton & Hamilton, 2000); (2) socio-cultural notions of discourse underlying

the complex moves writers make (Gee, 2005/1999, 2001, 1996; Ivanic, 1998); (3) an

academic literacies orientation that conceptualizes student writing as ideologically

inscribed and socially situated (Lea & Street, 2006; Ivanic, 2004; Street,1999); (4)

compositionist research around writing pedagogy, particularly as imagined and enacted in

collegiate first-year and secondary school settings (Hillocks, 2006; Elbow, 2000;

Bartholomae 2002/1985; Bazerman, 1988; Bergman & Baker, 2006); (5) the theoretical

notion of liminality, enacted as “third spaces” in New Literacy Studies (Pahl & Roswell,

2005; Moje et al., 2004) and as “contact zones” in composition studies (Bryant, 2005;

Bizzell, 1994; Pratt, 1999/1991) and (6) the growing body of literature analyzing new

literacies and digital communication technologies (Alvermann, 2008; Knobel &

Lankshear, 2007).

These literatures illuminate deep insights about literacy practices and the

construction of writers’ identities. At the same time, they raise questions and point to

gaps in our understandings of students’ writerly selves within secondary-level academic

28

spaces. This review of theoretical foundations and empirical research positions my study

within current conversations about writer identities.

A Socio-cultural Theoretical Framework

In many academic settings, literacy is often viewed as a set of skills that can be

taught to and received by students. Evidence of this viewpoint is widespread in policy

and curriculum guidelines that frame literacy in terms of skills that are discrete and de-

contextualized or frame content as if it is neutral and uncontested. Troubling these overly

simplified conceptions of literacy, Street (1984, 1993) draws a distinction between

“ideological models of literacy,” which view literacy as socially constructed, and

“autonomous models of literacy,” which view literacy as sets of prescriptive skills. In an

ideological framing, literacy is viewed as situated, fluid, multiple, and continuously re-

imagined by individuals within specific contexts. In this way, what has come to be known

as the New Literacies Studies (NLS) disrupts the notion of a single “literacy,” replacing it

instead with the existence of “multiple literacies” (Street, 2000; Barlett & Holland, 2002;

Barton & Hamilton, 2000). This approach to literacy recognizes that “the ways in which

people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge,

identity, and being” (Street, 2006, p.4). It also recognizes the complex and diverse

literacy practices within local social contexts that might be viewed as illiterate under

skill-based frameworks (Street, 2007).

NLS theorists use the notions of “literacy events” and “literacy practices” to

describe and analyze these multiple literacies grounded in local contexts. The concept of

29

“literacy event” was first used by Heath (1983) to describe “any event in which

meaningful interaction around reading and/or writing takes place” (p. 386). Building

upon Health’s theoretical frame, Street (1984) drew a distinction between “literacy

events” and “literacy practices,” which focus on “social practices and conceptions of

reading and writing” (p. 1). Over time, this definition of “literacy practices” was

elaborated by Street (1998) to include literacy events in Heath’s sense as well as the

social understandings people bring to bear upon the events and that give meaning to

them. This means that literacy practices are more than a set of skills to be acquired in

order to function effectively within a particular community (Street, 2000). Literacy

practices include how individuals make sense of literacy events, as well as how social

contexts mediate, shape, and often prescribe interactions with and among texts (Barton &

Hamilton, 2000).

Gee (2005/1999, 2001, 1996) applies the linguistic concept of discourse to

explain this power of social contexts to create and shape meaning. He does this by

differentiating between discourse (with a lowercase d) and Discourse (with an uppercase

D). Gee (1996) argues that traditionally when linguists refer to discourse, they mean the

language in action in a given situation—words, gestures, expressions, and intonations—

that people use to convey information. But aware that these words, gestures, expressions,

and intonations do not exist in isolation, Gee (1996) asserts that interlocutors also

understand the social context that influences and is influenced by language in action. In

this sense, Discourse, the socially specific ways of using language in particular contexts,

acts as "a sort of 'identity kit' that comes complete with the appropriate costume and

30

instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that

others will recognize" (Gee, 2001, p. 56).

Ivanic (1998) critiques Gee’s differentiation between discourse and Discourse.

She argues that the distinction creates an artificial boundary between individual and

social ways of making meaning. Instead, she uses the single word “discourses” to refer

to both individual and well as social instances in much the same way that Street (1999)

uses “literacy practices” to refer both to individual literacy events and their broader social

context that provides them with meaning. In this dissertation, I follow Ivanic’s

interpretation of “discourses” and Street’s interpretation of “practices.”

Within New Literacy Studies, there are also researchers who theorize and study

literacy practices and the discourses that inform these practices as they specifically relate

to writing. Among the most prominent, Ivanic (1998) argues that writer identity is a

tripartite function of autobiographical self (what Bourdieu (1977) might call the habitus

of the writer’s socially constructed self), discursive self (which is how the

autobiographical self constructs him/herself as a character), and authorial self (which is

how the discursive self claims ‘authority’ in a writing task). Ivanic believes that writers

construct identities that allow them access to discourse communities, availing themselves

of “possibilities for selfhood” within that particular community (p. 32). Interactions with,

among, and in opposition to various discourses shape writer identity. Writing as an act of

identity is then “consolidated over time” (Burgess & Ivanic, 2010, p. 229).

Academic Literacies

31

A specialized area of study within New Literacy Studies, academic literacies

specifically explores the construction of writer identities within academic contexts.

Focused primarily on first-year college composition programs, academic literacies

research grew out of the opening of the academy to previously underserved student

populations in the United Kingdom. It primarily describes college students’ unfamiliarity

with and misunderstandings of the nature of university writing (Street, 1999).

As academic literacies scholars, Lea and Street (2006) argue that theoretical and

research paradigms largely conceptualize writing according to one of three models, as (1)

writing that privileges specific skills like the kind of writing many students achieve some

degree of mastery of during high school, (2) writing where students are socialized or

apprenticed into the discourse of a particular academic field, and (3) writing in the

tradition of academic literacies, where students recognize discourse conventions and

make purposeful decisions to work within or against them. Often referred to as skills-

centered, academic socialization, and academic literacies orientations respectively, each

model subsumes the one before it. This suggests that an academic literacies approach to

composition contains multiple levels of understandings as students would need to acquire

specific skills, internalize the conventions of a discipline, and make purposeful decisions

about aligning or conflicting with these conventions. To develop these deep rather than

surface understandings of writing as social, Russell, Lea, Parker, Street, and Donahue

(2009) suggest the need for college composition programs to become more “writing-

conscious” rather than singularly “writing intensive” (p. 405). In this way, students

would gain greater awareness of their own writing practices.

32

In some ways, this increased consciousness is also problematic. Consciousness

suggests awareness of but not necessarily an active engagement to improve pedagogical

or student understandings and practices. One of the most prevalent critiques of academic

literacies research is that its findings do not lead to actions that meaningfully impact

pedagogy or stance. Specifically, Lillis (2003) points out that this body of research offers

few pedagogical suggestions for moving from the recognition of taken-for-granted

practices to the formation of newly imagined practices.

In response to this critique, Lillis and Turner (2001) and van Rensburg (2006)

suggest the need for pedagogical designs that trouble the simple recognition and critique

of seemingly authoritative and objective stances in writing. Some research is moving

towards this aim. Lea (2004), Lillis (2003), and Beaufort (2007), for example, suggest

models for course designs with academic literacies orientations.

In recent years, some academic literacies researchers have studied academic

literacies in classroom contexts. Studying a first year college class, Burgess and Ivanic

(2010) found that in the act of reading, some students unconsciously considered how

they, as writers, would respond to a text. Thesen and vanPletzen (2006) found that

exposure to dominant mainstream literacy traditions limited particular students’

willingness to adopt academic literacies orientations within a university setting. Ivanic

and Satchwell (2007) found when some of the out-of-school literacy practices of a select

group of adult university students, especially questioning and problem-solving practices,

were networked to academic literacy practices, these particular students were more

successful in academic contexts. These findings suggest that academic literacies

33

orientations hold the potential to positively shape the nature of writing pedagogy and

practice in university settings. Yet these findings, in my view, remain largely

marginalized within many college composition models, especially those whose stated aim

is to improve students’ writing skills.

Additionally practitioner inquiry tangentially informs the body of academic

literacies research, as many practitioners informed by academic literacies scholarship

study their own classrooms. Fecho and Green (2002) analyzed the multiple identities one

student assumed as he used writing to make sense of the chaos of his life. Greco’s (1999)

teacher-research found that formulaic writing provided a sense of security to several

young women who termed themselves good writers. Shiroff’s (2009) engagement with a

National Writing Project teacher-inquiry group found his inquiry processes when

introducing new technologies helped these students meaningfully apply classroom

lessons to their own reading and writing practices. This research grounded in the

experience of local teachers is compelling. It offers rich local knowledge of practice

within specific contexts and uses this local knowledge to impact the larger discussion of

writing and identity.

Unfortunately, a pervasive belief attached to practitioner research—that it is only

useful to the practitioner generating the inquiry—prevents these valuable pieces of

empirical research from being more widely read. And when these practitioner inquiries

are read, the perceived “limits of the local” often allows readers “to conclude that literacy

when it happens is only particular and locally situated” (Brandt & Clinton, 2002). In

these two ways, practitioner inquiries into academic literacies are sometimes viewed by

34

teachers with a doubting stance, best described in the question: “That’s a great

description of your classroom, but how does it help me in mine?”

Additionally, practitioner research is not generally widely shared among teachers,

aside from those who already believe in the stances the research advocates. Shirnoff’s

findings were shared within the National Writing Project community. Greco’s work was

published in English Journal. Fecho and Green’s work appeared in the Harvard

Educational Review. These are not publishing venues the majority of practicing

classroom teachers encounter on a regular basis. Teachers who publish within and

consult these venues hold stances in alignment with the publication; teachers whose

stances might be positively complicated or broadened by these findings do not often seek

them out.

Lastly, research grounded in academic literacies models is sometimes not trusted

by practitioners, especially those who see the research as unjustly critiquing or failing to

account for the complexities of secondary classroom settings. Some university-based

researchers like Donahue (2005) and Samuelson (2009) assumed academic literacies

stances in their research methodology yet conducted their research within secondary

school contexts that utilized skills-based models of writing. Unsurprisingly the studies

found that the high school seniors participating in the respective studies constructed and

represented their writing selves through the patterns of reproduction, reprise, invention,

and modification and ventriloquation respectively. In their research findings, these high

school seniors were described as trapped within static and limited ways of writing

because of their teachers’ embrace of skills-centered writing models. The difference in

35

institutional orientation towards writing between these particular university researchers

and the secondary teachers whose classrooms they studied lead to a deficit view of these

high school writers and teachers. Unfortunately this way in which university-based

research can be perceived as talking down, misreading, or misrepresenting secondary

educators often closes down dialogue among teachers and university-based researchers

regarding new research findings and theoretical understandings.

Research on Composition Pedagogy and Student Writing Practices

The body of research on composition in high school writing contexts also

informed this study. In his quasi-experimental study of academic writing from 1963-

1983, one of the few longitudinal studies of composition in secondary settings, Applebee

(1984) found that in school during this time period, little time was devoted to writings

longer than one paragraph, activities to engage students in writing were largely non-

existent, little attention was given to writing context or audience, and writing was largely

viewed as a series of discrete skills (as cited in Hillocks, 2006).

In twenty-seven years since Applebee’s study, “the social turn”, marked by a

movement towards socio-cultural frameworks, has dramatically altered the trajectory of

research on and practices of secondary writing. In essence, the social turn moved writing

research pedagogy from its cognitive origins with an emphasis on individual student

processes, as evidenced in the research of Elbow (1973/1998), Emig (1971), and

Shaughnessy (1977) to more social frames (Durst, 2006; Prior, 2006).

Contrary to previous constructions of writing and reading as individual and

private acts, research and pedagogy in the mid 1980s began to focus on the importance of

36

the classroom as a social context. The mediating role of talk and reading in writing

processes and the ways students constructed themselves as writers became guiding

concepts. In this vein, Dyson (1987) focused on the integral role of talk in the composing

processes of young children. Hull and Rose (1989) documented the complex knowledge

students who were deemed unsuccessful or under-prepared brought to writing tasks. In

their study of high school writers, Smagorinsky and Smith (1992) found that high school

students both wrote to learn and wrote to be read. Smagorinsky (1997) also found that

students become writers via a circular and recursive path of coming to participate in a

given discourse community through a combination of explicit instruction, lived

experiences within this particular discourse community, and express opportunities to

make the community’s discursive norms the writer’s own. Langer (2002) found that high

performing teachers and students adopted a generative approach to writing. These

research findings suggest the ways teachers and researchers theoretically understood and

framed writing were fundamentally different than what Applebee described at work in

classroom during the 1970s and early 1980s.

The implications of this research changed secondary writing instruction in the late

1980s and 1990s in some powerful and positive ways. Marked by an overall difference

in how teachers approached writing instruction, high school teachers now regularly

assigned multi-paragraph compositions, provided writing scaffolds, devoted classroom

time to talk about writing and peer critique, and invited students to consider audience and

purpose when writing (Hillocks, 2002). Assessments of students’ writing shifted to the

holistic scoring of complete writing samples, with less emphasis on, although not an

37

absence of, de-contextualized questions of usage and grammar prevalent in the 1970s

(Hillocks, 2006). Compared to the early 1980s, students wrote more often and in more

varied academic contexts, including in disciplines outside of language arts classes,

generating new knowledge with each writing engagement (Galbraith, 1999).

Yet in other ways, high school writing practices and pedagogies remained

unchanged; the “social turn” has not fully translated into secondary pedagogical

practices. Johnson, Smagorinky, Thompson, and Fry (2003) found teachers and students

did not necessarily develop conceptual frameworks for writing, relying instead on highly

specified strategies and adherence to rigid forms. Helmers (1994) found that classroom

pedagogy and assessment practices largely emphasized discrete and measurable

components and assessed pieces of writing in terms of a text’s deficiencies. Literal

interpretations and repetitions of class discussion continued to be rewarded in academic

writing (Anagnostopoulos, 2003). Students continued to use formulaic structures like the

five-paragraph essay to complete, but not necessarily learn from, writing tasks (Johnson

et al, 2003; Hillocks, 2002). Even holistic writing assessments used to evaluate students’

writing, which were designed to break away from the rigidity of multiple-choice

composition exams, focused on the demonstration of measurable, observable skills that

could be objectively measured by those scoring the writing pieces (Huot & Neal, 2006).

This suggests two simultaneous yet contradictory sets of secondary writing

practices. One situated secondary writing as guided by socio-cultural frameworks; the

other situated secondary writing as guided by a skills-based framework.

38

Secondary and Post-Secondary Divide

A divide existed not only among secondary writing orientations but also between

secondary and post-secondary writing models. This divide between secondary and post-

secondary writing models makes the discussion of research findings even more complex.

In the 1970s and 1980s, conversations about writing research, instruction, and pedagogy

in secondary and post-secondary settings, though far from singular, occurred in different

parts of the same very large house. Emig, who was a high school teacher, was cited by

Elbow, a college professor. Applebee and Smagorinsky, who researched in high school

settings, cited college compositionists like Bartholomae and Bazerman and vice versa.

In the simplest terms, the body of writing research included secondary and post-

secondary voices who read and cited each other. Current conversations about writing

research and pedagogy do not exist in the same house. Instead they exist in four separate

houses: secondary writing guided by socio-cultural models, secondary writing guided by

skill-based models, college writing guided by remediation models, and college writing

guided by socio-cultural models.

I begin by looking at the fissure between secondary and post-secondary

conversations about writing. In the 1980s, college composition moved toward the New

Rhetoric. College-level compositionists like Bartholomae (2002/1985) argued that

students “invent the university” each time they wrote and Bazerman (1988) argued that

the meaning created in a particular text is a function of how writers choose to represent

ideas in writing. These frameworks shifted attention from evaluations of how people

should write to a focus on descriptive questions about what writers did write and how

39

they came to write it. These frameworks evolved over the next decade, as further

research suggested that understanding is constructed within discourse communities as

writers created rather than discovered knowledge using forms and content that are

continually re-negotiated (Bartholomae, 1996; Elbow, 2000).

These understandings emerged and evolved because compositionists devoted time

and resources to the explicit researching of composition, which became a field onto itself

(Bergmann & Baker, 2006).4 I argue that this research emphasis in the field of college

composition and the findings generated largely separated college-level writing curricula

and research from high school writing curricula and research. The study of research on

writing diverged into separate conversations: one in which high school teachers

participated and one in which college compositionists participated. In these separate

conversations, high school teachers widely, yet erroneously, came to be viewed as

technicians while college-level writing instructors held the relatively higher status of

generators of knowledge about students’ writing practices and teachers’ pedagogy. I

argue that this fractured the once common theoretical and research trajectories of research

into writing in high school and college settings. This fissure was widened as the

development of high school writing programs shifted from understanding what students

do as they write to ensuring commonality in how teachers taught students to write. While

composition was widely researched and theorized within the university, writing was

largely being constructed as a rote, de-contextualized task in high school settings. 4 The relationship between literature and composition scholars within university English Departments is largely contentious. Many writing teachers and researchers see composition framed as the stepchild of university English Departments, which view their central aim as the teaching of literature. More on this topic is detailed in Composition and/or Literature: The End(s) of Education, edited by Linda S. Bergmann and Edith M. Baker and published by the National Council of Teachers of English in 2006.

40

In high school settings, skills-driven, deficit-centered, remediation models

increasingly overshadowed the social nature of writing. This was highlighted in the

growing body of university composition research. In the mid-1980s, projects like the 6 +

1 Trait rubric developed by the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory attempted to

establish criteria for the direct testing of writing (Hillocks, 2006). This created a legacy

of blending assessment based on autonomous models of literacy with instruction based on

ideological models of literacy.

This blended legacy is evident today in both The Pennsylvania State System of

School Assessment (PSSA) Writing Test and the Writing Section of the SAT. Both the

PSSA domain rubric and SAT writing rubric resemble the 6 + 1 Trait rubric and include

standardized criteria to efficiently measure and report both school and student writing

proficiency. The College Board’s 2006 writing section of the SAT rewards competencies

that can easily and consistently be scored, emphasizing the reliability of test scores as a

ranking and sorting device while minimizing the role of argumentation, idea formation,

and interpretation in both the writing process and products of individual students.

This is juxtaposed to the fact that Pennsylvania Department of Education (2007)

included on its PSSA website ideologically-grounded instructional practices designed by

Pennsylvania Writing Projects and a handbook written by Andrea Fishman (2007), the

Director of the West Chester Writing Project. In the same vein, the College Board (2006)

suggested that the required 20-30 minute impromptu writing task on the SAT had the

pedagogical value of emphasizing analytical writing in school contexts,

a contention that Baron (2005) refutes. In both of these cases, the way

41

students’ work is assessed is in contrast to the way writing instruction is framed. These

conflicting literacy models explain the prominence of the widely held, albeit erroneous,

belief that highly contextualized academic writing can be objectively scored based upon

pre-determined criteria (Broad, 2003).

The belief that writing is neutral and able to be objectively assessed based on a

breakdown of its component parts dominates current educational policy and curriculum.

Reports by the Pennsylvania Governor’s Commission on College and Career Success

(2006), National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges

(2006, 2003) and the National Commission of the High School Senior Year (2001) use

seemingly objective writing scores to drive educational policy by suggesting a crisis in

terms of students’ writing abilities. According to reports by these three commissions,

secondary students leave high school without the necessary writing skills to compete in

the global workplace. Specifically, the National Commission on Writing for America’s

Families, Schools, and Colleges (2006) recommended a focus on remediating students’

writing skills so that they will be successful on future writing assignments. It suggests

that “all prospective teachers, no matter their discipline, should be provided with courses

in how to teach the skill of writing” and “best practices in writing assessment should be

more widely replicated” (p. 2). Evidencing the same blending of assessments based on

autonomous models of literacy with instruction based on ideological models of literacy,

this same report later suggests that today’s students will be asked to write in contexts not

yet invented and successful 21st century writers will be able to move in and out of various

discourses in ways that can not be readily assessed.

42

As fixed skill-based assessments of academic writing became increasingly

institutionalized in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, a growing recognition of the

social construction of knowledge continued on the local levels of classrooms. Cochran-

Smith and Lytle (2009, 1993) continued to assert that teachers’ inquiry into classroom

practice generated unique and useful knowledge about literacy. Fecho, Allen, Mazaros,

and Inyega (2006) highlighted the important work of practitioner research that was being

written, read, and shared through teacher inquiry communities. This practitioner research

supported classroom teachers’ pedagogy and inquiry as it ran counter to the fixed notions

of writing inherent in the movement towards skill-based assessment measures for writing.

Additionally socio-cultural models of literacy were emerging more prominently in

research, providing a counter-narrative to the emphasis on discrete, testable writing skills.

In fact, research grounded in a social practices view of literacy underscored the powerful

ways that high school teachers and students understand secondary writing. For example,

a study by Rex and McEachen (1999) found that when high school students in a

particular class were offered a scaffolded invitation to think about what it means to be a

reader and writer, they made significant gains in their own reading and writing. Sperling

and Woodlief (1997) found that when a teacher underscored the dynamic nature of

discourse within the classroom, students questioned previously internalized assumptions

and falsely-assumed monolithic expectations of writing. When a classroom teacher

invested time in collaboratively negotiating the content that students wrote about, rather

than dictating the form they would write in, students questioned more deeply, read more

closely, and wrote more convincingly (Potter, McCormick, & Busching, 2001). In their

43

case study of three high school students, Haneda and Willis (2000) concluded that

problematizing the static conceptions of discourse and writer increased the students’

repertoire of writing strategies and increased their learning of content and their

confidence and command of writing skills. Smagorinsky and O’Donnell-Allen’s (2000)

study of an English class’ creation of a democratic discourse community illustrated the

complexity of negotiating the social context of an academic classroom and the writing

that takes place within it. Each of these empirical studies found that secondary teachers

and students understood writing in complex and socially constructed ways.

So if this body of research exists, why has it not more profoundly altered the ways

academic writing is socially constructed in high school contexts and within secondary

assessments? Barton and Hamilton (2005) offer two explanations. First they suggest that

literacy practices exist in “textually-mediated social worlds,” where over time literacy

practices become reified and then influence the dynamics of communities of practice and

social networks. Second, they argue that a kind of “irreversibility” exists. This means

the prominent and unquestioned appearance of literacy as concrete and fixed normalizes

this conception of literacy, so much so that it falsely appears neutral and natural rather

than socially constructed. This helps to explain why elements of autonomous models of

literacy persist in schools when socio-cultural research suggests the necessity of

pedagogical stances to the contrary. Institutional and pedagogical change would involve

recognizing literacy practices in light of socio-cultural frames. This would challenge the

seemingly innate authority granted to schools to define literacy as a skill, a “thing” that

can be both measured and controlled.

44

Liminality: Third Spaces and Contact Zones

The theoretical notion of liminality, enacted as “third spaces” in New Literacy

Studies (Pahl & Roswell, 2005; Moje, 2007) and as “contact zones” in composition

studies (Bryant, 2005; Bizzell, 1994; Pratt, 1999/1991), describes the positive and

productive spaces of tension and multiplicity where students and teachers belong to two

conflicting social contexts or embody two competing identities, and in being part of both

belong wholly to neither. This concept is useful as writers imagine writing practices and

writerly identities outside of the narrowly defined conceptions of writing that school

contexts typically afford them (Pahl & Rowsell, 2005; Moje, et al., 2004). But students

cannot simply step out of skills-centered contexts and into ones framed by academic

literacies as if they were crossing some physical threshold. Yet by bringing the literacy

practices associated with academic writing into conversation with students’ out-of-school

writing practices, teachers can honor what the students themselves bring to act of writing.

In this way, academic writing holds the potential to become a contested third space that

“hybridizes” the notion of writing in academic contexts with writing for students’ own

purposes (Street, 2003, p. 4). Academic writing, then, can be constructed in light of the

context of the classroom and the literacy practices it honors, including previous

experiences students bring to this context and their out-of-school literacy practices. This

recognition of the dialogic nature of local and larger contexts, where school and home

literacies hybridize, provides a vehicle to discuss the more practical applications of socio-

cultural models of writing.

45

In a complimentary conception of hybridity, some compositionists utilize the

metaphor of the “contact zone,” conceived by comparative literature scholar Mary Louise

Pratt (1999/1991) as the space where “cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other,

often in the context of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (p. 34). In this sense,

contact zones are not stable in-between places, but are contested, marked by the tensions

and discomforts. Yet as divergent and dissonant cultural practices rub against each other,

they invite new ways of thinking and make new literacies possible. Applying the theory

of the contact zone to composition studies creates new possibilities for the writing

classroom. Specifically, the interactions and possible tensions between home and school

literacies potentially lead to deeper understandings and more meaningful student writing.

Bryant (2005) echoes this possibility. Viewing discursive tensions as both uncomfortable

and generative, her case studies describing the development of academic voice among

college undergraduates suggest that the students she studied crafted effective academic

arguments only after they grappled with the tensions between personal and academic

voice.

Third spaces allow for the creation of newly imagined possibilities inside the

classroom where discourses are constructed in service of and in opposition to writer

identities and discourse communities present within the classroom. These writer

identities and communities are dialogically established, meaning that discourses and

identities shape other discourses and identities in dynamic ways often resulting in hybrids

of both. These interactions lead individual writers to participate in writing communities

influenced by competing discourses, an adaptation of Bahktin’s (1981) notion of

46

heteroglossia. The classroom discourse community, then, is a site where meaning can be

created and contested, not simply shared or imparted. It is a site where conventions and

expectations are negotiated, often implicitly, and not simply acquired through practice,

apprenticeship, socialization, or direct instruction.

Digital Literacies

Digital communication technologies have become increasingly central to our

lives. There has been a rapid shift in literacy practices from page to screen (Lankshear &

Knobel, 2006). Print is no longer the dominant form of communication and expression

(Lewis & Fabos, 2005). This shifts the ways writers interact in daily life and profoundly

impacts how we understand and create texts (Dresang, 2005).

Knobel and Wilber (2009) suggest that three interlocking online literacy practices

—participation, collaboration, and distribution—hold the potential to redefine the ways

readers and writers use, respond to, and create texts by challenging schools’ traditional

view of text creation as the product of an individual mind. In this way new literacies are

participatory and collaborative. Web 2.0 technologies, where readers and writers are

personally and socially responsible to collaborate and share texts with other members of

an online community, upend the notion of individual authorship.

As students participate and collaborate in digital spaces, they hold increased

power in how they will be represented. More specifically, students who are viewed as

remedial using autonomous models of literacy have been shown to flourish when the

definition of literacy expands to include digital literacies. For example, Kirkland (2008)

47

finds that a struggling writer by school standards created prolific content in his MySpace

page. Vasudevan (2010) finds that court-involved youth integrated practices like

downloading, recording, and taking digital photographs with autobiographical writing

practices often taught in school, producing powerful hybrid texts and, even more

importantly, coming to identify themselves as writers. These research findings suggest

that many students’ writing identities can only be understood when both out-of-school

and digital contexts are considered.

Studying how learning is accomplished in participatory online spaces also holds

the potential to powerfully shape classroom practice (Alvermann, 2008; Hagood, 2008;

Moje, 2007). These new literacies span multiple contexts—education, family, leisure,

private, public, work— and are embedded practices in students’ lives (Coiro, Knobel,

Lankshear, & Leu, 2008). This suggests the possibility of fluidity and connection

between in-school and out-of-school literacy practices and of digital extensions to the

traditional classroom informing literacy practices for formal and informal, personal and

academic purposes.

As a teacher, I recognize digital technologies as potential sites for new literacies

within classroom contexts. Yet not all digital spaces are sites of new literacies.

Lankshear and Knobel (2006) find that the presence of “technical stuff” in a classroom—

electronic message boards, course management software, electronic communications—

did not necessarily evidence of new literacies because “it is possible to use new

technologies to simply replicate long standing literacy practices” (p. 7). Instead the “new

technical stuff” needs to involve different “ethos stuff,” where literacy practices are more

48

participatory and collaborative (p. 9). Unfortunately, this increased emphasis on 21st

century skills is sometimes interpreted by teachers as little more than showing students

how to do the same things they have always done but by using a computer. For students

on the other hand, the increased emphasis on 21st century technologies holds the

possibility for different kinds of engagements with text and with others.

The increased presence of digital communication technologies in students’ lives,

both inside and outside of school, has created both new possibilities and potentially new

issues in classrooms. Specifically teachers and students often bring competing

understandings of digital literacy practices to classroom spaces and may interact with and

generate text in fundamentally different ways. Lankshear and Knobel (2008) assert that

students, accustomed to reading hyperlinked, electronic texts, interact with text more

textured ways while their teachers largely negotiate text as linear (Lankshear & Knobel,

2008). These competing understandings can be fostered on both the classroom and

institutional level. For example, Leander (2007) found some schools not only distinctly

categorized school online practices as different from out-of-school practices but also

worked hard to maintain these as distinct and separate spaces. In several schools where

these kinds of institutional boundaries were constructed, O’Brien and Scharber (2008)

found that teachers were more likely to view online literacies as optional add-ons rather

than vital components of students’ experiences. Additionally, Alvermann (2002) and

Wilber (2008) found some teachers largely viewed digital literacies as a distraction to

content coverage and worked to minimize their impact within the classroom. This

suggests that some students and teachers used digital resources to reach the same

49

traditional ends. As these research findings demonstrate, students’ multifaceted literate

worlds and out-of-school literacy practices are often routinely marginalized in their in-

school experiences and many practicing teachers have few theoretical or pedagogical

resources upon which to draw to navigate this divide.

Why Multiple Theoretical Frames?

One single theoretical framework rarely informs the acts of teaching and

researching. Understandings from each of these bodies of literature inform this

dissertation in the same way that my multiple perspectives as a practicing teacher, a

graduate student, a participant on the Keystone Set Scores Committee, and a member of a

practitioner inquiry community have done. In this way, I am positioned complexly as a

practitioner and researcher at the intersection of these experiences and literatures.

As I describe these, it is also important to remember that theoretical frameworks

and research-based understandings are never simply adopted into practice or scholarship;

they are always adapted, informed by and informing each other. While each of these

research and theoretical bodies of knowledge contribute to my teaching and researching

orientation, they are deeply interconnected in ways that are largely impossible for me to

parse. I cannot situate myself as an inquiring practitioner without recognizing the

multiple and varied literatures that inform my framing of literacy, writing, and identity. I

cannot describe and analyze students’ writing and identities without recognizing my own

positions and orientations.

50

Chapter 3

THE INTERWOVEN NATURE OF RESEARCH, TEACHING, AND

CURRICULUM

This dissertation is a focused look at students’ understandings of the notion of

inquiry as well as their practices and written products in crafting their own inquiries into

writing. This research study was designed to explore how the particular twelfth-grade

students participating in this inquiry curriculum constructed themselves as writers in light

of these two experiences.

For the purpose of this study, I re-imagined a traditional senior year English

course as an inquiry. In this vein, the inquiry curriculum that I designed attempted to do

four things: (1) to raise questions about and unsettle taken-for-granted positions about

academic writing and writers in high school settings, (2) to make explicit the social

nature of literacy in general and of writing in particular, (3) to invite students to

understand the notion of inquiry, and (4) to orchestrate a pedagogical space where

students themselves participate in an inquiry into writing.

Through this re-imagining of their senior English course, twenty-six students

were invited to inquire with me, as acts of teaching and learning, both theirs and mine,

were interconnected. In this way, the curricular aims of the course intertwined with the

aims of my research. Therefore the purpose of this chapter is to make clear the research

methods as they overlapped with the curricular goals of this particular English 4 course.

51

Contextualizing the School

This kind of research project and inquiry curriculum required a classroom context

where writing and idea generation could be viewed as social, constructive processes. In

the high school where I taught and researched such a perspective was not the institutional

norm at the time this research was conducted.

Best described as traditional, this affluent, predominately white, suburban

Philadelphia high school where I taught and researched was academically strong in terms

of its reputation. The school was highly successful and often characterized itself based

on its high school rankings and standardized test scores. In the spring of 2008, the school

district’s home page touted its 2005 Wall Street Journal ranking as among the top sixty

high schools in the nation, public or private. Other points of pride included: the school

consistently had graduation rates at or near 100% and the vast majority of the senior

class, including every student in this particular class, planned to attend a four-year

college. The high school’s standardized writing test scores were among the best in the

state, with over 90% of students characterized as either advanced or proficient on the

PSSA writing test. On the 2006 PSSA writing tests, 18.6% and 71.9% of eleventh grade

students scored at the advanced and proficient scores levels respectively (Pennsylvania

Department of Education, 2007). On the 2007 PSSA writing tests, 21.9% and 75.7% of

eleventh grade students scored at the advanced and proficient scores levels respectively

(Pennsylvania Department of Education, 2008)5. As juniors, twenty-seven members the

5 I include these scores in my contextualization of the setting because this is how the high school most often describes itself. I see the school setting as much more complex than simply its standardized test

52

graduating class of 2008 were recognized as National Merit Finalists and Semi-Finalists

based on PSAT test results including two students who participated in this study.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer Report Card on Schools, the average SAT scores

in writing for this graduating class were 572 out of 800. This high school was often

compared to the elite private schools that surrounded it, a reputation upon which the high

school and school district prided itself.

In an attempt to minimize the academic pressures felt by students in the school’s

culture of high achievement, the high school began experimenting with what it dubbed a

more student-centered schedule in 2007; the previous bell schedule was a traditional eight

period schedule. Under this previous schedule, many students scheduled themselves into

eight academic classes, giving themselves no time for lunch or to meet with teachers. In

the 2007-2008 school year, a rotating eight period schedule was implemented. It required

every student to have a lunch period and thirty minutes at the end of the day for

Academic Recovery where they could meet with a teacher for review, for enrichment, or

to make-up work.

Under this new schedule, the English 4 course whose students participated in my

study met three out of every four days during the final fifteen weeks of school from

January through June. The class met for one 45-minute period, one 53-minute period,

and one 78-minute period and the time of day that each class met varied based on a

rotating schedule. To accommodate the longer class periods, the Academic Recovery

period, and the rotating schedule, students attended a different academic class on the

scores.

53

fourth day of the teaching cycle. In addition to the pressure reducing effects, the

schedule was also meant to combat the cumulative effects of late arrivals or lack of

engagement in the first period of the day and the negative effects of early dismissals,

especially for athletics, during afternoon classes. The schedule, which was only in place

for two years, created a general sense of arrhythmia for students and teachers and was

abandoned in 2009, the year after data collect for my study concluded.

Like the schedule, the school was also in a state of change during this

dissertation’s data collection period. In the spring of 2008, the school had its third new

principal in five years, and a new superintendent was hired that April. A fourth new

principal would begin in the fall of 2009, just as the school ushered in a yet another new

bell schedule and began to change the district grading policy and assignment of guidance

counselors. Throughout 2008, the role of department chairs was changed, becoming

seemingly more administrative.

Instructionally, teachers were directed to create course maps, outlining content

covered during each month, with the eventual goal being the creation of common course

assessments. Portions of faculty meetings were devoted to sharing best practices, defined

as the instructional strategies that worked for conveying content knowledge to students.

Within this climate, inquiry, when invoked, was defined as a series of delineated steps in

which students engaged for the purpose of problem solving. Teacher leadership and

inquiry groups like the Differentiated Instruction Cadre and Technology Mentors were

disbanded and the emphasis on objective data-driven instruction and assessment, while

always relatively important, intensified.

54

In many ways, the high school could best be described as making strides that were

out of rhythm. The language we as a school used to talk about instruction and pedagogy

—inquiry, student-centered, rigorous—contained all the right terms as suggested in

progressive educational research. Yet in some ways we, as a school, took up those terms

in ways that ran counter to their sense in research and theory. For example, during the

spring of 2008, I was a member of the Differentiated Instruction Cadre, a group of fifteen

teacher-leaders from across the district committed to the principles of meaningful

constructivist education and inquiry. As a group, we were a hybrid of staff development

facilitators and a teacher inquiry group. In this dual role, we read Tomlinson’s (2003)

Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom. In chapter five, “Curriculum and

Instruction as the Vehicle for Addressing Student Needs,” Tomlinson invokes Erickson’s

(2002) argument about imagining curriculum in terms of “uncoverage” rather than

coverage. The chapter includes the following citation.

As knowledge and information grow at an unprecedented rate, it becomes increasingly clear that “coverage” is an impossible educational goal. Rather the aim of education must be to help students understand the frames of meaning in the disciplines, how to ask useful questions, and how to use information effectively and efficiently.

After we read and discussed Erickson’s ideas as an inquiry group, we took these ideas of

“curriculum as uncoverage” back to our respective schools. In my case, these ideas were

placed within the context of the high school’s then current discussion of best practices,

curriculum mapping, and common assessment of course content. This created for me a

deep tension that was, in contrast, regarded by my principal as a mere difference in

semantics. That tension remained largely unrecognized within the institutional context

55

of the school, although it was becoming increasingly more evident among some

individual teachers.

Contextualizing the Classroom

This classroom contained an array of instructional and technological resources. A

three-hundred volume classroom library supplemented the class sets of literary works

stored in this particular classroom’s book closets. An array of supplies ranging from

post-its to highlighters to glue sticks was available daily for students’ use. In addition to

print and stationary resources, the classroom contained a lightware projector, my teacher

laptop, an airliner, portable speakers, a document camera, and twenty-seven wireless

laptop computers with internet access and the ability to print to an in-classroom laser

printer. Each student had a network account, student folder, and access to multiple paid

electronic databases such as JStor, ProQuest, and Electric Library. The school district

also purchased site licenses and provided technical support for teachers to use Quia,

Turnitin.com, Waypoint, and Atomic Learning and required the use of e-board by all

faculty. Teacher gradebooks and attendance were recorded electronically, and students

and parents had daily access to these records via the district’s website. The district was

in the process of piloting Moodle, course-management software, during this time period

as well. I volunteered to be one of the teachers who used this resource within my

classroom.

56

Within my classroom, electronic modes of communication were integral to the

inquiry curriculum; they were another way members of the class talked to each other.

When working on assignments, students collaborated in oral conversation as well as on

electronic forums. As students drafted or completed written assignments, they shared

these pieces with an audience larger than just the teacher by posting electronically to e-

boards and/or google.docs. Additionally students’ texts were read aloud, posted on the

brick and mortar bulletin board, posted electronically on e-board, posted electronically on

google.doc, or shared in some other electronic forum. Students were invited to share

their ideas and their writing; they were expected to be both intellectually and socially

responsible to the work of the course and to each other.

The physical space of the room was arranged to build a community of inquiry, as

well. This was something especially important to me in light of the institutional culture

that largely privileged content coverage. Flanked by eight ten-foot windows, the

classroom was flooded with sunlight during almost every period of the day, keeping it

warm in the winter and very warm in the spring and fall. The walls were filled with chart

paper illustrations of lines of poetry and group work report outs. Bulletin boards

contained students’ recent student work awaiting a larger audience who would comment

on the posted papers with sticky or marginal notes.

The desks that one would expect to see in a high school classroom were absent.

In their place were thirteen tables that formed a large rectangle with chairs big enough for

adult bodies but light enough to be moved freely around both the outside of the rectangle,

for whole class discussions, and inside, for small group work. Students faced each other

57

around these seminar-style tables and the teacher’s desk in the far right hand corner of the

room remained empty on most days as I sat with the students. I intended for this

classroom setting to provide a space where conversation, collaboration, and inquiry were

not only possible but also were encouraged.

While students in this particular twelfth-grade class did not have assigned seats,

they gravitated to the same location each time we engaged in whole class discussions; the

eleven students highlighted and italicized in Figure 2 appear most prominently in the

dissertation. Nineteen of twenty-six students are mentioned by name at some point in

the dissertation.

58

Figure 2. Student Seating. This figure illustrates the layout of the

classroom, shows students’ locations during whole class discussions,

and italicizes students featured prominently in the dissertation.

In my research methods, I did not predetermine on which of these twenty-six students’

experiences my data analysis would focus. I worried that potentially rich understandings

would be obscured if I focused too early on select students. Instead, as I organized,

coded, and analyzed data, I developed insights about what occurred in this particular

classroom context with as many students as possible on each day of data collection.

Gradually, my observations and field notes came to focus more on some students than

others. It is these eleven students’ experiences that are highlighted in this dissertation. It

is their contributions to oral and electronic discussions, their writings, and excerpts from

conferences and correspondences that are deeply and recursively analyzed across the data

analysis chapters.

Additionally, I made purposeful efforts to pay attention to each student, not just

those prominently highlighted in my field notes, analytical memos, and early stages of

data analysis. For this reason, multiple students’ talk from class discussion, small group

work, and teacher conferences are included alongside multiple students’ written and

electronic texts. I did this to create a polyphonic sense of engagement within this

particular inquiry curriculum. As readers become intimately familiar with Candice,

Michael, Dylan, Jeanne, Joyce, Kyle, Jeff, Jared, Blake, Sophia, and Samantha, readers

59

can also sense how their experiences intertwined and then diverged and then re-

intertwined with those of each other as well as with their other classmates.

This highlights how these particular focal students’ experiences did not exist

independent of their class or classmates. In this vein, ancillary descriptions connected to

or inspired by these more prominently featured students merited the inclusion of talk and

writing by Bryan, Patrick, Maura, Christian, Marissa, Brennan, Grace, and Alexandra.

Additionally, it is important to note that the seven students not explicitly mentioned by

name in this dissertation also made meaningful contributions to the inquiry curriculum

and classroom experience.

Curricular Design

The inquiry-based curriculum that informed this class was not easily designed.

As I framed this curriculum that would serve as both high school course and research

framework, I experienced a tension in how I would balance my research aims and

students’ curricular experiences in the high school where I taught.

I had never explicitly invited students into inquiry in the way this research-design

demanded. Instead, I had always taught district-required curricular content from an

inquiry stance. This means that I, like many practitioners who embrace inquiry, taught

within a mixed frame of teaching. On one hand, I guided students through the scope and

sequence of course content as outlined by my school district. On the other, I invited

students to use these texts as a starting point for discussions larger than content

understanding or literary analysis. In this way, the act of inviting students into inquiry

was always subversive but never insubordinate. This approach encouraged students to

60

follow their own interests yet also awarded them success on district measures and

standardized assessments.

In previous years, this mixed framing of content-centered and inquiry-driven

curricula effectively served both the school’s desire for coverage of articulated content

and my desire to create opportunities for students’ writing and talk guided by students’

interests and questions. For example, when I taught the district-mandated text by James

McBride’s (1996) entitled The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White

Mother, I did not invite students into a chapter-by-chapter close reading that singled out

passages I pre-determined as meaningful. Instead, the class looked at the ways McBride

wrote about his and his mother’s life and considered how this informed the ways students

in the class could write their own lives. As a class, we didn’t didactically analyze the text

in terms of symbols and metaphors but instead wrestled with the larger question: “What

are our responsibilities when we tell other people’s stories?” In this way, students

considered the content, but more importantly, thought about their own experiences of

reading and writing where one informs the other. In this mixed model, inquiry was an

undercurrent, not especially visible on the surface yet responsible for much of the

intellectual movement that occurred within the course.

As a teacher, I had never questioned or had been questioned on my use of this

kind of mixed curricular frame—until my dissertation proposal hearing. After positive

and constructive feedback on the scholarly framings for this dissertation research, I

shared a draft of a one-page “tentative inquiry syllabus.” My dissertation committee

critiqued the curricular course frame as too scripted, too explicitly grounded in the very

61

fixed notions of writing and inquiry I was attempting to trouble. They asserted that as

written this course invited students to learn my ideas of inquiry but did not allow them

take up their own inquiries. They rightly critiqued the curriculum as unnecessarily

didactic, offering suggestions for questions I might want to include in the framing of the

inquiry curriculum.

My dissertation committee pointed out that I was missing a rare opportunity.

Since this particular senior-level course was going to be eliminated the following year, I

had the great freedom to shape this course however I would like. A central office

curriculum supervisor, who was also a member of my dissertation committee, told me

that I could imagine and create the “ideal inquiry course in high school. I just needed to

decide what that would look like” (Dissertation Proposal Hearing, November 2007). As

per her direction, there were no texts I was required to teach. There were no tests I had to

teach towards. For the first time in my teaching career, in this rare moment and for the

short span of an academic semester, the work of inquiry could be the obvious, and not the

hidden, center of the course. Once I recognized this, I reworked the course syllabus over

the next two months. In January 2008, I shared with students the course framework

reproduced in Figure 3.

In its truest sense, the course was constructed as a set of experiences to which I

invited students. Aligned with its etymological sense, the inquiry curriculum was a

‘course’ students ran, a ‘current’ students followed. It was not a scope and sequence

detailing content to be covered nor was it a listing of ideas to be transferred from teacher

to student. Framed as an inquiry, the course invited students to wrestle through and pose

62

questions about the notion of inquiry and to engage in inquiries about nature of academic

writing.

The pedagogy guiding this inquiry curriculum was conceptualized as two parts.

The first part was an introduction to the notion of inquiry; the second part was an

opportunity for students’ own inquiries into writing. In this vein, the first five weeks

were designed to introduce students to the notion of inquiry, a concept my experience as

a teacher suggested would be novel to the majority of these high school seniors. The

final ten weeks were conceived as an opportunity for students to engage in their own

inquiries into writing. In its most basic sense, the first five weeks of semester helped

students to learn about the notion of inquiry, while the remaining weeks focused on an

engagement in their own inquiries into writing.

63

Figure 3. Inquiry Syllabus. This is the syllabus shared with students

during our initial meeting in January, 2008.

Inquiry OverviewThird Quarter: Creating One’s Place in Society

Description of the Inquiry: As high school seniors, you have been “schooled” in writing and reading practices for the last twelve years. But in your view what does it really mean to be a reader and writer? What does it mean to belong to a discourse community? When you are completing assignments, whose purposes are you serving? How often do you think about your own writing and reading? Questions like these will punctuate our time together. Set up differently than other English courses, our class will use and create literary, electronic, and primary texts to explore “thick” questions about reading, writing, and literacy that have neither simple, nor singular answers. And when the course is finished, I hope that you will leave with nuanced questions and personal understandings about what it means to write, to be read, and to read other’s writings.

Core Concepts Meaning is socially constructed. Writing and identity are linked. Language is not neutral. Multiple, competing, and contested discourses of writing exist. Identities are multiple, complex, and evolving.

Goals (1) Students will use literary, electronic, and primary sources to engage with and in multiple discourses of writing. (2) Students will analyze and question how writerly identities are formed. (3) Students will consider how writing impacts society and shapes one’s place in society.

Essential Questions:What does it mean to be a writer?Whose purposes are served by writing?What counts as academic writing? How does the institution of school influence writing?Whose writing counts?What do we get out of reading the writings of others?What questions about writing do works of literature raise?What questions about writing do electronic texts raise?

Fourth Quarter: TransitionsDescription of the Inquiry: This is a very exciting time for you as seniors, as you prepare to complete high school and go off to college or to work. It’s also a very exciting time for me as a teacher as I work on my own graduate studies on writerly identities and practices. This marks a powerful opportunity for us to “wonder together” about how we carve out spaces for ourselves in both the world of school and in the larger world outside of school. In this moment, we can learn from each other and think about how our learning will impact us as individuals and how as learning and questioning individuals we will impact the larger world.

Core Concepts Individual influence discourse communities at the same time discourse

communities influence individuals. Writing in academic contexts is personal, albeit not necessarily,

autobiographical.Goals: (1) Students will consider what it means to write for real audiences and purposes. (2) Students will make decisions about content and modes of representation based on a text’s audience and purpose. Essential Questions:

How do you carve out spaces for yourself in your writing?What is necessary for people to feel invited to read and write?What is academic literacy and how does the world beyond LM influence this?How does writing, reading, and literacy shape the world and vice-versa?How do writerly identities evolve?What writing experiences and practices do you think will serve you in college?In what different ways do people construct “writing,” “reading,” and “literacy”?

64

The First Five Weeks: Notions of Inquiry

As a way to scaffold students’ introduction into inquiry, I opened the class by

inviting students to make sense of writings about writing. We read “The Writer” by

Richard Wilbur (2004), an excerpt from Talking Back by bell hooks (1989), and Jamaica

Kincaid’s interview with Donna Perry (1993) on writing as inherently complex. As we

engaged with these texts, we also discussed the notion of developing “thick” questions,

defined as questions whose responses are largely inferred, often debatable, and always

resistant to simple responses. Students read these pieces, annotated them, discussed them

in class, wrote back to them on collaborative electronic forums, and responded to each

other’s initial ideas and questions about writing in a high school class. In light of these

experiences, students were asked to consider what became a guiding question for the

class: “What does it mean to be a writer?”

Additionally students were challenged to reconsider terms such as writing,

discourse, dialogue, social, and identity in ways they might not have considered

previously. Students discussed and debated what it meant for them as writers that the

word discourse implies both an invisible set of rules for how a person acts in a specific

situation as well as, its more common sense of, words exchanged in that conversation.

Students discussed the word social in terms of cultural theory rather than in terms of

friendly interaction. They were introduced to the etymology of dialogue, as coming to

understanding through words, thoughts, or action in addition to its more common use as

an exchange between two speakers. As a class, we discussed the possibility that identity

65

is something you create and enact for yourself, not something that is layered upon you

from the outside or pre-determined. The students and I used these concepts to engage in

questions about whose purposes academic writing served.

Students were then assigned to read longer, denser, and more scholarly texts. In

anticipation for engaging these texts, I explicitly taught students a series of annotation

practices that encouraged them to “talk back to the text” using Billy Collins’ (2004)

“Marginalia” and Elizabeth Bishop’s (1936) “The Map” as in-class exercises. Students

read, annotated, and discussed excerpts from Doug Hunt’s (2002) Misunderstanding the

Assignment, an ethnography of six first-year college students navigating their freshman

composition class, Perry’s (1963)“Examsmenship and the Liberal Arts,” an essay about

the dangers and benefits of “bulling” your way through assigned essays, and Dawkin’s

(2006) The Selfish Gene, the text that coined the use of the term “meme” as a replicating

social move.

The purpose of these readings and discussions was to invite students to consider

their understandings of inquiry as a mode of learning. As we looked at Hunt’s (2002)

ethnography, we discussed the difference between telling an interesting story or

experience as opposed to something being studied in an inquiry. To open this discussion,

I explained that you are only inquiring into something if you don’t know the answer

before you begin. I also explained that engaging in any act of research involves being

systematic. I explained this to students as the difference between taking a series of

random snapshots versus taking a snapshot from the same location every five minutes

and then describing what changed and why this change was important. The first may

66

produce some interesting images but the second may help you to understand some larger

idea about the nature of change. We also discussed how arguments in academic writing

are structured so that there is an idea in every paragraph and each idea builds upon the

idea in the previous paragraph, something I call “the upward spiral in writing.”

As students read these longer, denser texts, we also revisited our initial thoughts

on whose purposes academic writing served and began to discuss the idea of reading,

writing, and thinking as recursive. In preparation for students’ own inquiries into writing,

they began to draft initial thick questions informed by the course readings to date.

Students drafted these questions with the knowledge that they would recursively revisit

these queries as they wrote throughout the semester.

The first five weeks of the class included these disparate texts to invite students to

consider the purpose and possibility for inquiry in a wide variety of ways. These shorter

texts encouraged students to look beyond obvious ideas and questions a given text might

engender, to begin to make connections among and between texts, and to practice deep

and meaningful annotation in service of answering students’ own questions about the

nature of academic reading and writing.

The Final Ten Weeks: Inquiries into Writing

During the final weeks of the course, the course was structured to enable students

to engage in two separate yet interrelated tasks: read and respond to literacy scholarship

and construct their own inquires into writing.

67

First they were assigned to place their personal insights and questions about

academic writing in conversation with the larger body of research on literacy, identity,

and writing. Students did this by engaging in the “Thinking…and Writing…About

Writing” Assignment, which was designed to prompt students’ inquiries into writing by

requiring students to read, annotate, discuss, and write in response to brief one-two page

excerpts from the works of four different literacy scholars.

Figure 4: Thinking…and Writing…about Writing Assignment.

Thinking…and Writing…about Writing

As we work through some readings about reading, writing, and literacy, keep in mind our questions, ideas, and responses to yesterday’s questions:

What do you expect to learn about writing and reading in high school? What does it mean to be a writer? What does it mean to be a reader? What does it mean to be a writer and/or a reader in school? Does it mean something different when you are in school? Why?

What do the following thinkers say about academic writing? They are, in many ways, writing about you. Do you agree with what they are saying? What would you say back to them?

Street, B. (in press/2008). New literacies, new times: How do we describe and teach the forms of literacy knowledge, skills, and values people need for new times. In N. Hornberger, (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Literacy. Vol. 2: Literacy. New York: Springer. Pages 2-3 two paragraph overview of NLS

Gee, J. (2004). Orality and literacy: From The Savage Mind to Ways with Words. In J. Maybin, (Ed.) Language and Literacy in Social Practice. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, pp. 168-192.Pages 168-169 opening four paragraphs

Hull, G. & Schultz, K. (2002). Connecting schools with out of school worlds, In G. Hull and K. Schultz (Eds.) School’s Out: Bridging out of school literacies with classroom practice. New York: Teacher’s College Press, pp. 32-57. Pages 33-34 first three paragraphs of “I’m not a pencil man.”

Collier, L. (2007). The shift to 21st-century literacies. The Council Chronicle. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. 17(2), 4-8.Pages 4-5 introductory paragraphs.

______________________________________________________________________________

Do these authors agree or disagree with each other?What does this suggest to you about the work that we are doing this semester?

68

This figure highlights the literacy scholarship that informed the class’

discussions and crafting of their own inquiries into writing.

Students previewed each of the excerpts, listened to me give a brief framing of each of

the articles, then self-selected the first excerpt they wanted to read. As students read and

annotated, they moved into groups with others reading and annotating the same text.

After students read and annotated the text over the course of two nights, they returned to

their group and worked to capture their excerpt’s essential arguments and their reactions

to these arguments in a class google.doc. After groups captured the arguments these

scholars presented, students then revised their evolving and evolved google.doc posting.

Over the next several nights, students read and annotated the remaining excerpts. Then

one by one each group presented their google.doc posting, opening into a class

discussion. After each discussion, students revised their google.doc postings.

While students generated the thick questions that would guide their inquiries into

writing, they were also recursively reconsidering the notions of inquiry, discourse, social,

and dialogue through literary works. In this vein, we read Cisneros’ (1984) The House

on Mango Street, Obama’s (2008) “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America,

and Melville’s (1853) “Bartleby the Scrivener.” These three radically different texts

provided us a way to talk about discourses as a “socially accepted association among

ways of using language, or other symbolic expressions, and artifacts of thinking, feeling,

believing, valuing, and acting used to identity oneself as a member of a socially

69

meaningful group, or social network, or to signal that one is playing a socially

meaningful role” (Gee, 1996, p. 131-2).

Students then completed an approximately four-page initial inquiry into writing.

Student had several options as they worked on these inquiry papers.

Option #1: Students could take the first assignment they drafted for the class:

“What does it mean to be a writer?” and recursively revisit and revise it in light of

subsequent discussions and readings.

Option #2: Students could take a literary text we studied in this course, either The

House on Mango Street or “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and develop/refine an

argument in response to the prompting question: “What does this text suggest

about writing?”

Option #3: Students could develop their own inquiry topic about writing

The final component of this assignment was that it be revised and shared with an

audience of the students’ choice. After students shared their papers with this larger

audience, they wrote on, reflected about, and discussed their experience of sharing their

academic work with someone outside their class.

The third of three required essays for the course was the students’ final paper. This

final essay was crafted as a synthesis of the inquiry work students completed throughout

the course. It included both analytical and reflective aspects and invited students to draw

on their academic and personal experiences to develop their final high school writing

assignment. On the final day of class, students shared an excerpt of this final with their

classmates. This assignment is highlighted in Figure 5.

70

An Overview of Method: Data Collection

While on sabbatical leave during the fall semester of 2008, I procured class lists

and addresses from the school registrar of all students enrolled in the sections of English 4

that I would teach upon my return. In early January, I wrote a letter introducing myself,

the inquiry curriculum, and this research project to my future students and their parents. I

mailed this letter, an overview of the research project, and consent forms to all

Figure 5. Final Essay Assignment. This figure highlights the

Exploring Ideas and Self: Final Essay for English 4 HonorsYour final exam involves two parts. Both aspects blend the academic and the personal, your ideas and your identities. And this blending is important because while some have tried to separate these aspects from each other in the course of school assignments, these are never really separate….

PART 1: Over the last fifteen weeks, we have read, annotated, discussed, and written a wide array of texts, including

but not limited to: “What is literacy?” by Street, “Orality and Literacy” by Gee, “I’m Not a Pencil Man” by Schultz and Hull, “21st Century Skills” by Collier, excerpts from The Selfish Gene by Dawkins, excerpts from Misunderstanding the Assignment by Hunt, “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts” by Perry, “Crito” by Plato, “A More Perfect Union” by Obama, the April cover of Vogue, “The Map” by Bishop, The House on Mango Street by Cisneros, brief passages from bell hooks and Jamaica Kincaid, “Bartleby the Scrivner” by Melville, postings on google docs and i-note, essays, and notes made in light of class discussions. Use your annotations, your notes, your essays and essay drafts, and your reflections on class discussions to take a single concept that has echoed throughout this course and explain (1) how you now understand it and (2) how you came to understand it. You may select from the following or get a word of your choice approved by Ms.Pratt: Writer, Writerly, Literacy, Reader, Audience, Identity, Discourse, Argument, Dialogue

Be sure to use meaningful and deeply embedded quotations from various course sources, to develop a powerful upward spiral, to develop an original and provocative assertion, to draw connections that touch on both the academic and the personal, to construct a conclusion and not a summary, to write in ways that are precise and concise, and to include both in-text and end-text citations.

PART 2:The second part of your final invites you to celebrate and to memorialize this moment in your life. You

will use a self-selected text of “great importance” to capture a piece of who you are right now in terms of both idea and identity. This means that you will construct a final text that both explains (1) what specifically makes your text one of “great importance” and (2) what the selection of this text specifically tells us about you in this moment.

As you think about this aspect of the final, consider this excerpt from “Why I Write,” where Joan Didion suggests that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not….We forget all too soon the things we thought that we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” I don’t want you to forget who you are right now or where you have been or where you hope to go. Use a form of your choice—memoir, vignette, poem, essay—that best captures what is worth remembering about who you are in this moment.

As you work through this aspect of the final, you may want to peruse these resources for ideas or inspiration.

K. Farmer writes about how a comic book he read forty years ago is of “great importance.” http://kfarmer.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-is-of-great-importance.html

In conjunction with the National Book Foundation, professional writers talk about the works of literature that shaped them as writers and people. http://www.nationalbook.org/bookchanged.html

Aaron Swartz describes how the documentary film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media and the book Understanding Power changed his worldview, one that some of his critics argue should not have changed. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany

Jerry Fresia describes how viewing Cezanne helps us to understand ourselves. http://painting.about.com/od/inspiration/a/JFresia_miracle.htm

71

final writing assignment of the inquiry curriculum.

students on my assigned class rosters, five sections in total. I returned to my classroom on

January 23 and January 24, 2008 to introduce myself to all five sections that I was

assigned to teach, to confirm that all students and parents had received consent forms, to

answer any questions or concerns students had in regards to the research, and to get

preliminary information about the experiences students had had in previous English

classes.

On January 28, 2008, I returned to teaching from my sabbatical leave. As a

researcher, I made a decision to narrow the scope of my data collection to a single

section. I found that I did not receive consent forms from select students in two of the

five sections that I taught. I excluded these sections from possible data collection,

leaving me with three sections as potential sources of data.

During the first three weeks of the spring semester, I audiotaped whole class

sessions in each of these three remaining sections, with the express purpose of narrowing

the data collection unit to one class of students. The intended purpose of this initial over-

arching data collection was to decide on which of the sections I would focus data

collection. Even though interesting data and cases seemed evident across each of the

three remaining sections, I opted to continue collecting data within one in particular, Set

6. This class seemed to contain a contingent of students resistant to inquiry and another

couple of students who proudly termed themselves writers and wanted to learn more

about what an inquiry into writing might mean. The class was also the most

academically diverse of the three English 4 sections. This was the first honors-level class

72

for three students in this class of twenty-six. The students also came from a wide range

of previous English teachers, whereas the other two sections contained large clusters of

students from the same junior English class. As both a teacher and a researcher, I found

myself most intrigued by Set 6.

In mid-February, I began recording data related to Set 6 exclusively. When it was

difficult to distinguish voices in early attempts at transcription from whole class video

recording, I began using an additional microphone on a video recorder, positioned in a

corner that provided a partial room shot so I could identify who was speaking. I also

began to carry a hand held recorder to capture the quieter conversations in the classroom,

such as those in small groups, as well as to record one-on-one conferences with students.

I met in conference with each student at least twice during data collection and audio-

recorded these conferences, making selective transcriptions after I listened to the

conferences. During the semester, I watched video and listened to audio recordings of at

least one class meeting each week. I did this for two reasons: if there were a technical

problem, I wanted to amend it so that I did not lose large amounts of data and I wanted to

construct in-process field notes to share with the students who participated in this inquiry.

I also set aside select lunch and preparation periods where I made myself available for

students to collaboratively analyze and discuss these posted field notes with me. To this

end, I posted eight field notes for public view. As part of my role as teacher, I also made

myself available to students during free periods and Academic Recovery to discuss their

questions and eventually their inquiries.

73

Until the end of formal classroom data collection on May 2, 2008, I continued to

utilize these data collection methods as well as to gather artifacts produced during the

class in the form of collaborative writings on google.doc, electronic communications

including but not limited to i-note, Moodle, and e-mail, and completed assignments.

Field notes and initial jottings were included on the covers and attached notes of the

micro-cassettes from the hand-held audio-recorder and from the audio and videotapes

from whole class recordings and in a teacher’s notebook that I maintained during data

collection.

In some ways, the natural entwining of my research interests and teaching

practices was positive. It made the methodical collection of data relatively

straightforward. Teachers collect and make sense of large volumes of data every day. I

was accustomed to looking for patterns in students’ work so that it could inform my

teaching. As a reflective practitioner, I was already engaged in the habit of keeping a

teaching journal, which in the process of this research became more formalized field

notes. I was in the habit of conferencing with students and keeping a running record of

these interactions, which now provided additional context for data collection.

Yet in other ways, the interconnected nature of research methods and teaching

practices made this research project incredibly challenging. I collected voluminous

amounts of data from which I made selective transcriptions. I recorded 44 whole class

sessions, totaling nearly 2700 minutes of class discussions. I recorded 22 micro-cassettes

of small group and individual conferences, each about one hour in length. I collected

over 300 pages of student writing, keeping copies of each of the three inquiry papers that

74

each of the twenty-six students crafted over the course of the semester. I also collected

other classroom artifacts: class sets of writer’s memos, images of google.doc in various

stages of revision, a class set of a take home assignment on the nature of writing, postings

from our course i-note and Moodle, e-mails from students, websites to which students

alerted me, notes from students’ larger audiences, a copy of an instant message chat a

student thought I would be interested in seeing. The raw data for this dissertation

consumes an entire filing cabinet drawer.

An unexpected difficulty also arose. As a researcher, focusing on the student or

the class as a dedicated unit of analysis was more challenging than I had expected. As a

teacher, I was accustomed to thinking about both the individual student as well as the

whole class, shifting automatically, quickly, and seamlessly between the two. Yet my

research aims required a dedicated analysis to either the unit of student or class in any

particular moment. In this way my teacher’s eye and research aims were sometimes at

odds, especially during the process of data analysis.

An Overview of Method: Data Analysis

I organized and coded the large amount of data I collected by establishing and

rigorously adhering to the analytic procedures described in this section. My analytical

process, modeled upon Strauss and Corbin’s (1998/1990) conception of grounded theory,

included four distinct yet recursive stages: data organization, open coding of this data,

axial coding of this data, and formalizing these codes into theoretical frameworks.

75

In the first stage, organization, I completed an inventory and annotated overview

of the three kinds of data collected: transcription of classroom talk, pieces of students’

academic writing, and evidence of students’ electronic dialogue and drafting. I reviewed

the videotaped and audiotaped class discussions and student conversations. Each was

labeled during data collection with the date and a short title, like “3/3/08 Audience

Discussion.” Setting up a two-column chart, I wrote the date and short title in one

column and made, and in some cases, analytical notes suggesting potential areas for

analysis. I used a parallel organizational process for the other two forms of data I

collected. In terms of students’ printed work, I made an inventory of each of the three

major writing assignments students completed. I included the following organizational

columns: the author’s pseudonym, assignment due date, students’ title for the assignment,

and brief analytical comments. For students’ electronic writings, I focused on two i-note

threads and three google.doc forums that my field notes suggested were particularly rich.

I used the archiving feature to revisit these documents at various moments in their

creation. Just as with the previous catalogues of data, I created columns that in this

instance included the date, the pseudonym(s) of writers on the forum, the topic of the

forum and brief analytical comments. The analytical comments generated during this

organizational phase, also functioned recursively as a rudimentary form of open coding,

in addition to being an organizational tool.

The second stage of data analysis concerned itself with more precisely labeling

and categorizing the phenomena in my classroom. After my annotated data inventory

was complete, I viewed/listened/read all evidence, adding to the analytical notes where

76

appropriate. Then, I looked across the data sets—talk, writing, and electronic—for

potential codes evident in both the analytical comments I initially wrote and those

developed during this second look at the data. From this, I decided which excerpts from

classroom talk would be selectively transcribed and which excerpts from student writing

would be pulled for deeper analysis. I then reviewed these again and crafted more

detailed analytical notes for each. These selected excerpts of students’ talk and students’

writing as well as my initial analytical sense-making of both became the focus of my

second stage of open coding, which according to Strauss and Corbin (1998/1990)

“involves the breaking down, examining, comparing, conceptualizing, and categorizing

of data” (p. 61). In this way, my codes were initially identified without any restrictions

other than to discover units of potential meaning; I built theory from my data.

The codes I developed allowed me to describe “what” was occurring in my

classroom. Now, I began to consider “why” these observations might be of consequence.

Searching for patterns among the codes, I began the third stage of my data analysis,

known in grounded theory as axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998/1990). During this

process, I examined my codes and looked for ways to group them into meaningful “code

families.” To do this, I asked myself the following questions: What patterns existed?

What informed these patterns? What was the larger phenomenon at work among these

patterns? How might these patterns help me to answer my research questions?

During the final stage of data analysis, I developed a theoretical framework that

attempted to answer each of my research questions.

77

The following four data analysis chapters derive their arguments from the

thoughtful adherence to the methods described in this chapter. Chapter Four finds that

these particular students’ initial and evolving expectations of what was supposed to occur

in a high school English class dramatically impacted how they responded to the notion of

and invitation to inquiry in this novel curricular setting. Chapter Five finds annotation

held the potential to be a mode of inquiry for many of the students participating in this

study. Chapter Six finds that in crafting their own inquiries into writing, these high

school students learned that the content they opted to write about and the ways they opted

to write revealed aspects of their writer identity as both individuals and members of this

class. Chapter Seven furthers this social understanding of writing, finding that several

students adapted, integrated, and transformed academic writing practices they found

meaningful to their personal writing outside of the classroom context.

78

CHAPTER 4

THE INVITATION TO AND EVOLVING UNDERSTANINGS OF INQUIRY

Research conducted within elementary classroom settings suggests young

students embrace inquiry as a way of thinking when teachers provide meaningful inquiry

spaces. This occurs when teachers allow students a sense of agency in determining their

own questions to be explored and when teachers encourage students’ out-of-school

experiences to inform academic writing (Ghiso, 2009; Campano, 2007; Parker, 2007;

Cowhey, 2006; Berghoff, Egawa, Harste, & Hoonan, 2000).

However, the invitation to inquire, even when these conditions are present, is not

always as readily accepted within middle and high school academic settings. Lee and

Ashby (2000) found the secondary students described in their study were resistant to

inquiry within a history curriculum because they had little previous experience with the

conception of knowledge as constructed. Wilson (2002) found the middle school

students she studied were resistant to multiple understandings of a question; they

searched instead for definitive answers and the least time consuming way to arrive at

these answers. Tillotson and Kluth (2003) found that the culture of school learning,

which often revolves around content knowledge and rote memorization, interfered with

the genuine curiosity students brought to a particular science classroom. These findings

suggest that as older students become more acculturated to “doing school,” they become

less open to inquiry within academic settings.

79

In this same vein, many of the honors-level students in this research study met the

concept of inquiry with a sense of suspicion. They knew how to enact their roles as

students and, for the most part, had done so successfully for twelve years. This inquiry

curriculum, however, uncomfortably challenged many of their deeply engrained

conceptions of academic learning and writing. Quite simply, my invitation to inquiry ran

contrary to their twelve-year enculturation of what it meant to “do school”.

Specifically, the invitation to this inquiry curriculum troubled the concept that

these students were receivers of teacher-specified knowledge and that academic writing

was a neutral means of demonstrating this received knowledge. Before this study, these

particular high school seniors largely neither questioned nor considered these concepts.

This inquiry curriculum, however, required these high school seniors to recast their

conceptions of both “student” and “writing,” a position at once empowering and

simultaneously unsettling.

The first part of this chapter, then, describes how the inquiry-based curriculum

guiding this course was a novel experience for the students in this study. It demonstrates

how these particular students’ initial expectations of the English 4 Honors classroom

were violated and details the range of ways some used this initial dissonance as an entrée

to their own inquiry questions.

The second part of this chapter describes how particular students came to

understand the notion of inquiry through sustained, applied engagement. In-the-head

understandings of the notion of inquiry were only developed while students

simultaneously crafted on-the-page/on-the-screen/in-conversation texts of their own that

80

tried to “figure out” what an inquiry curriculum was and contemplated how writing might

be used as a mode of inquiry. What my findings suggest is that while the planned

curriculum dedicated the initial one-third of the course to introducing the concept of

inquiry, most students’ understandings of the concept of inquiry evolved over the course

of the entire semester in a recursive manner.

Violated Expectations and Positive Dissonance

At the beginning of the semester, seniors enrolled in this English 4 Honors section

entered the twelfth-grade classroom with vastly different understandings about the nature

and purpose of an inquiry-centered class than I did. Yet this dissonance ultimately proved

positive as it provided students with an array of questions about their own academic

writing, who they were writers, and why they had not previously raised questions about

the nature of academic writing.

This violation of students’ expectations initially set up a tension between the

students and me. This tension stemmed from the fact that we approached the inquiry

curriculum of the English 4 Honors course from competing understandings about what it

meant to learn, to write, and to read. I imagined this course as an inquiry, what Lorri

Neilson (1998) termed, a “conspiracy, a breathing together” (p. 262). However, the

majority of students initially viewed this inquiry project like Candice did, as “yet another

set of tasks [they] have to do in response to [the teacher’s] questions” (class discussion,

1/24/08). Candice, like many other students, was initially distrustful of my research and

pedagogical purposes.

81

The nature of her and her classmates’ distrust was two-fold: (1) students felt the

“rules for doing school” were being changed on them during their last semester of high

school and (2) these honors level students had experienced great success in their previous

English classes and now that once clear path to academic success was unclear.

This position was evident when Candice introduced herself to me with the

question: “So you’re asking us to write, so you can write about us, so you can get your

Ph.D? How are we supposed to do that? We’re not teachers?” (class discussion,

1/24/08). With a sense of quiet defiance, Candice suggested that she viewed the

proposed inquiry as a series of tasks for her and her classmates to complete so I could

earn a credential. She questioned why were students doing all the work and I getting all

the credit. She viewed this inquiry-curriculum as a burden instead of an opportunity for

her and her classmates to learn with and not simply from me.

While her first sentence suggests a kind of defiance, the second betrays more of a

nervousness. Candice, a student described by one of her previous teachers as successful

because she always did exactly what rubrics specified, recognized the dangerous potential

to fail because she, rather than a teacher, would be responsible to determine what context

she would interrogate in service of the course’s larger curricular understandings.

Candice’s two-prong sense of distrust captured the overall initial tenor of the

class. The next week when I asked students what they believed would make this class

successful, Michael suggested, “Reading good books” (class discussion, 1/29/08). Half

overlapping with Michael’s comment and eliciting laughter from his classmates, Dylan

quipped, “Reading short books” (class discussion, 1/29/08). A few comments later

82

Jeanne added, “When the teacher points out what’s important in books” (class discussion,

1/29/08). Each of these comments suggested that students expected this course to hold a

study of literature and the teacher’s explication of that literature at its center.

Extrapolating from these comments and others like them, reading and analyzing literary

texts was the purpose of English class in these students’ minds. This was after I had met

with students and explicitly told them that we would have an inquiry-based rather than a

literature-based curriculum. The distinction between these two radically different

curricular frameworks was largely unrecognized.

Later in the same conversation, Samantha added that clear expectations for the

assignments, specifically “knowing what [she] need[ed] to do to get an A,” made a class

successful English class (class discussion, 1/29/08). In a different discussion, Joyce

furthered this thought on clear expectations explaining: “With what I’m learning, I need a

proper explanation of it and another way of being taught if the teacher isn’t doing a good

job of helping me to understand what it is I’m learning” (class discussion, 2/1/08). These

comments reflected the class’ initial expectations: a good English 4 Honors course

included clear teacher-determined literary content and an explicitly delineated way to

demonstrate the presumed understanding of this literary content. In both its proposed

content of study and its method of study, the course that these students expected was

antithetical to an inquiry curriculum.

As an initial means to work through these competing understandings, I offered an

explicit framing of inquiry as both verb and noun. I did this because I recognized that

students and I held different expectations about the purpose of this research project and

83

inquiry curriculum. As a starting point, I explained that the word inquiry meant two

things: (1) it is a way of thinking about and being in the world where you raise questions

about ideas that are sometimes accepted as facts when they are actually debatable and (2)

it is the writing you generate that captures your thoughts and reflections on this way of

thinking. These overlapping senses of inquiry are very similar to Richardson and St.

Pierre’s (2005) explication of “writing as a mode of inquiry”, in which they describe

writing as “not an objectifying practice or a mopping-up activity at the end of a research

project but a creative practice used throughout to make sense of lives and culture, to

theorize, and to produce knowledge” (p. 959). In this study, students were invited to use

writing as a mode of inquiry to explore their own questions about writing in a series of

essays they would craft.

My data analysis revealed that I, as a teacher, made two erroneous assumptions in

this initial attempt to clarify the purposes of the inquiry curriculum. I assumed (1) that

students would understand the notion of inquiry during the initial weeks of the course so

that the bulk of our time together would be spent in students’ crafting their own inquiries

and (2) that students only needed a teacher-framed conceptual understanding of the

notion of inquiry as a precursor to engaging in their own inquiry projects. I falsely

assumed that my explanations of the process and product of inquiry provided students

with the space and authority to inquire into the nature of their own writing practices and

experiences.

During the first week of class, I asked students to share some of their initial

questions and thoughts about academic writing using this conception of inquiry I

84

presented in class. To do this, I provided students with an anonymous electronic forum

to write their initial thoughts or questions and if they found themselves stuck, I suggested

they try to answer the question “What does it mean to be a writer?”

The majority of posted comments included statements and questions like: “I have

no idea what is going on in here” (google.doc, 1/31/08), “I’m so lost” (google.doc,

1/31/08) and “does anybody know what [Ms. Pratt] wants”” (google.doc, 1/31/08).

Students, largely unfamiliar with inquiry models of learning, expected me, as the teacher,

to clearly articulate what they were supposed to think and found themselves relatively

uncomfortable when a question without a singular pre-determined answer formed the

center of an academic task. A recursive, and inherently messy, sense of on-going

meaning-making is implicit in inquiry. A majority of students were unsure how to

engage in an assignment like this because the question was too broad. It was grounded in

an inquiry stance that I had been invested in as a practitioner-researcher and graduate

student for fifteen-years, while these students were encountering it for the first time.

Students felt unsuccessful and uncomfortable, a conclusion I came to after three parent

phone calls inquiring into the nature of the previous nights’ assignment and

uncomfortable silence when I asked students how they made sense of the previous night’s

assignment.

Yet this kind of resistance was not the case with every student. In response to this

same assignment about “what does it mean to be a writer?”, two postings took up the

invitation to inquiry with excitement. These two individual students’ expectations were

violated but in a positive sense. Kyle, who signed his name to the electronic posting even

85

though it was meant to be anonymous, wrote one such posting. In his posting, he asserted,

“real writers write on their own time, because they have something to say” (google.doc,

1/29/08).

This sentiment was echoed in his first draft of “Being a High School Writer”

(2/20/08) and framed his final essay about how the unexpected death of his father when he

was nine-years old encouraged him to write. In this essay, he describes how he wrote and

still writes to make sense of “the huge pile of shit” his world became after his dad died

because “a writer is someone who takes all the beautiful, horrible, provocative things in

their head and finds a way to mix it all up in a way that gives a different view that maybe

they never knew” (final, 4/25/08). In Kyle’s writing there were no neat conclusions to his

inquiry on why or how he writes to make sense of his life. Instead his writing dwelt in the

complexities of his life and what it meant that he tried to make sense of his life through

writing.

These complex and sometimes contradictory sense-makings are evident throughout

Kyle’s writings as he inquired into the nature of writing outside of school and questions

why this kind of writing is not valued in academic contexts. Kyle describes his feelings of

isolation immediately after the passing of his father but simultaneously and uncomfortably

explains how he felt grateful that students at school who had previously tormented him

were now suddenly kinder. With a powerful mix of grief and thankfulness, he writes:

I realize the kind of things [my father’s] death set in motion. I probably would’ve been a completely different person if he were still around. His death caused my mother to remarry. It caused me to go to a new school where I met new friends and girlfriends. It caused me to see the world in a way that I greatly appreciate. I am happy about the way things turned out.

86

I miss my father, but can’t help but think that his death was meant to be, that he gave me more than he ever could have in his life, through his death. He is my motivation now. He is everything that I hope to be actually, and I want to make him as proud as I can.

There is a great sense of agency and urgency in Kyle’s writing. It is in his act of writing

that he works to make sense of his world, and as he told me later that semester in a

conference, this was the first time he felt he could write in ways that he really needed to

in school. Kyle entered this inquiry curriculum with a sense of his own questions about

the nature and process of his writing and developed these questions about the place for

this kind of writing in school over the course of the semester.

Few students embraced inquiry as a concept or sustained their initial inquiry in

this way, though. In fact, some students openly demonstrated resistance through

disengagement. Jeff, Jared, and Sophia are noticeably absent from much of the

transcriptions of class discussion and electronic postings during the first two weeks of the

semester. Sophia did not offer a single comment during class for the first eight class

sessions, although I encouraged her participation after her art teacher informed me about

her blog posts arguing the necessity of art in the world. When I asked her about this, she

told me, “that wasn’t a part of her schoolwork” (conference, 2/7/08). Jared stopped

bringing his notebook to class after the first week because “there was nothing to write

down that [he] needed for a test” (conference, 2/9/08). Jeff, often late to class, reserved

during class discussions, and unwilling to complete several of his homework

assignments, once suggested it wasn’t necessary to generate original thought because it

was so much easier to just repeat the thoughts of others. One of the three comments he

offered during the first eight days of class discussion was, “it is more important to sound

87

smart than to be smart. You don’t need to come up with new ideas. You just need to

sound like you have new ideas” (class discussion, 1/28/08).

Others students attempted to engage in inquiry for the sake of meeting teacher

expectations rather than for the sake of posing their own questions about the nature of

academic writing. In doing so, they attempted to make the abstraction of inquiry

frameworks concrete. Candice explained that she didn’t “understand what [I] wanted her

to do” and that if I would just explain “step-by-step” how to answer an inquiry, “[she]

would do it” (class discussion, 2/4/08). This attempt to shift inquiry to a concrete,

sequential form stripped of indeterminacy and nuance would allow Candice, at least in

her estimation, to complete, or to at least attempt these writing assignments. This pattern

of thinking was evident in other students who were amenable to posing their own

questions yet also demanded the singular “right” answer for which they assumed I, as the

teacher, was ultimately looking.

Seeming contradictions like this were evident in many students’ dispositions

toward the notion of inquiry. For all the resistances evident in the opening weeks of

class, some students hinted that they wanted inquiry to be a more integral part of their

academic experience. Jeff commented that “what [he] learn[ed] and not what the teacher

teaches makes a good class because if [he] can’t make the ideas [his] own, then [he

hasn’t] learned anything” (class discussion, 1/24/08). Joyce explained that “the teacher’s

job is explaining the materials so that [she] can get it and do something with it [her]self”

(class discussion, 1/23/08). In these comments, both Jeff and Joyce complexly positioned

themselves as the generators of new knowledge at the same moment they sought clarity

88

from the teacher in exactly what and how they were supposed to learn. This suggests that

some members of the class were open to the possibility of inquiry as an instructional

vehicle so long as it provided a meaningful or applicable outcome.

This section described the implicit and stated expectations of the eleven students

featured prominently in this dissertation. It highlighted their assumptions regarding what

was supposed to occur in their high school English classroom and their hesitance towards

an embrace a novel inquiry-based curricular framework. It highlighted how the inquiry

curriculum I proposed was not the experience they assumed they would have in their final

English course of high school. In this particular class, each student’s expectation was

violated and the ways individual students made sense of these violated expectations were

as varied and multiple as the students in the class.

Fluid and Evolving Understandings of Inquiry

In considering these particular students’ initial patterns of engagement and

resistance to the inquiry curriculum, it is important to note that the twelfth-grade students

in this study did not embrace a singular disposition towards inquiry nor did they come to

understandings about the notion of inquiry in uniformly regimented, sequential ways.

Instead, deepening understandings of the notion of inquiry developed in recursive and

highly individual ways over the extent of the course. Specifically, students’ dispositions

towards and understandings of inquiry evolved through two mutually constitutive

conceptual shifts: (1) individual students, at various points in the curriculum, warmed to

the notion of inquiry and (2) the class’ collective conception of inquiry, which was

89

influenced by understandings of individual students within this class, shifted to become

more receptive to a inquiry. Notably, these individual students’ understandings and the

class’ conception of the notion of inquiry emerged only through sustained engagement

with the academic practice of writing as a mode of inquiry.

Additionally, no two students held the same understandings at the same fixed

point in time; students moved in and out of various dispositions towards inquiry. This

means that a singular, specific student could, in the span of days or even various

conversations occurring on the same day, be described as resistant to the notion of

inquiry in some circumstances, as desiring definitive answers in others, and open to the

possibility of inquiry in still other circumstances. This is representative of the multiple

and fluid positions students constructed as they worked to make sense of the notion of

inquiry in this particular academic context.

As with many of the students, the ways Jeff and Joyce took up the invitation to

inquiry changed from discussion to discussion, from class to class; their understandings

did not evolve according to a pre-determined, sequential scheme. Jeff did not easily

move to an evolved way of thinking about writing as a mode of inquiry. His conceptual

understandings of the notion of inquiry were recursive, not linear. Joyce did not come to

understand the notion of inquiry simply through academic participation in teacher-

designed tasks. Her conceptual understandings of the notion of inquiry were shaped by a

profound interaction with a course text and classmate.

Jeff’s Evolving Understandings of Inquiry

90

As described in the previous section of this chapter, Jeff evidenced an initial

resistance to both the notion of inquiry and to participation in the inquiry curriculum.

While he disengaged from the majority of class conversations during the first eight class

meetings, Jeff was not, overall, a disengaged student. In fact he sought me out in early

February to conference about his academic writing. During our lunchtime conversation,

Jeff told me that he wanted to “become a better writer,” to change from being a writer

who found writing cumbersome and disengaging to one for whom writing “[came] more

easily and was more worthwhile” (conference, 2/11/08). In this meeting, Jeff explained

that he wanted to be taught explicit strategies that would, in his estimation, make him “a

better writer” and make “writing easier.” He said that he had little initial interest in

inquiry as a way of thinking or generating ideas; he just wanted to be taught “how to

write” (conference, 2/11/08). In this way, he positioned himself as a student of writing

rather than a writer, which in some ways explains his initial resistance to the notion of

inquiry and the possibilities for writing as a mode of inquiry.

Yet the fact that he met with me on his own time to discuss his writing

specifically and the nature of academic writing generally underscored his deep and

inquiring thoughts about writing. During the conference, whether intentionally or not, he

positioned himself in complicated and seemingly contradictory ways. On one hand, he

made it clear that he envisioned writing as a series of discrete skills, that he did not

necessarily buy into the notion of inquiry, and that his responsibility as a student was to

solicit advice on writing from an expert, the teacher. Yet at the same time, he positioned

himself as expert in what he needed. He needed to make the act of writing “worthwhile,”

91

a suggestion that in his estimation meaningful writing involved a high degree of personal

investment. In his academic writing, he wanted to complete assignments as per the

teacher’s requirements and simultaneously wanted to find a way to make engagement in

academic writing more meaningful. These complex dispositions suggested Jeff did view

writing, in some ways, as a mode of inquiry, even if he did not necessarily utilize this

term or consistently embrace this disposition.

Jeff’s disposition towards inquiry was not only marked by this in-any-given-

moment complexity. It was also marked by shifts in his belief about the nature of and

place for inquiry in academic contexts. Jeff was not disengaged from the act of writing;

he was disengaged when ideas in his writing were not wholly his. When provided the

opportunity to voice his opinion, Jeff generated powerfully original insights. But when

pushed against a deadline, he relegated those rich ideas to the draft pile so he could

complete the assignment. As Jeff came to understand that inquiry is an on-going process

—and that his inquires were meant to capture his understandings at a given moment

rather than a conclusive, immutable understanding—he became more engaged in the

process of writing and in the creation of his own inquiries.

This shift over the course from initial disengaged resistance and tentative

curiosity to openness to inquiry was especially apparent in ways Jeff built his final course

essay. Jeff, who unquestioningly accepted zeros on two previous assignments and was

aware of the fact that he could earn an F for the second semester and still pass the course

with a C, requested additional time to write and refine his final essay. Jeff’s request for

an extension suggested that he had a degree of investment in this particular essay, which

92

was “to take a single concept you learned and to trace your understandings of this word

over the course of the course.”

As Jeff wrote about his evolving understanding of discourse, his essay dutifully

marched through conceptual definitions and paraphrases of ideas his classmates and I

offered in class. He paraphrased class discussion by defining discursive norms as “codes

of behavior and conversation,” arguing with a sense of detachment that he and his class

moved from “having stale boring discussion filled with platitude and basic summary to

vetting our ideas and…understanding [texts] on another level” (final, 4/26/08). Jeff

described discussions as “expanding [his] horizons” and described himself as finding

“passion and originality” in writing about The House on Mango Street by Sandra

Cisneros (1984). Punctuated with cliché, the seemingly teacher-pleasing text even

concluded with a line of praise for me, explaining how much he believed he learned that

year.

Yet the final essay did not conclude there; it continued for an additional three

pages. In this second section of his final, he deconstructed, analyzed, and critiqued the

initial three pages, describing them as the final he would have written had he not

participated in this inquiry curriculum. Jeff analyzed how as a dutiful high school writer,

he would have echoed other people’s ideas to “ensure successful assignment completion”

(final, 4/26/08). He reflected on his initial response to what The House on Mango Street

suggested about writing, claiming that “[his] negative impression…prevented him from

thinking about what Esperanza’s character might teach [him] about writing” (final,

4/26/08). Reflecting on this particular writing experience, he described that he “didn’t

93

put in the energy to figure out what [he] wanted to say because it was easier to say that

[he] just wasn’t interested in a girl book.” Evident in these understandings is a

simultaneous discomfort and pleasure that comes from his analysis of how his thinking

about the concept of inquiry and his engagement in writing as a mode of inquiry evolved

over the course of the semester.

Joyce’s Evolving Understandings of Inquiry

In a traditional sense, Joyce was good at doing school. She easily applied discrete

strategies learned in class to her homework or a test, although she quickly abandoned a

previous strategy when a new one was offered. Fastidious in following directions and

meeting the expectations of assignments, Joyce met with me once a week during

Academic Recovery to make sure that she was maintaining her A. Joyce also believed

that teachers had answers they were meant to give to students and experienced great

frustration when she felt I did not provide her with the answers to which she was entitled.

On one such occasion, Joyce set up a conference to talk about a poetry explication

of Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer,” a poem we discussed in the first week of our inquiry

into writing. Joyce was having a particularly difficult time negotiating the poem and the

“What does it mean to be a writer?” assignment. In a moment of great frustration, she

blurted out, “You are not doing a very good job here. You need to just tell me what you

want and I will do it. Just tell me what the poem means so that I can complete the

assignment and write about it” (conference, 2/4/08). Later that same day, she visited with

her previous year’s English teacher, telling her that she was upset because “she was not

94

getting the grade she deserved” (field notes, 2/4/08) in my English class. In this example,

Joyce’s view of inquiry was a series of questions that lead to a specific answer.

Discussions, especially individual conferences, were meant to clarify the singular

meaning that she believed I had decided so that she could complete a task and earn an

“A”. Joyce’s frustration stemmed from her initial sense that ideas are fully formed

instead of always in process, her sense that ideas are transferred from teacher to student

instead of built in conversation and engagement with oral and written text.

Joyce’s misconception of inquiry as a sequence of questions and tasks that

ultimately lead to a definitive answer became more apparent as the class used the online

forum of google.docs to give specific shape to individual and collective inquiries of

writerly identities. google.docs is an open internet-based application that gives multiple

writers access to common or collaboratively written documents via the Microsoft Office

Suite. In this vein, we used a google.doc on which students could write their name or

post anonymously to brainstorm and share potential student inquiries. In the process of

posting, students could respond to any of the following teacher prompts or could generate

their own thoughts and questions about writing.

Figure 6. Prompts for google.doc. These questions were posed

What does it mean to be a reader, writer, or thinker? What do you expect to learn in school? What is at stake when you write?What are the benefits and drawback of writing on an electronic forum like this one?What question do you want to pose about writing?

95

during class and students were asked to write in response to them

on a collaborative google.doc

These questions were intended to tap into students’ understandings of learning as social

and of arguments as built through engagement with others. Yet even the very nature of

google.docs as social collaborative writing space was reified for Joyce as she wrote:

I see [google.docs] being helpful to the teacher as a way to coordinate and communicate certain assignments with students. It is more like an instant message way of connecting with students and assigning work rather than an e-mail where it could take a while to read and turn in. The application is a great way for the students and the teacher to know where they are on the curriculum of the week or month.

Joyce took up our class google.doc as space where teacher demands were clarified and

individual student requests for clarity were met, even though the google.doc was set up as

a space to pose questions and to wrestle through potential inquiries. To Joyce the

invitation to inquiry initially meant that clarifying questions about writing tasks were

definitively answered.

Although frustrated, Joyce continued participating actively in class and continued

meeting with me on a weekly basis. In late-February, she was still unclear about the

notion of inquiry, although she diligently and dutifully completed assignments meant to

guide her towards a personally meaningful inquiry topic but instead completed for

completion’s sake. For example, in response to an assignment requiring students to read

one two-page excerpt by one of four literacy scholars, she sent a clarifying e-mail asking:

“Is reading all you want us to do?...How will [we] be graded on this?” (e-mail, 2/17/08).

96

Joyce’s emphasis continued to be on task completion rather than engagements with ideas

that might prove meaningful to her.

Yet her emphasis on grades and preoccupation with identifying the presumably

singular correct answer shifted in light of a classroom epiphany. This occurred the day

that Kyle shared an early draft of his essay about writing to make sense of his world after

the death of his father. This essay deeply impacted Joyce, who for the first time

recognized the social nature of writing within a classroom community. What Kyle had

written and read powerfully affected her and those effects were evident in her own

writing. In an essay entitled “Greener on the Other Side,” she wrote that as Kyle shared

his piece “the class was in awe, and [I] began to wonder how it would feel to lose a

parent” (essay, 3/24/08). As she drafted this essay, she spoke to me about how she had

never really felt moved by someone’s school writing and that she admired Kyle’s bravery

in sharing. Hearing Kyle’s essay draft read aloud was a pivotal moment for Joyce. In

her “Greener on the Other Side” essay, she, for the first time abandoned the five-

paragraph structure and her unwavering use of the objective third person, effacing the

clear line she constructed between academic writing and personal writing. Using the

strategy of intertwining personal narrative writing within expository assignments that was

evident in Kyle’s writing and discussed during class, she connected her experiences

inside and outside of the class to her writing. Yet even more importantly, this recognition

and embrace of the intersection of the academic and the personal evolved into an inquiry

framework that informed and guided Joyce’s writing throughout the rest of the semester.

97

This move towards inquiry continued in her final. This final essay opened with

the sentence, “This was my story; this was a lie or imagination, which ever you like,”

marking an embrace of ambiguity absent earlier in the semester (final, 5/1/08). But this

embrace of ambiguity is not an anything goes, collapse into relativism. Her openly

defiant, second-person essay argued the concept of intended audience is “an obsolete idea

because the internet ruins the luxury of only the intended audience ever seeing the piece”

and increases the likelihood of a piece being read out of context (final, 5/1/08). Arguing

that it is better to write as if your work will be published on the internet for anyone to

read or misread, Joyce asserts an idea countercurrent to the dominant understanding of

the class. Her willingness to challenge this understanding—that intended audience

dramatically informs writing’s meaning—denoted a radically different disposition from

the opening weeks of the class. Joyce was no longer interested in repeating what I or her

classmates thought; she was more interested in uncovering what she thought through

inquiry.

Joyce’s changed disposition was evidenced in her willingness and capacity to

interrogate academic questions as informed by her own experiences and those of her

classmates. Over the course of the semester, she recognized that the analysis of academic

content was not a neutral task best approached with objectivity and detachment. Instead

she came to understand the act of writing and constructing academic knowledge was

situated within her own necessarily subjective reality as well as the social interactions

and experiences that inform that reality, an understanding at which she arrived after a

98

sustained struggle with the very notion of inquiry and a series of missteps in her own

inquiries into writing.

Conclusion

The inquiry-centered curriculum to which I invited students initially stood largely

in tenuous relation to the traditional literature-based curriculum that students expected.

Because of this, the invitation to inquiry was taken up with various degrees of resistance

and engagement during the initial weeks of and throughout the course. Many students in

this class were initially reluctant to consider a new way of “doing school” during their

final semester of senior year. Several were even initially hostile to the invitation to

inquiry, which challenged the implicit rules for “doing school” that they negotiated so

deftly in previous years. A notable few, like Kyle, eagerly welcomed the opportunity to

write in ways more relevant to themselves. This suggests that although there were

patterns of engagement like the ones I describe above, there was no singular, unified way

students took up the invitation to inquiry in this high school classroom.

This underscores the impossibility of reducing the invitation to inquiry to a series

of sequential steps to be followed or a series of best practices to be shared and replicated

across pedagogical contexts. There was singular inquiry strategy that extended to all

students in this inquiry-curriculum. Instead, these findings illuminate multiple and

evolving dispositions towards inquiry for the particular students highlighted in this

chapter. Yet how these students took up the invitation to inquiry, while not

generalizable, holds potential transferability as teachers and teacher-educators consider

99

the experiences of my students and use this study’s thick descriptions as the starting point

for their own questions about the construction of an inquiry-curriculum that explores the

experience of writing in a high school setting.

In additional to this transferability, there is also internal generalizability,

characterized as “the generalizability of a conclusion within the setting or group studied”

(Maxwell, 2005, p. 115). Specifically one overarching trend that emerged was that

students’ embrace of the notion of inquiry as a way of thinking and of writing as a mode

of inquiry correlated to a student’s desire (at any given moment) to be seen as a writer

rather than a student of writing. This was evidenced by Kyle’s narrative about the loss of

his father that began in some ways during the first week of class and continued through

his final. This was evidenced by Joyce’s shift from a student who dutifully followed

directions to a writer whose texts challenged assumptions held by the class. This was

evidenced by Jeff’s careful analysis of who he was as a student versus who he was as a

writer. As students embraced the disposition that they were writers, they more readily

accepted the invitation to inquiry at various moments in the curriculum.

This chapter also finds that students in the class became more open to the notion

of inquiry and to the possibility for writing as a mode inquiry as the semester progressed.

When students’ questions emerged from personal experiences or curiosities, students

tolerated ambiguity more easily and more readily revisited their questions about writing

through discussion or revision.

This did not occur naturally or easily. This inquiry-centered curriculum was

marked by moments of tension and contested expectations. As the teacher, I worked to

100

frame these as positive spaces in which students were invited to develop and share their

writing and insights and to revisit and reconsider prior understandings through class

discussions and writing. To do this, the tenor of the class was simultaneously pragmatic

and reflective.

Students had specific writing and reading tasks to complete, but the content of

their writing was not specified. Additionally, these students were invited to adopt

practices like annotation to fit their own needs. The unexpected inquiry into annotation

as a mode of inquiry is the subject of the next chapter.

101

CHAPTER 5

ANNOTATION AS A MODE AND SUBJECT OF INQUIRY

Tracing the history of annotation practices from the teachings of Erasmus in the

early sixteenth-century to modern pedagogies and reading preferences, Jackson (2001)

defines annotation as any markings on a text that are “a product of the interaction

between text and reader” (p. 100). Her study of thousands of often anonymously

annotated texts found value in readers’ notes, insisting that annotations are significant in

capturing in-the-moment reactions and understandings. In this same vein, Tierney (1998)

argues that annotations are vitally important ways readers can make sense of their own

understandings by “keeping traces of what they do, …by pursuing ways to depict their

journey, and by setting aside time to contemplate their progress and efforts” (p. 375).

Additionally, Johnston (2003) argues that teachers should underscore the importance of

annotation, suggesting teachers notice, record, and factor into classroom assessment

measures the annotations of students. These findings suggest that self-guided readers’

annotations hold the potential to be a powerful literacy practice.

Yet few, if any, of the twelfth-grade students in this study initially had much

experience with annotation as this kind of self-guided meaning-making practice in

academic contexts. They may have annotated outside of school for their own personal

reasons, but in school they took notes most often to capture an instructor’s

understandings or to prepare for assessments of content mastery. Based on my

experience as a teacher within this school, I suggest that this occurred for two reasons.

102

Unable to write in school-owned texts, they viewed the practice of writing down thoughts

as divorced from the acts of reading that inspired those thoughts. For them, annotation

was synonymous with capturing content after the reading was complete so that they

would be successful on an upcoming assessment, not as a way to capture their in-process

understandings, reactions, and questions. Secondly, while annotation and note-making

practices were likely discussed and used in humanities courses, notes were largely

viewed as a device for textual recall across the majority of their other courses. In the

majority of non-humanities courses and even in some humanities courses, annotation

involved the capture of content understanding as the primary aim, while writing and the

demonstration of students’ insights were largely viewed as secondary. This means that

the invitation to view annotation as an interaction between text and reader where meaning

gets made and not found was a largely novel academic experience, in much the same way

as was the invitation to inquiry.

As the particular twelfth-grade students in this study recursively revisited the

notion of inquiry throughout the semester, they came to view the potential for academic

reading and writing as a conduit to their own, rather than just the teacher’s, questions and

insights. Students warmed to the possibilities that texts were not necessarily containers

for pre-determined answers. In this vein, many of these students changed the ways they

read and wrote in response to texts. Students who initially concentrated their annotations

on comprehension and recall, now had an additional purpose for reading: to allow a text

to inspire their own ideas, and a new purpose for making annotations: to write themselves

into these insights.

103

It is worth noting that the kind of mini-inquiry into the annotation practices of this

particular twelfth-grade class was not planned as a part of the research design. But it was

the very design of the inquiry-based curriculum at the heart of the study that allowed it to

emerge.

The first part of this chapter, then, describes and analyzes students’ initial

dispositions towards annotation. It demonstrates how all twenty-six students’ initial

sense of annotation was different from my understanding of annotation. They viewed

annotation as a product that demonstrated their completed reading and highlighted

aspects of content; I viewed annotation as a process for making meaning in light of a text.

The second part of this chapter explores the tensions and successes that emerged

as the notion of annotation evolved, as note-making in this particular classroom context

became less about proving understandings of teacher-content and more about particular

students’ insights in light of their specific understandings of and interactions with text.

The final part of this chapter explores students’ annotation practices in light of

their engagement with challenging scholarly texts. It explains how students’ experience

in reading for explicitly stated main ideas and their initial resistance to re-reading texts

made “talking back” to scholarly texts particularly challenging and how overcoming

these challenges proved particularly worthwhile for several of the students.

Initial Dispositions Towards Annotation

Annotation as a class literacy practice was initially introduced as a course

assignment; I required students to annotate what they read, providing them with writeable

104

photocopies or large 4 x 6 post-it notes on which they were accountable to write

elaborated thoughts or questions. I made it explicitly clear that annotations were

something that, as a teacher, I expected them, as students, to do.

In addition to stating that texts needed to be annotated as a requirement of this

class, I also provided students the opportunity to discuss what they considered the

purpose and value of annotations. It was in this way that I came to discover that the vast

majority of the class initially viewed the crafting of annotations as a task to complete

rather than as a practice leading to generative thought. Candice did not annotate because

she was convinced that “if [ideas were] important then [the teacher] will talk about

[them] in class” (class discussion, 1/29/08). Dylan argued that, “the main idea [was]

always in the first paragraph [in non-fiction] and as long as [readers] understand that then

[they] don’t have to read the rest [of the passage] or write anything in the margins” (class

discussion, 1/29/08). Michael asserted that he just “need[ed] to understand main ideas

and annotations just tripped [him] up on the details” (class discussion, 1/29/08). As a

whole, the class largely viewed annotations initially as pointless because they viewed

writing as the presentation of facts gleaned from the act of reading. In this way, the

majority of these twelfth-grade students initially viewed reading and writing as

complimentary tasks where the first involved “doing” the work of reading and the second

involved “proving” that the reading was done through an act of writing. As readers,

students captured the thoughts of someone else. As writers, they transcribed these

captured thoughts.

105

This sense of annotation as reading task rather than meaningful literacy practice

was prominent in our discussion of annotation in advance of reading Richard Wilbur’s

poem “The Writer”. When I asked students how many of them considered themselves

annotators and why they made the annotations they did, this is the conversation that

ensued:

Grace: I highlight. [pause] When I read something I don’t understand. Does that count?

Pratt: Yes, highlighting counts as annotation.

Bryan: Yeah, but I highlight everything (laughter) so nothing is really highlighted.

Samantha: I underline and the same thing happens to me.

More laughter

Bryan: I kind of like highlight entire paragraphs and then later wonder what’s the point of this? In my copy of the PowerGame (a text that students were required to read for their American Government classes), there is this much text [student opens his thumbs and forefinger about six inches] and except for the word “this” everything is highlighted.

Pratt: How do you use the things that you write or highlight? Perhaps in class discussions, or when you are sitting down to write a paper?

Samantha: I write stuff down too. I always intend to go back to look at them; I just never do.

Michael: I just never look back at them so I don’t bother to take notes [when I read.]

Bryan: I highlight and it helps me to focus when I’m reading. Otherwise, it just goes right through.

Alexandra: I’m like Michael. I just don’t usually take notes. It disrupts my reading.

106

(class discussion, 1/29/08)

Within this conversation, students suggested three kinds of annotations—highlights,

underlines, and marginal comments—and four annotation practices: (1) marking a text to

physically slow down the speed of reading (2) marking a text to demonstrate to a teacher

task completion (3) marking a text for the, often unrealized, purpose of revisiting and

reconsidering elements of the text and (4) marking a text with the intention of quickly

locating an excerpt for class discussion or inclusion in an essay.

These practices were particularly interesting because each situated annotation as a

task to be completed so a student could meet a teacher’s needs. For example, Bryan and

Samantha highlighted everything to ensure that they captured what they believed the

teacher saw as the main point of the article. For them, annotation was a demonstration

of assignment completion rather than an engagement with idea formation. I would argue

that Samantha’s intention to “go back to look” at annotations suggests what a student

might suspect a teacher would expect to hear. Yet Samantha did not return to her

annotations because once she learned “the way” of interpreting the text in a subsequent

class discussion, she believed that she no longer needed to think about it independently

(conference, 2/26/08). She dutifully completed annotations yet came to class with the

expectation that she would “be filled” with the correct way to make sense of the text.

Samantha annotated out of obligation.

This analysis is further supported by comments made at different times and by

different students. In a conference, Joyce talked about how “important it was that [the

teacher] knew that she was trying her best to find the correct analysis” (conference,

107

2/26/08). Joyce’s search for the “correct analysis” posited knowledge as existing

singularly within the text and was juxtaposed against the way she talked about herself as

a generator of knowledge in our initial conversation. In the excerpt from January 29’s

class discussion cited in the previous paragraph, Michael also suggested a kind of

pointlessness of taking annotations that he does not find useful and will never revisit so

he simply does not make annotations as he reads. Like many other students Joyce and

Michael initially viewed annotations as serving the teacher’s rather than their own

academic needs.

Annotations as “Talking Back”

While this inquiry curriculum challenged students’ initial sense of annotation as

primarily a vessel for recording the ideas and insights of another writer, this does not

suggest that comprehension of texts was unimportant in this particular academic context.

Instead it suggests that for annotations to be meaningful two equally important conditions

needed to be met. These particular students needed to both understand deeply and

specifically the arguments a text presented and they needed to have something to “say

back” to this text. Meaningful annotations always did both of these things.

This section traces how some students began “talking back” to texts and using

their annotations to come full to class discussions. In this content, “talking back” implied

understanding a text on two levels: understanding what the text asserted and negotiating

how this assertion connected to students’ own sense-making in a particular moment.

“Coming full to discussion” meant that the insights students shared in discussion and

108

writing worked on both of these levels of meaning, an academic disposition initially

suggested by me but ultimately adopted by many students in this class.

This means that students’ deepening understandings of annotation had a profound

and concrete impact on their academic work. It shifted their focus in reading and writing

from marginally capturing content to wrestling through conceptual understandings, from

proving they understood what they read through writing to using writing to prove a

student-generated point or to ponder a text-inspired question a piece of writing raised.

The Case of Samantha

In an effort to get acquainted with students and to understand their dispositions

toward both the notion of inquiry and the possibilities for writing as a mode of inquiry, I

met with each member of the class in an individual conference during the first weeks of

the course. The majority of the conferences could be described as dutiful and most

progressed in either one of two directions: teachers and students getting to know each

other through an exchange of personal pleasantries or a discussion of recent assignments

and expectations for the completion of those as well as upcoming academic assignments.

Samantha’s conference, though, was not about either the personal or the academic

as I framed them in the previous sentence. Instead her conference centered around and

recognized the importance and interconnection of both. In this conference, Samantha

made it clear that she wanted two things from our meeting: to understand what I expected

in assignments so she could meet those expectations and to be recognized as a deep

thinker and writer with her own insights and ideas. During our conference, she asked

109

clarifying questions about the work posted on our collaborative electronic forums as well

as shared a short story that she started writing last year but never completed. As our

conversation continued, she described herself as someone who “like[d] school but not the

work” and who was “interested in what other people had to say” but was often “bored

listening to people in class” (conference, 2/11/08). These seeming contradictions were

especially interesting to me.

Specifically, I asked why she was “bored listening to people in class” when she

was “interested in what other people had to say?” Samantha responded that her

classmates didn’t really share their own ideas; they really shared different versions of the

teacher’s idea. She wasn’t interested in that in so much as she wanted to hear her

classmates’ thoughts. She confessed that there did not really “seem to be enough of a

place for students’ own ideas” because “teachers had so much [content] they needed to

cover”(conference, 2/11/08). In her view, classrooms were places for getting to the

teacher’s understanding, even when her own or her classmates understandings seemed

more provocative or interesting.

As she continued to speak, she was both proud of and befuddled by the fact that

she could write a paper “without having to think much about it” (conference, 2/11/08).

She laughingly explained that she “didn’t have to think about what she was going to

argue [when she wrote a paper. She] just needed to make sure that [she] answered the

prompt, included some quotes, and [her] paragraphs followed [the format] main point,

subpoint, evidence, explanation, subpoint, evidence, explanation, subpoint, evidence,

explanation, conclusion” (conference, 2/11/08). That she articulated this point

110

demonstrated that she had thought deeply about her previous academic writing

experiences. In her recognition of, analysis of, and desire to problematize her own writing

practices, Samantha implicitly suggested that she was interested in deep contemplation

and recursive analysis of her own writing practices.

Yet this complexity of thought, the recognition of her multiple positions as

student of other people’s ideas and generator of her own ideas, and the nuanced self-

reflection evidenced in this oral conversation was largely absent in her early writings and

initial annotations. On an i-note posting, Samantha wrote, “Being a high school writer

means thinking deeply about an idea and then sharing the ideas you develop.” In offering

this point, Samantha utilized two prescriptive writing strategies. First she used the

prompt question—What does it mean to be a high school writer?—to develop a

conclusive thesis in the way that students are trained to be successful on standardized

tests. She took the prompt question—“What does it mean to be a high school writer?”—

and reworded it as a statement—“Being a high school writer means…..” The second

prescriptive writing strategy she used was the restatement of points made during

discussion and posted on previous i-notes. In her academic experiences, Samantha

learned that her role as a student was to adopt strategies taught to her by teachers and to

apply them to her work. According to Samantha, “the ideas interesting to her could wait

until after a teacher’s points were understood” (conference, 2/11/08).

Recognizing, inscribing, and honoring the ideas she generated while reading

involved a major philosophical shift for Samantha. In Samantha’s mind, the creation of

textual annotations was associated with reading as a demonstration of understanding, not

111

a questioning or developing of novel content. Annotation making was a reading process

that helped her to find an answer or solution, not a writing process that enabled her to

generate questions or insights. According to Samantha when teachers wrote marginal

comments in an essay draft, they “clarified what [she] was supposed to do [to meet the

teacher’s expectations]” (conference, 2/11/08). When she wrote marginal comments in

response to something that she read or in preparation for something she would write, it

was to uncover the singular “meaning of the text” for which the teacher was looking

(conference, 2/11/08). In this way, Samantha viewed the act of writing as it potentially

centered on her personal thoughts and inquiries as divorced from the act of reading,

which was viewed as the comprehension of academic sources.

This was evident as Samantha completed annotations of Wilbur’s “The Writer.”

112

Figure 7: Annotations on “The Writer.”

Samantha’s annotations on what it means to write.

These annotations contained paraphrases of stanzas, such as “stops, thinks, keeps

writing” to describe the fourth stanza and “he hoped the heavy burden of writing doesn’t

hurt her emotionally” to describe the third stanza. They also contained questions of

content clarification such as “what’s a gunwale?,” “prow—definition?,” and “how young

could she really be if she is writing a story?” When it was time to talk with a partner,

Samantha and her partner Blake, who did not complete annotations, used Samantha’s

annotations as the starting point for their conversation. Even though they worked from

113

the same poem with the same annotations in the margins, each participated in the act of

“talking back” in different ways.

While Blake and Samantha spent the initial moments of their discussion clarifying

elements of content Samantha found unclear in her reading, their conversation soon

turned silent; they felt they had little to discuss. Without teacher generated questions to

guide their discussion, they felt “stuck” (class discussion, 2/6/08). While other pairs of

students questioned whether the speaker was the writer’s mother or father, Samantha and

Blake defaulted to the father as speaker. While other pairs of students, worked to figure

out what was happening in the final six stanzas, Blake and Samantha waited for me to

visit their group in the hopes that I would tell them what the poem was about.

To encourage them to look more deeply, I joined their conversation and offered

the following question, “What do you think is a meaning in this poem?” This question

led to the following exchange.

Pratt: Well, what do you think is a meaning in this poem? Any thoughts on why I might have asked us to read this when we are participating in an inquiry this semester?

Samantha: What do you mean “the meaning of the poem?” I don’t read poetry. What are you looking for?

Pratt: Meaning is what you think, not just what the poem said. There is a distinction there. You need both. With that in mind, what would you say if I asked you, ‘What do you see as the stakes of this poem?’

Blake: What do you mean by the stakes?

Pratt: By the stakes, I mean (pause) I mean what meanings do you see as what you are meant to take away from this poem?

114

Samantha: [inaudible] Well my question is what exactly happens and why does this person change how he looks at the writer from being caring to something else?

Pratt: I’m curious what you mean? What gave you the impression of a change in the person? Is there a change in the poem? Can you tell us where you see this shift?

Blake: [Pointing to the first line of the sixth stanza.] Well, the writer thinks back to the past to the thing at the window. (pause) Well there is that thing at the window; it’s a monster.

Pratt: Is it really a monster?

Blake: Well they retreated from a dark creature so that’s what I assumed.

Pratt: Go back. Look again at the specific language of the poem. Remember, when you are in a dialogue with a text, you need to hear what the text is saying before you can answer back with your analysis.

(silence)

Blake: Uh, it’s a starling. It’s a bird.

Samantha: See I didn’t know that.

Pratt: Those are the content questions that you can ask each other to clarify. Now what is happening to this bird and why would the speaker of the poem describe it that way? See how we need both parts of this question [of meaning], the what is happenings and why is it important, to really push us towards meaning?

(silence)

Samantha: It’s trying to get out…..

Blake: But it keeps banging into the wall until it bleeds.

Samantha: Ah, it’s saying that she is stuck when she’s writing like the bird is stuck. (deep sigh) But I can’t do that by myself without you [a teacher] asking me those kinds of questions.

(class discussion, 2/6/08)

115

In their small group, I suggested that Samantha and Blake use a two-part annotation

strategy. First I suggested they focus on clarifying what the content meant and then focus

on what this meaning suggested to them.

While my attempts to move them from a singularly comprehension-based,

content-centered discussion and towards an engagement with the poem independent of

the teacher was largely unsuccessful, I learned a great deal about why they felt “stuck.”

Samantha wanted a teacher-supplied strategy to help her arrive at the correct, pre-

determined analysis of the poem’s content before she was willing to assert her analytical

insights, or what she called her personal opinion about what the poem meant. Samantha

sought to comprehend the text as she asked “what exactly I wanted” and “what happens.”

When she posed a tentative analysis in the form of the question, “Why does this person

change how he looks at the writer from being caring to something else?,” she hints

towards an analytical insight without asserting it directly. As the conversation continued,

Samantha accumulated more “clues” as to what she was supposed to comprehend in the

poem. After she accumulated multiple validating cues, she felt confident enough to

suggest her understanding of content, which was evident as she explicated the poem’s

metaphor of a young girl writing as like a dazed starling. What was missing were

Samantha’s own insights.

On the other hand, Blake was extremely confident in asserting his own insights,

even though he had no annotations and little evidence that he read the poem in advance of

class. He believed his analysis of the poem was apt and meaningful, convinced there was

no such thing as a misreading so long as he could point to a specific piece of text from

116

the poem, even if this evidence did not support his analysis. Blake’s initial reading of the

poem and his suggestion of an assertive, albeit erroneous, reading of “it is a monster”

demonstrated his cursory impression, one he viewed as complete and correct “because he

read, wrote, and then came up with his own idea” (class discussion, 2/6/08). In his

estimation isn’t that all I, as the teacher, could have expected him to do? How could his

experience be wrong? He believed his point was valid because he generated his own idea

yet was unconcerned that this idea was not supported by the text.

Samantha’s and Blake’s understanding of annotation as a meaningful writing

practice required that they find finding a balance between these two ways of making

sense of text: understanding content and “talking back” to it with your own insights.

Over the semester, their understandings of annotations as a writing practice evolved

through a process of recursive engagement and reflection. By the end of the semester,

each enacted a more balanced approach to the crafting of annotations, using them as a

mode of inquiry.

When Samantha returned to her marginal annotations of Wilbur’s (2004) “The

Writer” later in the semester, she developed insights about writing as an act of identity.

While these insights were apparent in our initial oral conference, they were now

becoming more apparent in her textual representations of her self and her ideas. When

describing herself as a writer, Samantha referenced Wilbur’s poem and wrote that she too

“[was] a young girl with no clear sense of writing identity” and that she was “lost in the

sense of figuring out how to write” (essay, 2/20/08). In describing her own adherence to

prescriptive writing strategies, she returned to the Wilbur poem again to describe her

117

beliefs about who she was as a high school writer. She explained that students like her

were inspired by “the sense of fear [when they write]. Except in the poem the dad is

afraid. When students write, we are afraid” (essay, 3/11/08). In this essay draft,

Samantha described herself and her classmates, “silenc[ing] the voices of curiosity of the

unknown because we fear stepping out of our comfort zones and becoming vulnerable”

(essay, 3/11/08). Over the course of the semester, Samantha came to believe that that

“writing [was] easier and more meaningful when [she had] something to say and

sometimes [she needed] to write herself into those ideas” (final writer’s memo, 5/1/08).

Blake’s sense of annotations as tool for understanding both the texts we read and

his reactions to these texts also evolved. Blake’s second essay contained the

sophisticated thesis, I include below.

While perusing the wide array of texts surrounding our class, I noted my diligent annotations in some texts, while other texts were barely met by my pencil. Some of the texts captured my interest….Other pieces failed to bring me in….This, in itself, is an embodiment of what quality is, which is why I chose to use this word as the center of my final essay. Quality separates what you like and what you don’t like, and what interests and makes sense to you and what doesn’t….Determining what makes a certain trend popular, or cultural practice relevant, or act perceived as “better” than others are questions of quality in their barebones form. The more I pondered, the more certain pieces [we studied] began to fit together. (essay, 3/13/08)

As suggested by his writing, Blake not only revised his course texts and annotations but

he worked to make sense of why he marked some texts and not others.

In conclusion, Samantha and Blake each came to understand that engagement

with text marks a potential starting point for idea generation. This was a radical, freeing,

and simultaneously overwhelming concept for these two high school seniors who

118

explored the connection between reading, writing, and idea generation after recursively

revisiting these practices over the course of the semester.

The Case of Dylan

While the crafting and revisiting of annotations was initially envisioned to be a

small part of the students’ and my inquiry into academic writing, it continued to play a

large part in our academic conversations. In fact, as we considered the possibilities for

written annotations as a mode of inquiry, I directed students to the URL for Elizabeth

Bishop’s (1936) “The Map” on PoemHunter.com. I purposefully selected a poem by

Elizabeth Bishop because a sense of complexity and multiplicity dominates her work; her

poetry does not allow for singular interpretations. After students read the poem, I asked

them, “What does this poem mean? And why is it acceptable for this poem to have many

multiple meanings but novels and essays….and people…we think they are only allowed

to have one?”

Even with the previous annotation experiences with Wilbur’s (2004) “The

Writer,” excerpts from a bells hooks’ interview (Perry, 1963), and weeks of first pass

annotations in response to academic texts like Dawkins’ (2006) The Selfish Gene and

Hunt’s (2002) Misunderstanding the Assignment and excerpts from literacy scholarship,

students repeatedly demanded to know the “answer” to what the poem meant and “what

connection” I was trying to make between this poem and the other texts that we were

reading.

119

To provide students a way into the poem and away from their search for teacher-

determined meaning, I directed them to the lines below.

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimohas oiled it (:9-11)

and asked what they thought “Labrador’s yellow” meant. Marissa quickly asserted, “it

was the color of a dog. You know that golden color some Labrador retrievers are.

Newfoundland is that color yellow on the map” (class discussion, 2/29/08). I asked

students “now could it mean something else as well? Are there any possibilities that this

might also imply something else?” (class discussion, 2/29/08). My question was greeted

by silence, until I told students to “take ten minutes and see what they could learn about

any or all of the words in the excerpt” (class discussion, 2/29/08). Since every student in

class had an internet-accessible laptop, they immediately searched the web to respond to

my query. Most students paired up with people sitting near them; Jeanne, Alexandra,

Christian, and Michael worked independently. As the click of keystrokes and the

murmur of voices filled the room, Marissa asked questions about what process they

needed to use to “get to the answer,” still assuming that a singular correct response was

the focus of our work. “Can we use Wikipedia?,” Maura asked. “Yes as a place to

begin. But it should lead you to a source that allows you to make an argument.” Jeff

asked, “Can’t we just go to ProQuest and get a literary review of the poem so that it tells

us what the poem means?” “Sure, you can use ProQuest, but remember, our purpose

isn’t to complete a literary analysis. We are using this poem as a way to understand

multiple meanings in service of our discussions of literacy, identity, and writing.” “Why

120

not use Bishop’s own background? She used to live in Canada, so this poem is just a

description of her life,” asserted Marissa. “Of course you can use Bishop’s background

but remember this information must still be in service of our guiding question about

multiple meanings and identity.” As they read and shared their findings, students were

surprised to learn that Newfoundland and Labrador are two regions of a singular

Canadian province with Newfoundland depicted above Labrador on a map. Most people

call the province Newfoundland, placing Labrador in its shadow metaphorically as well

as literally through its placement on the map. Suddenly what was initially viewed as a

vehicle for a description of color became a larger idea worth exploring in itself: are there

ways that places and people are made to seem inferior or subordinate to others? I

suggested that this was what we were doing in our own inquiries into writing. We were

taking something, writing, that has been viewed as the vehicle for describing classroom

content and looking at the ways that writers do not have to view themselves as servants to

this content.

As a follow up to our discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s (1936) “The Map,” I asked

students to select one of the following three poems—Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,”

Cisneros’ “My Wicked, Wicked Ways,” or Rich’s “North American Time”—locate them

online, and respond to the following question: What might one of these poems teach us

about multiple meanings and how might this connect to what we understand about

writing and writers?

Several students, even as late as more than halfway through the course, found

themselves still unsure of, resistant to, or uncomfortable with annotation as a meaning-

121

making rather than a meaning recording practice, especially when responding to dense of

complex texts. Dylan was one of those students. As we continued our discussion of

poetry, Dylan continued to view the practice of reading a text as an act of locating pre-

determined meanings. If the meanings were not clear, then the issue was in the text, not

in his interpretation of the text.

Why do writers try to be so complex like that? I mean like….Obviously they are really good at what they do. I feel like they are just attempting to be better than everyone else by other means of expressing themselves.(class discussion, 4/8/08)

His comment surprised me. As a class, I thought the notion of multiple meanings was

now an academic norm, especially at this point in the semester. Dylan challenged this

sense of acquired communal classroom practices and insisted that his sense of annotation

as meaning making continued was highly individual.

Dylan, who made his distaste of academic writing and his resistance to inquiry

obvious from the opening days of class, stated in his first essay draft that his greatest

struggle in writing was “deciding whether or not [he] should fully speak [his] mind (essay

draft, 1/31/08). Writing an essay entitled “High School Writer,” he argued successful

writing in high school involved meeting a teacher’s expectations rather than honoring a

writer’s desire to share ideas.

It means compos[ing] an argument based on what the teacher taught, and then manifest[ing] this obedience in a double-spaced, MLA formatted piece of garbage….To give high school writing more credit than this would be a fallacy….Because the only thing being a high school writer represents is a block of time designated to write a piece of crap for some teacher that you can barely relate to. (essay draft, 1/31/08)

122

Dylan prided himself on this resistance to school, a stance that set the background for him

being thrown out of his science class weekly and banned from the classroom of one of the

school’s most popular and amenable teachers.

As students worked in small groups to make sense of Bishop’s “The Map”, Dylan

called me over to his group and asked, “So why are poets, especially, so esoteric? I feel

like it is so pretentious.” At this moment, I opened this conversation to the class,

addressing the first part of my initial statement directly to Dylan and the second part to

the entire group.

Pratt: I don’t have a simple answer, but I’ll make sense of it in a different way…[to the class] What is the name?…I can’t think of the principle…..Have you guys studied Schrodinger's Cat in chemistry?

Dylan: I think back to chemistry. I got a B and I’m never gonna think about it again.

Christian: (from another group across the room, laughing). I heard of that.

Pratt: Tell us what you know about it.

(While rumblings of student conversations continue, especially among Dylan and his friends, I turn to look at Dylan.) Dylan: All I remember is Mr. Hupple (the Chemistry teacher) being like “Hal-i-dayyyyyy (Dylan’s last name)”

(laughter from members of Dylan’s group as well as other members of the class.)

Kate, from across the room: That’s about the cat is the box that you don’t know if it is alive or dead until you open the box and because you don’t know it is both and neither at the same time.

Pratt: You see, you guys are at the place in your academic lives where the disciplines are going to start connecting and overlapping. Dylan just posed the question, why can’t poets just come out and say what they mean? Why does every meaning have to be so complex and nuanced? And we answered this

123

question by making a connection to chemistry. So poetry, like science, opens up possibilities that may otherwise be closed, invites us to think in ways that are different. Two possible meanings can exist at the same time.

Dylan: But all that brings us is debating the meaning of what [the poet or scientist] is talking about.

Pratt: Is there really just one answer?

Dylan: Alright, so you’re saying it makes you think.

Pratt: And not only to think, but it allows for the multiplicity of meanings. It requires you to interpret.

Dylan: How could there be a multiplicity of meanings?

(class discussion, 4/8/08)

In this discussion Dylan initially deflected and critiqued dialogic engagements as

unnecessarily complex, both “esoteric” and “pretentious.” Secondly, he minimized the

interdisciplinary connections that his classmates and I make. Lastly he playfully

insinuated that he just wanted the prescribed “correct answer” as opposed to any kind of

analysis whose purpose was to “making him think.”

Later in the period, I referenced this discussion in a private conversation with

Dylan. As small groups worked on their poems, he and I talked about how nuance and

complexity can be positive, especially when we think about our identities as writers and

people.

Pratt: Right now. Describe my identity right now. It takes a lot to offend me, describe who I am.

Dylan: Don’t ask me that….(pause) I don’t know, you’re an English teacher.

Pratt: My identity is much more complex. How is my identity constructed right now?

124

(silence)

Pratt: (playfully) I know that I get under your skin…I know that there are times that you think what I am asking you to do is unreasonable.

(silence)

Dylan: (smiling) You ARE irritating at times.

Pratt: Now, do you think that is the same way that I am viewed by my family, my friends, my fellow teachers?

Dylan: (pause) Noooo.

Pratt: Right now I exist in multiple ways…the same way that you exist in multiple ways. When you go home and talk to your parents or hang out with your friends, you are not the same person that you are in this classroom.

Dylan: My dad probably regards me as most of the teachers do, but my mom…my mom she really loves me. We have a good relationship.

Pratt: Your dad loves you too (both laughing).

Dylan: I luv him. Pratt: But the point is, I am making a mistake if I think that I really KNOW you when I see you for only one class period each day and only within the context of our class. In the same way that you are making a mistake if you think you know Leslie Pratt because you see me for forty-five minutes a day. There is a lot more to us. So this comes back to your question about why are writers and poets so complex….

Dylan: I hear what you are trying to say and I’m just trying to comprehend. I just feel like it leaves people to think they understand what the writer is talking about and then they don’t really get it at all. Like you can have an entirely different meaning of what the author is talking about, then you are dealing with fallacies. It just makes it vague.

(conference, 4/8/08)

125

In this exchange Dylan confessed that he experienced difficulty navigating open-ended

inquiry-centered questions and annotation tasks. For him, it seemed easier to annotate a

text by finding the main ideas and not thinking about those ideas again after a unit test.

In making these dispositions known to me, he reminded me that the practices surrounding

writing annotations as a mode of inquiry were largely antithetical to academic norms,

especially in this high school setting where these practices were novel for Dylan and

many of his classmates.

Ultimately Dylan came to recognize the potential for written annotations as a

mode of inquiry. But this occurred after many weeks and was not evident until the final

week of the course. In his final, Dylan revisited what he wrote over the course of the

semester. He examined his experience with and understandings of annotations as a mode

of inquiry, even though he did not use this specific framing. In the first part of his final,

which required him to select a word that resonated over the semester and trace his

understanding of this word over the course, he wrote “the word [he] chose has a direct

relationship to [what then seemed] a meaningless conversation we had in class,” insisting

parenthetically in the next line that I go back and “check the tapes” (final, 5/1/08). The

seemingly minor conversation about the fluid and multiple nature of identity that he had

with me a month earlier became the basis for this final essay, an essay he was about to

develop because he captured his thoughts through annotations in that moment of our

April 8th conversation. By doing so, he provided himself a text inspired by his ideas to

which he could return, although he did not realize the significance of this conversation in

the moment it occurred. His final essay continued that what he “initially felt was just a

126

benign assertion [he] made followed by a classic contradiction [the teacher] made” was

actually much more. Dylan described the interaction in a sweeping paraphrase.

Mrs. Pratt: You act differently in certain situations than in others.Dylan: That’s not true.Mrs. Pratt: You’re wrong Dylan.

Now I am no good at confessing any sort of error in judgment of any capacity but in this situation, I realize how foolish I was being. I continued to relish the point you made and come to embrace this notion of PROTEANISM. (final, 5/1/08)

By the time he wrote his final, his ideas about the practice of annotation as a way to

respond to and engage with academic texts had evolved dramatically. He confessed how

much easier it was to write this essay than he imagined; he “even thought the writing of

this essay was in a way a little enjoyable” (final writer’s memo, 5/1/08). Dylan made the

final his own, purposefully deviating from the assignment that required him to trace his

understandings of a select word through the course, by selecting his own word rather than

one of the words outlined on the assignment. In the process of selecting this word and

revisiting his readings, annotations, and previous essays, Dylan ultimately recognized the

potential for writing annotations as a mode of inquiry, a recognition that required two

pedagogical conditions: (1) the space to meaningfully question and disagree within

academic settings and (2) teacher support of inquiry frameworks that allowed for and

even encouraged dissent as a way of making meaning.

“Talking Back” to Scholarly Texts

127

As students read course assigned texts, they were tasked with making, rather than

simply taking, meaning from a text. In this way annotation was framed as a way to

capture students’ ideas and reactions so they could “come full to the class discussion.”

However, the crafting of annotations, in-the-moment written artifacts capturing students’

attempts to try to weigh ideas, remained problematic in both theory and practice. Some

students struggled to maintain a meaningful balance between content understanding and

personal insight as they read and annotated dense scholarly materials that were written

with a college-level readership in mind.

These tensions became especially clear as students engaged in the annotation

making portion of the “Thinking…and Writing…About Writing” assignment described

in Chapter 3. This assignment required students to “talk back” through marginal

annotation to excerpts written by the literacy scholars Brian Street (2008), James Gee

(2004), Glynda Hull and Kathy Schultz (2002), and Linda Collier (2007).

The majority of the students in this particular twelfth-grade class found these texts

particularly dense and struggled to understand the points each of the scholarly works

asserted. This led to considerable difficulty as students found themselves initially unable

to “talk back” to the text in their annotations because they struggled to understand the

content of the readings. In this vein, students required opportunities to re-read and re-

annotate a text’s content multiple times, practices with which the majority of students

were largely unaccustomed as they were used to reading a text and “getting it” the first

time.

128

To talk back to scholarly excerpts, students needed to see themselves as expert on

two levels. They needed to see themselves as able to comprehend these dense scholarly

texts though engagement over the course of required multiple readings. They also needed

to recognize that they had something meaningful to contribute to the conversation on

high school students’ literacy practices in which these scholarly texts were grounded. To

“talk back” to scholarly texts meant that students both captured and analyze how these

particular literary scholars attempted to understand and analyze these students personally-

lived experience in the academic writing classroom.

Responding to Hull and Schultz’s School’s Out

When students in this particular class opted neither to re-read nor to revisit

annotations made in response to a challenging text multiple times, they often understood

broader thematic aspects of the essay but missed important nuances. For example, on

February 12, 2008, the class attempted to talk back to Hull and Schultz’s (2002)

“Connecting Schools With Out of School Worlds,” a two-page excerpt from School’s

Out. As students discussed the case study of high school student Jacques who was

unsuccessful in traditional school measures because he failed his classes but ran his own

successful lawn care business after school hours, Brennan and Joyce offered in two

different “success is relative” based on their initial and only readings of the excerpt.

Brennan: If you have a teacher that talks and talks and you get nothing out of it, then you are not inspired to really do academic work. So you’re like Jacques and don’t really want to achieve high grades in high school.

129

Joyce: It really depends on what your aspirations are, not really inspiration from a teacher. In my mind, it depends more on what your aspirations are. If someone’s goal is to go to a specific college and to be a lawyer, then they will look at vo-tech and think that it is pointless because it’s not really geared to what they wanna to do. But if you’re talking to someone who just wants to cut hair, then going to that same college is ridiculous because it has nothing to do with their aspirations. It makes a huge difference.

Silence

Brennan and Joyce both assert their opinions that success is being inspired to do

something and seeing it through. Brennan’s comment suggests that if Jacques were not

inspired by a teacher then the teacher has to find a way to inspire him; Joyce’s comment

suggests that a student like Jacques can find his own inspiration and do what makes him

happy. Both comments argue that academic success is a matter of individual agency, that

students’ academic success is controlled by an individual agent who holds authority,

either a teacher or the student him/herself. While these comments are interesting in their

own right and suggest a particular worldview held by Joyce and Brennan, they are not

aligned with Hull and Schultz’s (2002) argument about recognizing the social nature of

literacy. Both Joyce and Brennan presented an insight inspired by the text, meaning

something in this particular text prompted them to make the connections they did. Yet in

missing a key component in Hull and Schultz’s (2002) argument—that some forms of

academic success are held in greater esteem than others—other students in the class had

little way to build off of their insight. The insight was based wholly on these students’

personal reactions to the text; there was no common textual-based content to sustain the

discussion. I suggest that this is why the conversation fell into silence.

130

In a subsequent turn of the conversation, Jeanne and Sophia pushed their

classmates to consider how the notion of school success and literacy are socially shaped,

understandings they culled from the Hull and Schultz (2002) piece after multiple readings

and annotation that were both revised and amplified in successive readings.

Jeanne: We look down on some ways of being successful. Especially in our school. The kids who go to tech [students who attend afternoons at the Intermediate Unit vocational school] are [viewed by many as] not as smart.

Sophia: Yeah. [pause] School says getting “A”s in academic classes is what makes you smart but maybe that’s not the only way. That’s kind of weird for us because, let’s be honest, a lot of us don’t believe that.”

Silence

(class discussion, 2/12/08)

As this assertion about the social nature of what constitutes academic success is made,

two interesting things occurred. First the tenor of the responses shifted from an emphasis

on students’ individual reactions based on their lived experiences to students’ individual

reactions informed by the readings and shaped by their lived experiences. Sophia’s

comment and Jeanne’s explication of Hull and Schultz (2002) honored both the content

of the scholarly work, i.e. they got what Hull and Schultz were asserting, and their

personal insights about how this connected to their lives in this specific moment. Their

annotations allowed them to confront a powerful, normalized, and largely unquestioned

assumption: that academic classes were often viewed as inherently more important than

others ways of learning.

Yet Sophia’s thoughtful insight was also greeted with silence. This silence made

Sophia doubt her ability to generate and assert ideas. This was brought to light when I

131

asked Sophia after class why she didn’t initially expand on Hull and Schultz’s (2002)

idea and share more of her ideas. She responded, “What else could I say?” (conference,

2/12/08). Sophia explained that she didn’t want to be the only one left talking “because

[she felt] really uncomfortable when [she has] to do all the talking” (conference,

2/12/08). She didn’t want to place herself in that position. Unfortunately, that is exactly

what happened.

Her and Jeanne’s comments changed the tenor of the discussion, but I suggest this

silence was for fundamentally difference reasons than the initial silence. The reason for

this lapse in the conversation was because the discussion’s various interlocutors,

specifically the twenty-six students in this particular class, engaged in this discussion on

different levels. At this early point in the semester, the majority of students were not

closely re-reading and annotating scholarly texts. When confronted with insights crafted

by students like Sophia and Jeanne that blended the nuances of the scholarly texts with

students’ own lived experiences, other members of the class found themselves unsure of

what to say. This makes the initial days of participation in an inquiry-centered

classroom that holds challenging scholarly texts at its center inherently difficult. This

was evidenced in no two students coming to embrace re-reading and re-visiting

annotations in response to these re-readings as a way of talking back to text in the same

way, at the same time, or even in the same conversations.

Responding to Gee’s The Savage Mind to Ways with Words

132

Many students’ annotation practices shifted over the course of the semester.

These moves were neither linear nor uniform and proved to be as complex as the

scholarly perspectives and personal experiences informing their ideas. Since the Gee

(2004) excerpt seemed to present the greatest challenge in crafting meaningful

annotations, I use this excerpt to show how students reluctantly, at first, attempted to

make multiple passes using annotation as a mode of inquiry before they ultimately

arrived at tentative insights informed by the scholarly texts they read.

On February 13, 2008, students were charged by me with “making sense of one of

the three excerpts and sharing their insights, questions, and connections on the class

google.doc in preparation for discussions the following week” (class discussion, 2/13/08).

Students did not have to tell me in which group they would participate; they did not have

to include the names of group members in the google.doc. In this particular group,

students read and annotated an excerpt by James Gee (2004) about the development of

discourse communities. During this small group work, students had the option of sitting

near each other and appointing a note-taker to synthesize their thoughts on to the

google.doc or of individually posting comments and revising and building on each

other’s insights in real time electronically using this same digital mode. The majority of

the group working on explicating and analyzing the Gee excerpt sat together and worked

by consensus to arrive at a common meaning of the Gee excerpt. By the end of the 55-

minute period, the following list of main ideas based on the Gee excerpt was created.

Interesting quote ‘the link often assumed to exist between literacy and higher order mental skills, such as analytical, logical, or abstract thinking.’ Literacy is often associated with intelligence but is it unfair

133

to categorize someone as intelligent/unintelligent or civilized/uncivilized based on their level of literacy?  Achievement is not always defined by literacy. One can have intelligence in other respects without being strong in reading and writing.literacy is often defined by the dominant culture in the world- (google.doc, 2/13/08)

The students who authored this collaborative response understood the directive “to share

their insights” to mean “to provide a clear statement of Gee’s ideas.” To this end, these

students included an “interesting quote” that proved they read the primary text, but they

never explained what made this quote interesting. They also attempted to capture Gee’s

main ideas as a conceptual understanding but did not initially trouble what the

implications of this conceptual understanding might be. Largely unconfident in “talking

back” to Gee’s text, this group of students ended their annotations with a question mark.

Literacy is often associated with intelligence but is it unfair to categorize someone as intelligent/ unintelligent or civilized/uncivilized based on their level of literacy? (google.doc, 2/13/08)

Constructing this sentence as a question allowed it to be read in two ways: (1) as a

question to the teacher asking, “Did we understand this reading correctly or is this a

misreading?” and simultaneously (2) as an assertion of disagreement with Gee’s ideas as

in “How could he argue that?” This process of tentative analysis allowed the students to

attempt to “fish” for what I, the teacher, wanted. In fact one student in this group, Joyce,

was particularly angry that I did not add any comments to the google.doc even though she

could see in the revision history that I had read it (field notes, 2/14/08).

Because the Gee excerpt proved so challenging to these particular high school

readers, they invested the majority of their efforts on working to make sense of its

content. In their initial act of analysis, the students did not fully understand the content

134

that they read and so were unable to “talk back” to it. This oversight and misreading was

especially ironic in light of the fact that Gee’s essay excerpt argues that it is the powerful

forces of naming, defining, and categorizing that often marginalize people whose literacy

practices are different than those of the dominant culture.

While students demonstrated their ability to identify key terms used by Gee:

“literacy,” “civilized/uncivilized dichotomy,” “intelligence,” and “achievement,” a

strategy reinforced in preparation for the PSSA, they did not explain the stakes of these

definitions in terms of either Gee’s content or their own understandings of literacy. They

were crafting annotations that attempted to concentrate on the first of the two conditions

for meaningful annotation: comprehension on the text, at the expense of the second:

talking back to the text in a meaningful way. Because they did not attempt “talk back” to

Gee’s ideas, they actually missed an opportunity to clarify their content understandings,

which in this case would likely have been useful.

Reminiscent of Dylan’s first week comment that, “the main idea is always in the

first paragraph [in non-fiction] and as long as I understand that then I don’t have to read

the rest,” the students in this group concerned themselves with mainly the first two of

Gee’s four excerpted paragraphs (class discussion, 1/29/08). When I asked them why,

they replied that they “assumed that the main idea would be expressed there,” so they

invested all their energies in negotiating the meaning of what they viewed as the central

paragraphs of the excerpt: the ones stating the main idea (class discussion, 2/14/08). Yet

this idea of the singular thesis explicitly articulated in a single sentence within the first

paragraphs holds true in very few academic writing contexts save five-paragraph essays

135

and standardized test prompts. This means in their initial readings and annotations,

students overlooked the concept of discourse practices and Gee’s application of

anthropological understanding to contemporary schooling. Both of these concepts were

discussed in later paragraphs. Because they were not in the first paragraph, they were

viewed as not a part of the main idea. The reading and writing strategies that served

students well in their twelve years of schooling were now interfering with their moves

towards deep understanding and annotation of complex scholarly texts.

Over the course of the next eight school days, students revisited their initial

annotations on the Gee excerpt. They spent class time working in collaboration with

self-selected small groups to ensure they understood the content of the scholar excerpt, to

develop annotations, and to create on google.docs a series of talking points that would

guide their discussion of one of the articles to the class. The revisions and

reconsiderations that occurred over the course of these eight days were based on both

whole-class discussions and small-group discussions we had during this period. In light

of these discussions, students added to their initial annotations based on what they had

learned, considered, questioned, or thought about more deeply. On February 26, 2008,

the collaborative insights from the group exploring Gee’s excerpt were extended

substantially.

Interesting quote ‘the link often assumed to exist between literacy and higher order mental skills, such as analytical, logical, or abstract thinking.’ Literacy is often associated with intelligence but is it unfair to categorize someone as intelligent/unintelligent or civilized/uncivilized based on their level of literacy?  Achievement is not always defined by literacy. One can have intelligence in other respects without being strong in reading and writing.  You

136

must be literate to be civilized because civility involves interacting with others, usually requiring reading, writing, speaking, and listening. but the rules of literacy today have become restricting to alternative forms of communication.unfair that literacy is often defined by the dominant culture in the world- While it is not fair for people to be judged by dominant literacy standards, the truth is that people are judged by these standards, and the ability to speak proper English (in the US) is necessary in the majority of work places.  In many districts in the US students are not given the chance, as everyone should be, to learn proper English, which can hinder their success rates later in life.  If children are not given the chance to learn proper English practices, how can they be expected to use them once they are mature adults?so...  while a standard agreement on a definition of literacy is vital to successful communication in the world, its standards can be overly restrictingLiteracy evolves with technology.  Now, typing included in literacy.  Future could include being able to type on a cell phone, blackberry, etc. typing... the new reading?

In this second pass at engaging with this dense scholarly text, the students in this

particular group more than doubled the length of their annotation, a fact that brought

great pride to multiple members of the group (field notes, 2/26/08). Yet more

importantly, revisiting both the Gee excerpt and their own annotations allowed these

particular students to develop a deeper understanding of the content of Gee’s arguments

and to begin to “talk back” to his points. In their second pass, they amplified Gee’s

established point about literacy as social, when they wrote that “literacy is often defined

by the dominant culture in the world-[and] it is not fair for people to be judged by

dominant literacy standards.” They also understood Gee’s idea that literacy “evolves,”

questioning will “typing [on a cellphone, blackberry, etc…] become the new [literacy?].”

137

These evidenced differences between the first and second google.doc postings

corresponded with subtle shifts from students’ questioning “what” Gee asserted to their

musings about “why” his assertions were worth their consideration. Yet an essentialized

and unexamined background view of literacy continued to inform their thinking, even

after these students made arguments about the highly contextualized notion of “fairness”

in what counts as literacy in a particular culture. In the same section where these

particular students problematized the injustice that “literacy is often defined by the

dominant culture in the world,” they argued “the truth is that people are judged by these

standards, and the ability to speak proper English (in the US) is necessary in the majority

of work places.”

This suggests that in spite of some of the deeper understandings students

constructed about the social nature of literacy within particular discourse communities,

there were serious textual misunderstandings that these students did not recognize. For

example, in the final line, students conflated reading with literacy. They also embraced

several notions of literacy against which Gee argues. For example, these students

recognized the “unfairness” of “people to be judged [against] dominant literacy

standards.” But instead of recognizing Gee’s position that this narrow understanding of

literacy is problematic because it does not recognize different ways of reading and

writing, they suggest that children be “given the chance to learn proper English practices”

as a remedy. Students did not recognize the contradiction between their understanding

that it was “unfair that literacy [was] often defined by the dominant culture in the world”

138

and their advocacy of the dominant cultural beliefs by suggesting the existence of a

singular “proper English” to which all children should have access.

Members of this group took a third pass at annotating the Gee excerpt during the

first week of March. The multiple re-readings and the revisiting and reconsidering of

previous annotations captured even more nuanced understandings of Gee’s argument at

the same time that individual students meaningfully connected his arguments to their

ideas and experiences.

On March 6, 2008, the class reconsidered the excerpt from Gee’s (2004) essay

“Orality and literacy: From The Savage Mind to Ways with Words.” During this

discussion that was informed by their group’s increasingly sophisticated annotations,

Kyle asserted the meaning he found in reading Gee; Dylan concurs; Jared amplifies and

analyzes and the discussion ends.

Pratt: No one looked at the Jim Gee piece. Yet I am going to encourage all of you to go back and revisit it. We really haven’t talked about all the parts of the Gee piece but he writes about some ideas that fit really nicely into understanding Street’s essay. He has this really important idea of discourse practices. What do we think Gee argues?

Silence, students flipping through the packets. Pratt: Any thoughts, comments, ideas, or questions that you would like to suggest as the focus of Gee’s piece. Kyle: I think the whole gist of this piece is that literacy in one culture is illiteracy in another culture. In the second paragraph when he says that literacy has replaced civilized as a way of describing people. I totally agree with that, but the real answer is that there is no one right way to live. What we consider to be literacy is not the only way to live.

Dylan: I agree.

139

Jared: Yeah, culture is like what you do from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. Like in [this school’s] culture, you wake up, go to school, and then go home and do your homework. There are certain practices that people have [in this area] but the whole idea of thinking about culture is that one practice isn’t the only one right way of thinking.

Silence

Kyle suggested both his understandings of the readings and his personal insights about

the value of these ideas. He talked back to Gee’s excerpt.

Conversely, Dylan simply consented to Kyle’s idea without offering his own

opinion as to the value of understanding Gee’s ideas about literacy. I wonder, as Marissa

proposed three weeks earlier, if Dylan felt he did not have the authority to “talk back” to

the ideas of published literacy scholars because these literacy scholars “knew more than

[he] did” or if he was simply looking for a way to participate in the discussion where he

did not have to share his own insights (class discussion, 2/12/08).

When Jared talked back to Gee’s ideas, he made comments ripe for further

discussion. He used an example from his own life to try to make sense of the ideas in

Gee and his comments invite other students to share their own experiences with

recognizing the constructed nature of academic literacies. He goes further than Dylan in

making the text his own and seems to be inviting Dylan to expand upon his agreement

with Kyle.

These kinds of intellectual engagements would not be possible if students and I

had not invested multiple weeks in annotating, discussing and re-annotating the Gee

excerpt in the form of both marginal and summative google.doc comments. While this is

an atypically lengthy duration for a high school class to study a one-page excerpt, it was

140

this extended time for revisiting, re-evaluating, and reflecting that enabled students to

wrestle through the dense complexities of Gee’s writing. Even though these students

initially misunderstood various aspects of Gee’s content, they gained considerable

insights through the process of writing back to the Gee text, insights I suggest that would

not have been generated had I simply summarized Gee’s main points and required

students to complete an assessment based on my summary. These particular students

wrote their way into understanding through the annotations they crafted.

Conclusion

In the introduction to this chapter, I referenced Jackson’s (2001) study of

marginalia as the source for my definition of annotation as “a product of the interaction

between text and reader” (p. 100). In it, Jackson (2001) suggests that annotations help

readers in some future moment understand more deeply both the identity of the writer as

well as the moment in which annotations were written. Later readers can consider the

explicit and implicit insights specific annotations suggest, how the annotations highlight

aspects of a text or a period that might otherwise be overlooked, or a writer’s constructed

identity in-the-moment and over time. This sense of annotation as historical relic serves

later readers’ purposes well. In a complimentary way, this chapter claims that

annotations functioned, in some ways, as both a historical record of thinking as well as a

mode of inquiry for these particular students as writers.

Students in this study did not initially recognize annotation as a mode of inquiry

or as a valuable record of their in-the-moment thinking. Instead these particular students

141

largely viewed it as a way to demonstrate proof of reading assignment completion.

Specific scaffolding, class discussion, guided instruction, and recursive engagement in

annotation practices were required before most students meaningfully engaged in the

work of annotation as a mode of inquiry. My initial providing of spaces for students to

annotate and to revisit annotations was not enough. This need for scaffolded exposure to

and engagement with annotation as meaning-making activity was made most profoundly

clear to me after our initial discussions of the excerpts by Street (2008), Gee (2004), Hull

and Schultz (2002), and Collier (2007) were met with awkward silences and incomplete

or incorrect summaries of these scholarly texts. As discussed in this chapter, a profound

disconnect initially existed between my understandings of annotation as idea generation

and students’ understanding of annotation as evidence of reading completion.

It was only in the purposeful revisiting of their annotations and their questioning

of how these annotations “talked back” to scholarly and academic texts that these

students began to recognize the possibility for annotation to serve a different purpose

than capturing content-centered notes. Most immediately the two-fold process for

crafting annotations—understanding a text’s content and talking back to this content—

challenged and changed way that the majority of the twenty-six students in this particular

class thought about reading texts and writing in response to them.

This growing awareness of annotation as a mode of inquiry, a way of writing that

helps to flesh out ideas these seniors did not yet know, led to a kind of mini-inquiry into

annotation. In this way, viewing annotation as a mode of inquiry and subsequently

inquiring into the purposes of this very mode allowed most of these students to develop a

142

sense of engagement with scholarly work atypical for most high school students. As

these particular students became more aware of the importance of developing their own

insights in response to what they read, they developed a sense of authoritatively “talking

back” to scholarly texts. As they “talked back” to these texts, they began to consider the

potential for reading and writing in more dialogic ways.

This sense of annotations as “talking back” catalyzed many students’ own

inquiries into writing, the subject of the next chapter. Meaningful annotations provided

questions, pointed out areas that required clarification, and most importantly, became the

fodder for the majority of the longer academic essays students submitted. In the simplest

sense, ideas were often generated through annotation and then developed through essays.

Each of these practices—crafting annotations and constructing academic essays—

recursively informed the other.

As students became more comfortable with annotation as a way to generate ideas,

the annotations themselves became a written text that we studied and discussed in class.

Students evolved understanding of annotation also enabled them to access challenging

and dense texts by encouraging them to re-read and revisit texts, a novel practice many of

these students who were largely unaccustomed to rereading embraced widely by the end

of the course.

The practice of annotation as a mode of inquiry was not initially envisioned as

either a subject of this dissertation’s inquiry or as a means of data collection. Yet over

the course of the semester, students’ evolving annotation practices evidenced through

how and why they crafted (or didn’t craft) annotations offered insight into how students

143

initially positioned themselves as writers. When students both understood the nuances of

a text and felt a sense of authority that enabled them to “talk back” to the text through

their reading and writing, they envisioned themselves as writers rather than as students

writing down another author’s meanings. As these twelfth-grade students began to

interrogate the disposition that new knowledge could be informed by understanding

scholarly texts outside of their own experience and places these understandings in

conversation with their own experiences, the way that they engaged with texts they read

and wrote annotations changed.

Yet this change did not come easily. The reading and writing strategies that had

served these particular students well over the course of their schooling interfered with

their attempts to deeply understand and annotate scholarly texts. They needed to question

the very foundations of their academic reading and writing practices. In this way,

looking at the evolution of students’ annotations became a way for me as a researcher to

discover how students’ conceptions of academic writing and themselves as academic

writers changed. Students’ annotations became both an evolving literacy practice in

which many students invested themselves and became evidence of the various ways

students thought about themselves as writers in relation to the texts that they read.

Chapter 6

RE-IMAGINING ACADEMIC WRITING

The act of writing is an act of identity, a point made clear in the work of Ivanic

(1998, 2004). Each time a person writes, he/she reveals parts of the self. The act of

144

writing cannot be separated from the particular self that constructed a text in a particular

moment of time. As a teacher and writer, I recognize this.

However, in the academic setting of my classroom, many of the students who

participated in this study did not consider writing in this way. Instead they viewed it

according to narrowly defined and institutionally normalized views of writing as a series

of discrete and measurable skills. For many of these particular high school students,

these skills functioned as essentialized characterizations of who they were as writers.

Before they crossed the threshold of my classroom, I received multiple

characterizations of these particular students as writers by well-meaning colleagues. This

was especially true for students categorized as “struggling,” “special needs,” or “at risk.”

I received information about these students’ abilities or willingness to complete academic

assignments per a teacher’s directive, about the length of responses these students

generated or should be expected to generate, and about these students’ strengths and

weaknesses in terms of mechanical and grammatical aspects of writing.

I also received initial data-based characterizations from my school district and

department. I was meant to use this information as a preemptive tool to help me reach

students more effectively based on their needs. As a teacher, I was encouraged, and

ultimately required by administrative directive, to preview students’ standardized writing

test scores on Performance Tracker, a district-purchased database that catalogued and

sorted assessment results. The explicitly stated purpose of this data review was so that I,

as the teacher, could understand students’ areas of weakness and design appropriate

145

instruction based on students’ needs. The implied purpose, as I understood it, was to

implement strategies to “fix” the writing skills of students’ whose writing was “broken.”

These institutional characterizations of writers and writing—official and

unofficial—as well as students’ self-characterizations as writers largely privileged

students’ abilities and willingness to complete writing tasks rather than closely examined

why, how, and what these particular students wrote.

The three major inquiry essays that students crafted in the context of this course

were designed to provide students with an opportunity to recognize, confront, or work

against these narrow characterizations of who they were as writers. The first assignment

—“What does it mean to be a high school writer?”—was designed both to highlight

questions as the basis of writing and inquiry as well as to encourage students to recognize

their own ideas as central to an assignment. The second assignment, where students had

a choice of three inquiry questions, was designed to provided students the freedom to

inquire into the questions about academic writing that most interested them while at the

same time offering support if students were unsure where to begin. The third and final

assignment invited students to trace their understanding of a concept over the course of

the semester and construct an analysis of a text of great importance. This assignment was

designed to allow students to reflect on what they learned over the course of the semester

and to consider how this impacted their reading and writing. Each assignment was

framed so that students could begin to see themselves as a writer, rather than as students

of writing.

146

As I crafted these assignments, I tried to consider students’ writing practices in

terms of what I call writerly identity. Aligned with New Literacy Studies conceptions of

identity, I conceptualized identity as complex, multiple, fluid, and continuously re-

imagined, not static or definitive. More specifically, I aligned my thinking with Ivanic’s

(1998) conception of writer identity where writing is “an act of identity I which people

align themselves with socio-culturally shaped possibilities for self-hood, playing their

part in the reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values,

beliefs, and interests they embody” (p. 32).

In my data analysis, I adapt Ivanic’s (1998) concept of writer identity, invoking

instead the term writerly identity. I use this notion of writerly identity in a way that is

congruent with Ivanic’s conception of the “possibilities for selfhood” that exist as writer

identity is recognized as autobiographical, discursive, and authorial. However, this slight

adaptation rhetorically and subtly underscores a distinction between the way that I use

this concept and the way Ivanic does. Ivanic employs this term in her analysis of adult

students negotiating their identities in the academic contexts of college after years away

from formalized academic study. My conception of writerly identity emphasizes what I,

as a high school educator, tried to invite a particular group of high school students to

recognize about identity as a way to be in the world and about their writing as belonging

to them. In the context of our class, we specifically discussed the concept of identity and

writerly identity. Writerly identity was both a term I, like Ivanic, use in my presentation

of data findings and a term, unlike Ivanic, that I use pedagogically within the classroom.

147

This chapter, then, focuses on the inquiries into academic writing the high school

students I taught generated as they negotiated “possibilities for selfhood” in this

particular twelfth-grade classroom. It analyzes students’ self-reflections on their

academic writing experiences and teases out the writerly moves that informed their

writing practices and their subsequent inquiries. The chapter analyzes both the content of

select students’ writing as well as the writerly identities they assumed as they developed

and asserted questions, engaged in writing processes, made decisions around self-

representation, and negotiated these self-representations in light of being read by others.

The first part of the chapter includes a content analysis of students’ self-reflective

inquiries into their previous academic writing experiences. The analysis of each focal

inquiry evidences and expounds upon varying writerly moves at work, describing the

specific ways that students positioned themselves and their ideas in relation to academic

expectations.

The second part of the chapter explores how the introduction (or some might say

imposition) of inquiry awakened these high school seniors to the possibility that writing

could be guided by questions rather than definitive answers, a socio-culturally framed

conception of writing that was largely novel for this group of students.

The third part of the chapter makes the claim that exposure to and engagement in

inquiries into academic writing made particular students more cognizant of how they

represented themselves, their ideas, and others in writing.

The fourth part of the chapter uses the case of Candice to consider the challenges

one student faced in considering writing as a mode of inquiry. Candice, who worked

148

diligently, did not easily or necessarily internalize the notion of inquiry or the practice of

writing as a mode of inquiry nor did she fully recognize the potential for writerly moves

to signal ways how she might be read. This section analyzes how the invitation to an

inquiry curriculum and the assignment of an inquiry into academic writing impacted her

and poses questions about the impact of an inquiry curriculum on students who do not

necessarily come to understand or embrace the tenants of an inquiry-based curriculum.

Describing Writerly Moves, Not Writers

I begin this section of data analysis with the premise that students cannot be

meaningfully characterized as one “kind” of writer. Their writerly identities are social,

dynamic, and fluid. In each particular act of academic writing, these individual students

made decisions about how to represent themselves within this particular classroom

context in a particular moment.

Yet overall patterns of academic writing practices did exist in this classroom. As

these twenty-six students described their previous academic experiences, patterns of

writerly moves, or specific ways that students positioned themselves or their ideas in

relation to academic expectations, emerged. As they considered and wrote about how

and why they engaged in academic writing assignments in the ways that they did, many

of these students recognized that they adopted a kind of narrow writerly identity

sanctioned by the institution of school. In light of this recognition, students raised

questions about how they masked or privileged aspects of how they wanted to be seen as

writers, as students, and as people. Through their inquiry questions and the writing born

149

of these questions, some of these particular seniors both recognized and critiqued the

conceptions of academic writing that shaped their previous academic experiences.

Analyzing these patterns lead me to understand general currents of students’ past

academic writing experiences.

The following three sub-sections describe three patterns of writerly moves that

students recognized in their own writing experiences. I term these memetic moves,

efficient moves, and subversive moves. While students did not use these terms to

describe their own writerly moves, the kinds of moves these terms capture became

evident in the early stages of coding and proved useful descriptors for students’ academic

writing experiences prior to this invitation to an inquiry curriculum, a subject taken up by

multiple students as the subject of their own inquiries into writing.

Memetic Moves

Memes are practices, values, patterns, or stances shared among people through

imitation and adaptation. They replicate and evolve as they are transferred from one text

to another. The essence of memetic moves lies largely in their social reproduction.

When this reproduction is done purposefully, it holds the potential to create a sense of

meaningful juxtaposition. Yet when unacknowledged, the person adopting a particular

meme risks being misread or having their insights overshadowed by the structure

intended to be a conduit for their insights.

This concept of memes is borrowed from Richard Dawkins’ (2006/1976) work in

biology in the 1970s. In his book The Selfish Gene, he asserts that memes, a play on the

150

word genes, are “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” that

“automatically band together and alter themselves when necessary to create systems …

that … work to favor their continued replication” (p. 63). In this way, memes are highly

recognizable yet simultaneously highly inventive.

The concept of memes is not only evident in the scholarly literature of science and

the social sciences. It has become common among internet users who share memes on

The Daily Meme http://thedailymeme.com/ and Fail Blog http://failblog.org/. An entire

website, http://thememegenerator.com is dedicated to the creation of memes, covering

topics ranging from SpongeBob to Bill O’Reilly. The concept has even entered the

traditional press with The Atlantic publishing an essay on “The Menassiance Meme” on

May 27, 2010 and The New York Times Magazine publishing an essay on the prevalence

of humorous online memes in “When Funny Goes Viral” in July 16, 2010’s edition.

But memes are not only patterns involving cultural fads. An excerpt Doug Hunt’s

(2002) Misunderstanding the Assignment, a text that these particular seniors read in

preparation for their own inquiries into academic writing, evokes the term “memetic” to

describe the writing products of college composition students whose papers repeated

class ideas rather than argued their own insights. Hunt (2002) makes the claim that many

freshmen in college experience difficulties in their introductory college courses because

writing assignments in high school, largely, encourage a kind of memetic replication

rather than generative thinking in the production of school assignments. He found that

students wrote the same kind of formulaic essay, regardless of prompt, and simply

adapted “stock” essays to their assigned task. In this way, memes are repetitive. Yet

151

Hunt’s claims failed to consider the complexity of the high school contexts from where

his students came and overlooked the highly creative ways students tried to take stock

essay formats and make them simultaneously inventive. This is why memes are best

described as something highly recognizable with elements of newness.

My analysis suggests that the particular high school writers in this study did not

initially or often recognize the various memetic moves they made. They sometimes used

and worked against certain patterns without even recognizing this. Memetic moves, for

example, are evident in an e-mail message Jeff sent when he submitted an essay draft to

me electronically. His essay was prefaced by e-mail message: “Ms. Pratt, Do your worst,

I am not afraid of death. But seriously I’m wondering what you will think” (e-mail,

4/10/08). Within the e-mail, Jeff moves memetically. He uses the socially-accepted

protocols most students adopt when e-mailing a teacher. According to Abrams (2010),

these include the use of a formal and respectful salutation, the use of capitalization and

punctuation, and the avoidance of texting shorthand. Yet, the defiant tone of the initial

sentence contradicts the conventions of respect for a teacher, a socially normalized

practice. This adaptation imprints cues about the specific way Jeff would like his essay

and himself as writer to be read. It suggests that he is following teacher direction in

formal ways and that he would like his writing to be validated while simultaneously

suggesting he does not require teacher validation. This single e-mailed line moves in

seemingly contradictory ways that suggest a complex way of reading Jeff and his essay

before I read the first word of his piece.

152

The text of his essay contained many of these same tenuous blends between

evidencing satisfactory completion of an assignment and asserting his own thoughts on

the assignment. These were also tempered by my expectations of the arguments on

which the essay would center. I began reading this essay expecting it to center on the

argument that The House on Mango Street is not an appropriate text for him as a male, or

any male that that matter, to read as a required text in high school. In the preliminary

stages of conceiving and drafting this essay, Jeff suggested that this was the topic that

interested him. He suggested that he hoped to explore the notion of gendered readings

more deeply and was “surprised” that he was “allowed” to write on this topic. He met

with me in conference, outlined his ideas, and even had his ideas vetted by me in advance

of submitting the essay.

Yet the essay was not what I expected in terms of its content. It didn’t take up

Jeff’s personally important argument as its center and included instead the insertion of

ideas suggested by several of his classmates who praised the text. This move undermined

his potentially powerful argument, as Jeff tried to balance the act of presenting himself as

student at the same time he presented himself as a person who disagreed vehemently with

having been assigned to read and write in response to this book. In the introductory

paragraph, Jeff cobbled together a series of disjointed ideas that were each individually

interesting but did not work together as the premise of an essay.

In the book The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros fabricates her uprising into a “David and Goliath” story where she battles the injustices and social restraints of being a young Mexican woman in Chicago. She paints her struggle in such a way that no one else at the time was really going through what she was going

153

through. This book and topic of study is not an interest of mine and the way she writes about herself makes me want to put the book down and maybe use it for kindling; guys should not have to read this book. Throughout my life a main topic imposed on our young minds is the concept of equality and the injustices of certain social standards. This book is a hero fairy tale, lecture and autobiography all put into a blender served with an impressive literary talent.(essay, 4/10/08)

It was Becca who suggested that The House on Mango Street reminded her of a “fairy

tale” and Marissa who raised the idea of a writer’s own life bleeding into the fiction she

writes. Jeff’s insight—that The House on Mango Street excludes men and therefore male

students should not be required to read it—was overshadowed by the inclusion of

sentiments with which he vehemently disagreed. His idea is literally bracketed by two

contradictory assertions.

After reading his essay, I asked Jeff about this disconnect. I wanted to understand

why Jeff made the choices that he did in his writing, why he opted to write in the ways

that he did when he knew he had the opportunity to take the essay in the direction his

inquiry question led him. After class as students were filing out of the room, I quietly

pulled him aside.

Pratt: Before you leave, I wanted to snag you for a second.

Jeff: Read my essay?

Pratt: Yeah, I did.

Jeff: Made you mad, did it?

Pratt: Not really mad as much as confused. If you wanted to argue that this book is not appropriate to assign to male students, then why did you include the paragraphs about how fairy-tale-like the book is and say that it is a book of literary merit?

154

Jeff: I wouldn’t of had enough to write if I just wrote my idea. How was I supposed to write a three-page essay about that?”

(conference, 4/14/08)

The only way Jeff imagined himself as successful on this assignment in terms of his role

as student was to default to the academic practices that benefited him in the past, even at

the expense of sharing his honest opinions and insights, which he also did not totally

efface. The memetic moves evidenced in this particular essay allowed him to rely on the

writing strategies he learned throughout his academic experience to complete the

assignment as well as to state his strong opinion that the book was a waste of his time to

read.

He felt caught between asserting meaningful ideas and successfully completing

the assignment, ideas viewed as antagonistic within his mind as suggested by his

comment that he “wouldn’t of had enough to write if [he] just wrote [his] idea.” To

reconcile these tensions, he opted to do what he had always done in his writing while also

challenging himself to insert his own insights into his writing, even if just marginally.

Writing in the academic context of this particular class was never a matter of rote

transcription of ideas from class discussion for Jeff, although without thoughtful attention

paid to his writing could be perceived this way. Instead the multi-faceted fingerprints of

his insights and evidence of his complex writerly moves were evident in his submitted

academic essay, in her follow-up e-mail, and in our subsequent conversation. This was

true even as he insisted that he was disengaged from the act of reading and writing about

The House on Mango Street. Yet even when extensively paraphrasing others’ ideas from

a discussion or conference, Jeff’s writing and talk about his writing suggested a genuine

155

concern for how I would read his text. This suggests that memetic writerly moves

evidence a degree of investment as Jeff invited me to recognize and honor the insertions

of self he made in his academic writing.

Efficient Moves

Efficient writerly moves were largely motivated by a particular writer’s context-

specific belief that task completion was the paramount aim of a particular academic

writing task. Examples of this move included offering textual examples or rich

descriptions without an argument, extensive paraphrase of others’ work, or including

arguments offered by others even if these are outside of the scope of a particular essay.

Efficient writerly moves were about being able, as Dylan suggested during a class

discussion, to play the “game of school” so that academic work could be completed as

quickly and easily as possible (class discussion, 3/5/08).

As Dylan suggested, a written product for school could be created through the

mentally taxing work of developing, organizing, and composing prose or could be

produced through a rote process with considerably less effort. In light of this, “Why

would [he] work any harder than he had to? Why would anyone?” (class discussion,

3/5/08).

Students’ use of formulaic responses, language, and organizational structures is

not a new phenomenon. In the 1990s, Pirie (1997) documented the limiting nature of

156

five-paragraph essays and formulaic writing structures terming them “mind-manacles.”

Dyson and Freedman (1991) found that while writing is not and cannot be treated as a

neat linear process with sequential steps, it is often treated as such in classrooms. A case-

study by Purcell-Gates (1993) found that one woman went through seven years of public

school and four years of adult remediation classes to prepare for her GED and never once

had written or read her own words. She simply copied other people’s words.

In the era of high stakes testing, this issue has grown increasingly more

commonplace and problematic. Arthur Holbrook (1999), a writing specialist for the GED

testing service, claimed after reading thousands of exams that the formulaic ways

students wrote were a “blueprint for mediocrity” (p.8). Little has changed over the last

decade. As Florida’s Department of Education officials reviewed 2009 FCAT tests,

Leslie Postal in the July 17, 2009 Orlando Sentinel wrote an article detailing that “writing

exams from 49 schools were found to have ‘template writing’—instances in which

students from the same school used identical or similar phrases on FCAT essays, such as

‘Poof! Now I’m in dragon land.’ Each of these schools received a letter of reprimand

from the state, although ultimately the repeated phrases were determined to be “not

technically cheating.” Each school also earned scores of “A” on the school report card

because the Department of Education “graded the often-used phrases on their merit.”

This sends a confusing message to students and schools: that students and schools

are rewarded for writing that is technically correct and highly colorful but devoid of

students’ understandings and meaning-making processes. It suggests that writing is a

157

rote skill or a performance of conformity, one neither informed nor shaped by student’s

academic and personal experiences or insights.

This same message is suggested to students in the Pennsylvania System of School

Assessment (PSSA) writing test, which requires the production of three writing samples

where content is assessed separately from conventions. I claim that this assessment, as

do many standardized writing assessments, encourages students to write efficiently rather

than to write generatively. I substantiate this claim with my analysis of the 2008-2009

PDE-produced 11th Grade Writing Item and Scoring Sampler (Pennsylvania Department

of Education, 2009). In my analysis, I recognized that each essay that earned a score of a

three (3) or a four (4), judging the writing as either advanced or proficient, followed a

nearly identical format. Each essay used body paragraphs as a listing mechanism of three

or four points initially articulated in the introductory paragraph. The assessment

explanations granted great weight to the measurable elements in the writing, stating that

strong essays used transition words like, first, second, third, and in conclusion to guide

the reader through the writing and content was described as well-developed when the

sample was two pages in length. Interestingly some shorter pieces that contained more

difficult and sophisticated ideas scored in the 1-2 range, critiqued in the evaluator’s

comments for their length and lack of content development.

Several of the senior students participating in this study used their inquiries to

document their own experiences in making efficient writerly moves on timed writing

assessments. Christian’s essay “Writing Machines” describes the efficient writerly

moves he made in a timed-writing situation similar to the one described above. In his

158

essay, he describes how these moves granted him academic success and, presumably,

college access.

I know from my experiences that [I could write well without having an idea because] when I took my last writing test for the SATs, I drew a blank on the prompt. I could not think of decent material to save my life, so I just began to write. I wrote anything that came to mind that was related to the topic, rephrasing the question as a statement as many times as I could, and before I knew it, I had finished my essay with a quote from Alanis Morissette ten minutes before time was up. I was befuddled when I received my scores in the mail and saw a 720 next to “writing.” My “non-sense” earned me an 11….[In high school] we are not taught how to write; we are taught a universal way to answer different questions with the same answer….[By senior year] necessity has finally defeated integrity.(essay, 3/12/08)

Describing the efficient moves he made, Christian confesses he had nothing to write

about the topic and used a series of prescriptive writing strategies like ending with a

quote and rephrasing the prompt question as a statement.

Interestingly, his own analysis of the efficient writerly moves he made evidenced

memetic writerly moves. In his analysis, Christian references Perri’s essay

“Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts,” which we read as a class, in the seventh line. He

included this textual references as he has been taught to do and adapts Perri’s argument

that the “right kind of non-sense” earns an A for his own purposes. He not only includes

this quote to evidence that he completed the reading, he included it to validate this point

that his demonstration of writing skills earned an unmerited high writing score as he

developed an interrogation of how and why this happened.

Recognizing that his efficient writerly moves often garnered academic success,

Christian, like many of the students in this class, was resistant to attacks against the

159

culture of efficiency that informed his academic writing practices and shaped his written

texts. In fact, Christian and his classmates overwhelmingly viewed efficient moves as

central to high school success. They believed this to the point of seeing little problem

with directly copying words from another person if that enabled successful assignment

completion. It was the ideas that eventually grew into this essay that ignited the

exchange below, which began as a side conversation before the bell rang but grew into a

whole class discussion.

Pratt: Christian, Dylan, and I were having a little discussion before class that everyone might find interesting. Apparently in Mr. Johnson’s gov. class, people are using shared notes in preparation for an upcoming Model Congress assignment. In some ways that’s the same thing that I ask you to do. Talk to each other. Share information. Construct understandings. In that same vein, Mr. Johnson said to create a sheet, collaboratively if you’d like, that would help you on your upcoming project. One student in the class just asked another, are you done with your sheet? Let me cop …..

Dylan: (interrupting, laughing) Not copy it, just compare it.

Noisy outburst. Students talking and laughing.

Pratt: Now wait, what is happening here is really interesting.

Christian: (interjecting) Yeah because copying is so legit.

Rumblings of classroom side conversation

Pratt: (over the din, as students are refocusing on the teacher) Why do you think Mr. Johnson is allowing you to use this sheet? And if he is allowing you to use it, why shouldn’t I allow another student to just copy it?

Dylan: If something were worth learning, then I would be happy to learn it. But I really don’t care about this. I just need to copy it to get it done.

(class discussion, 2/26/08)

160

As students debated the merits of copying note sheets from each other as well as passing

down the typed class notes from previous years in preparation for an upcoming American

Government test, they conveyed their beliefs that task completion is largely the central

aim of high school assignments.

This sense of academic work as task completion is not limited to these high

school students or this setting. Entire websites like GradeGuru.com, ShareNotes.com,

FinalsClub.org, koofers.com, coursehero.com, knetwit.com, studyblue.com and

isleptthroughclass.com are dedicated to the sharing of college class notes. While these

sites attest that sharing of class notes is in the spirit of the social construction of

knowledge, many students in this particular twelfth-grade English class, especially

Christian, viewed them as a way that he “won’t have to work so hard next year” (class

discussion, 2/26/09).

When I interjected that “school exercises and writing tasks are in service of

learning something new, not just for the sake of getting some grade,” Blake stated that he

didn’t believe me, that this was “something teachers say but don’t really mean” (class

discussion, 2/26/08). Michael asserted that “we participate in school to move up in

society, not really to learn,” arguing that school is a means to earn a credential and that

the credential grants you access and success (class discussion, 2/26/08). His belief that

school is “about getting ahead in the world” was embraced by most of his classmates,

who neither challenged nor refuted his position.

This belief about completing assignments and accumulating credentials explains

in some degree these particular students’ motivation to lapse into the prescriptive

161

formats. This was not a thoughtless decision. Students struggled to negotiate the

tensions between their goal to earn a high grade, their intention to please their teacher,

their understanding of the teacher’s ideas, their willingness to develop their own ideas,

and their own desire to write. For students, these concerns were typically confronted in

the order described above. As the teacher, I would have preferred these needs to be

honored in the inverse order.

For example, Grace wrote the following on the class’ electronic discussion forum.

Being a high school writer can be likened to being a drone. There is a constant limitation on exactly what we can do—which can be attributed to the rubrics and requirements the teacher sets. The high school writer eventually adapts to this constant meeting of goals and develops an apathetic sense by ‘making one day resemble another as much as possible, avoiding unpredictable experiences, even interesting conversations, in order to muster a steady concentration.’(Hunt) When receiving an assignment, the writer constantly does the same work on the paper as he has done for all the other papers set by the high school curriculum. This drone like nature of high school writing is what defines, and ruins, us.(i-note posting, 2/7/08)

In this posting, Grace never gets to her own ideas. She paraphrases Hunt’s arguments,

culled from an excerpt that we read in class and repeats aspects of class discussion. Like

Jenny from Purcell-Gates’ (1995) research, Grace does not write her own words; she

simply copies other people’s.

In a separate google.docs forum, the following discussion transpired where the

first student repeated points from class discussion and the second concurred.

Patrick: to be a high school writer means to be able to express yourself freely. Many teachers prevent this from happening with grades and rubrics. By just letting a student write what they feel, is much more bennificial than making them write what you (teachers) think is write. (i-note posting 2/12/08)

162

Dylan’s response: ….yeah, what he said (i-note posting 2/13/08). Anonymous student’s response: Me too. I am here to be the best student I can be and get prepped for college and learning the facts about what it means to succeed in life and to be successful. I would not like to be at [this school] one more moment but I have to if I want to get a good education in college

No additional posting are included on this thread. The discussion ends.

(i-note posting, 2/14/08)

This exchange between the first two students highlights two motivations underlying their

efficient writerly moves: (1) school is about task completion with clear, objective

markers of what this means and how it will be scored as well as (2) the repetition of a

previously stated response allows a student to participate in class without having to fully

engage with complex ideas. Yet the third and anonymous posting attempted to extend the

ideas of the previous postings while simultaneously validating Patrick’s point, which is

different from his own. It attempts to invite fellow interlocutors into a more generative

writerly discourse. But the invitation was declined even with the opening phrase “Me

too” that demonstrated the writer’s agreement with the previous statement, a convention

of politeness in classrooms where no one wants to make anyone else “look bad.”

The dominance of these kinds of efficient moves was most evident in particular

students’ formal academic writing. For example, Patrick’s second draft of his “what does

it mean to be a high school writer” essay elaborates on ideas asserted and subsequently

validated in his i-note posting. His five-paragraph essay is one where each paragraph

supports the singular, central argument with various examples and pieces of evidence.

An excerpt of his essay is below.

163

While teachers may promote originality and creative writing, students are confined by the numerous rules and rubrics that are enforced by the teachers. Nowadays teachers have limited room for creativity due to instructions on length, format, and style of writing. The typical high school essay requires five paragraphs, a strong thesis statement, and follows MLA format. Therefore, students are so focused on meeting the requirements of rules and rubrics that they loose interest in the assignment and solely focus on completing it.(essay, 3/26/08)

Like the many of his classmates’ essays, Patrick’s essay was critical of the formulaic

nature of high school writing. Yet his essay constructed a critique of academic writing

formats and formulas within the same rigid framework against which he is arguing. The

essay delineating the points that the essay would cover in the introduction and

paraphrased one of these sentences as the topic sentence for each body paragraph. In this

way, the essay evidenced what Patrick believed it was expected to evidence: dutiful

assignment completion.

Efficient moves made by the high school writers in his chapter do not simply

suggest their attention to assignment completion. Instead these moves suggest the

students’ complex analysis of institutional messages about what is valued in academic

writing. The efficient writing moves evidenced in Dylan’s, Christian’s, Grace’s, and

Patrick’s writing are indicative of deep engagement with academic texts and the largely

invisible institutional norms around students’ written products and writing practices. By

highlighting and subtly critiquing the impact of often-repeated writing experiences, their

efficient writerly moves underscore the irony that this pedagogical repetition is often

viewed as a best practice, especially when it enables students to become unthinkingly

familiar with tasks they may see in assessment situations.

164

Subversive Moves

Subversive writerly moves are largely motivated by students’ belief that academic

writing as taught in school prevents real writers from engaging meaningfully in text

creation. Subversive moves often critique prescriptive writing strategies by, among other

things, making use of non-traditional formats, crafting arguments with tangential

connections to a prompt, or offering challenging insights. Subversive writerly moves

thoughtfully trouble seemingly unthoughtful repetitions of teacher-centered ideas and

formats. Unlike memetic moves, which are simultaneously repetitive and inventive,

subversive moves are largely inventive and guided by the writer’s own interest and

insights.

Subversive moves were evident in the writings of some students, like Bryan, who

asserted that high school academic contexts were spaces that discouraged him from being

inventive. Bryan expounds on this idea in the content of his essay entitled “School of

Fish.”

In his essay about being a writer, Bryan argued that too many high school writers

craft a writerly identity that defines them as “student” instead of as “writer.” He argued

that instead of being viewed by teachers as writers instead he and his classmates were

viewed as students of writing. According to Bryan’s essay, students largely spent time

efficiently completing assignments to meet academic requirements. In this context,

students lacked spaces to construct themselves as writers. Instead, they could ONLY be

students because that is the singular identity assigned to them by the institution of school.

165

…The greatest problem…arises when students have no will to write, but must do so for school anyway; their high school writing career becomes their entire writing career. Therein lies the problem; high school writers, as a group, are so horribly misunderstood because instead of writers, they are seen as high school students first and as writers afterward.

Some of the blame for the distorted view of high school writers as students first, writers second, lies on the school system itself and, again, the sheer amount of writing that students do for school. Teachers very often embed routine learning and rote memorization into writing assignments. That, plus the sheer amount of writing on a multitude of subjects that a high school student creates almost requires him to discard the process of inspiration completely. A writer seeking inspiration is like a “fisherman making a guess and a cast”(Ong cited in Hunt) and the analogy that writers just “have to learn where the big fish are” shows the experiential yet completely irrational process of finding inspiration. However, keeping with the fish analogy, high school academics demand from students far more fish than the student can fish up in a stream, forcing students to purchase fish from markets or turn in the same fish over and over until it is rotted. Eventually overfishing will kill off the population in students’ ponds of inspiration; when their own environments run dry, students have to resort to desperate measures, such as store purchasing fish or taking down their trophy catches from their mantelpieces to turn in for every assignment they possibly could.

This essay asserts that the volume of writing tasks assigned in high school coupled with

assignments that privileged, what Bryan called, “no thinking and all facts” was an

impediment to the messy process of generating thought in composition processes.

Bryan’s essay underscores the point that writing intensive experiences are not the same as

writing-conscious experiences.

Interestingly Bryan submitted this essay to the on-line writing community,

ThisIsBy.Us.6 Bryan introduced me to this writing community, which he individually

6 ThisIsBy.Us was a “writing community launched in the Spring of 2006 that had seen over 50,000 posts by over 15,000 different writers” but “sadly could not be economically sustained [because] though the site attracted a base of dedicated writers, the advertising market that caters to writers is neither large not fast-growing.” (http://www.thisisby.us/ accessed on July 13, 2009). ThisIsBy.Us hosted writers in multiple modes, including expository, and monetarily compensated them for writing based on the number of hits and readings their piece had. Advertising revenue from pop-up adds supported the financing of writers’ work and work that did not receive a wide audience, was not compensated.

166

sought outside the context of school. Bryan’s position as an expert on the ThisIsBy.Us

writing community subverted the traditional teacher-student hierarchy, challenging the

ways relationships are set up in high school and posing an alternative for how they could

be.

Bryan shared that while he had written this essay in light of our class discussions,

its primary intended audience was his online ThisIsBy.Us writing community. That the

assignment just so happened to tangentially meet the requirements of a school assignment

was of secondary importance to him as a student, writer, and person. As a self-described

writer, Bryan instead wrote in ways meaningful to him. He had no intention of revising

before it shared with me as an assignment. As he made clear, I was the secondary

audience and the grade that he would earn and the feedback that I would offer was of

secondary concern to the feedback that he would receive from his online writing

community.

Submitting work for publication outside the institution of school is not the only

kind of subversive writerly move Bryan’s work evidenced. Subversive moves also

involved the invention or inclusion of novel formats, like in Bryan’s final essay. In this

essay, he crafted a monologue from the point of view of an apple just before it is shot off

of a fence. The digital text included words, Bryan in a voiceover reading the words, and

time-lapse images of the apple at various moments of implosion to which Bryan draws

parallels of himself as a writer.

Another example of subversive moves involved purposefully confrontational

formatting or content decisions. These kinds of subversive moves were evident an

167

excerpt from the writing of Sophia, an artist who often arrived to class late, taking her

detentions before they were even assigned. The first essay that she submitted in this class

was one sentence in length.

Set 1Mrs. Pratt

What itmeans toBe a high

schoolwriter

Being ahigh school

writermeans

doing thebare

minimumand then

waiting forthe next set

of instructionsuntil June

17th.

Two days after the due date, and with no prompting as I had not yet even read her essay,

she submitted the following addendum:

Bare MinimumIf understanding the theory or developing a new insight is really more important than sheer completion and satisfying the requirements set by the teacher, why don’t grades show it? From the very beginning of the educational path, students are drilled that getting high grades from a teacher is the right thing to do. This constant and overwhelming goal convinces students that a legitimate grade can be reached by any means, as long as it pleases the teacher giving the grade. Our flawed system allows an incredible amount of students to fully believe that high school and higher education exist for the sole purpose of learning not what is being

168

taught, but how to achieve the best grade with a minimum of understanding and lasting effect. In essence William Perry [in “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts”] is correct when he argues that “the student learns that the more facts and procedures he can get right in a given course, the better will be his grade.” It’s a shame that in the most rebellious times of our lives, so many of us are masters at producing the bare minimum and dull, but satisfactory, perfection.

Challenging the widely accepted conventions of format, Sophia explained in an attached

writer’s memo that she was “proud that she was able to turn an essay into a piece of art.”

At the same time, her addendum emphasized how important it was to her that the teacher

understand both what and why she wrote.

Ironically both Bryan and Sarah earned “C”s as final grades in English the

preceding year of high school. When I asked Sophia about her previous grades in

English, Sophia offered a one sentence response that both clarified and questioned:

“What do teachers really want from their students: The obedient and trusting disciple or

the courageous and contrary individual?” (writing conference, 4/3/08). This question

about student purpose and teacher expectations marked a site of tension as Sophia

negotiated the person she would be in this particular classroom. Do students who

evidence such rich thought deserve “C”s in literacy-based classes because they don’t

adjust their writing practices to align seamlessly with the teachers? Her one-sentence

essay and addendum response challenged me to examine how much did I really allow

students’ insights to guide the work of the class?

As we moved more into the second in a series of writing inquiries in mid-

February, the class used the writing of Sandra Cisneros to consider the question, “What

does The House on Mango Street suggest about writing?” This question invited students

169

to read this work of literature differently than they were accustomed to reading literary

texts. They were not asked to engage in a literary analysis but rather were asked to place

this text in dialogue with their own ideas about being a writer. The content of Sophia’s

essay ideas explored the intersection of art and literature, asserting that an artist’s work

reflects the way they see the world. The conclusion of her essay presents a powerful

metaphor of identity as collage.

House on Mango Street is written in a way that suggests jumps in progression of thought rather than any traditional, whether it is Esperanza from the present, past, or future, or Cisneros talking through her. Picture to picture, the reader sees one image after another, turning into a stop motion feature of surreal poetry mixed in with not only other senses, but also words that directly trigger emotions. When I read House on Mango Street, I see visual pictures being fitted together—each vignette forms its own close-up of one area of Cisneros’ prose. She doesn’t go in any sort of traditional literary order. The book gives the impression of jumping from thought to thought and memory to memory. David Hockney’s photo collages remind me of how I see this book.

David Hockney is an artist who made elaborate photo collages which I think share the same feeling of jumping focus. Both Cisneros’s writing and Hockney’s photos evoke an illusion of realistically seeing something.

Sophia’s essay, even with all its technical flaws, demonstrated powerful insights about

the potential for thought and memory to shape identity. As a writer, Sophia used

metaphor deftly to make a rich and unexpected comparison between the writing of

Cisneros and the photography of Hockney, suggesting the paradox that the closer that you

get to something, the less likely you are able to see it; that collages, like memory and

identity, only make sense from a distance where you allow yourself to be bombarded by

multiple details simultaneously.

170

One of the most intriguing subversive moves evidenced within this essay was that

it was left unrevised, even after receiving written feedback and engaging in a writing

conference with me. As a teacher, I was confronted with a dilemma. I wanted to honor

this because the presentation of an original idea is a most powerful part of an essay, but I

also wanted Sophia to revise and polish her writing.

Sophia recognized two aspects of her writerly identity, her desire to write for

herself in ways that she determined as meaningful and her desire to have her texts

understood by others. While these two aspects of her writerly identity were often in

conflict with each other, both of these positions were deeply influenced by the ways she

viewed herself as an artist. She privileged writing as a form of art with the power and

responsibility to push back against the status quo. Yet in other ways, she viewed the act

of writing as not worth her effort to polish. Writing was not art; it was unlike the

paintings or jewelry work that she devoted hours to perfecting.

Pratt: Sophia, you know, writing, at least for you, doesn’t have to be just a task that you complete.

Sophia: But anything that pulls me away from the art studio is just a task. I wrote this paper because it was an assignment.

Pratt: I know that….But you have a real talent, a gift, for coming up with genuinely original ideas that other people…and not just me, but also your classmates, would be interested in reading.

Sophia: I do feel like I said some interesting things. It took me a long time to think about the Hockney comparison.

Pratt: That comparison is awesome. That’s why I make such a big deal about these more technical things because they can interfere with meaning, distract your reader from the great ideas you have.

171

Sophia: Aren’t the ideas enough? If you say that I have really good insights, isn’t that enough?

(writing conference, 4/8/08)

This writing conference stayed with me for a long time. Sophia was right in her

implication that teachers, myself included, contend ideas and engagement are at the

center of writing only to focus on the tangible product when a writer is still in the process

of the act of writing. The act of writing—defined not by the tangible product but by the

interactions around the physical process of creating text—could become effaced by the

writing content when viewed in this way.

The kinds of subversive writerly moves evidenced in the writings of both Sophia

and Bryan were among the most interesting to read and the most challenging to analyze. I

suggest this because they were the closest approximation to writing-conscious practices

seen in this high school context, and analyzing writing-consciousness involves trying to

understand what occurs in a writers’ process during the writing process. In their writing

but most especially in their talk about their writing, Sophia and Bryan carefully crafted an

identity that guided me, their teacher, to read them in a specific way. At the same time,

they also recognized the presumptions I held about their writerly identities and their

likely adherence to academic conventions. They recognized these dispositions in me, the

reader of their texts, and used their writing to push against these, a move that interrupted

the typical balance of teacher-student authority in the class, a de-centering that was both

incredibly brave on an individual level and highly effective in shaping our discussions

and writing on the level of the entire class.

172

Writing Guided by Questions Rather Than Answers

The invitation to inquiry and the initial recognition of the writerly moves they

made awakened in some students the possibility that writing could be guided by their

own questions rather than definitive answers. This was evident regardless of the various

writerly moves suggested in a particular assignment and became possible when

individual students recognized the interconnection between personal insights and

academic texts as mutually informative and potentially transformative. For example

Jared, Sophia, Jeanne, and Maura, recognized this and attempted to make academic

writing and reading tasks more personally engaging, while at the same time their writings

evidenced a wide-variety of writerly moves.

Jared recognized that outside texts had the potential to inform and transform his

ideas; yet he did not arrive in class with this disposition. Initially he expressed his fear

that “his ideas would not be perceived as belonging to him if they were evidenced in an

outside text” (conference, 3/15/08). He viewed “the peril of mindless repetition and the

potential for plagiarism” as obstacles to allowing his writing to be informed by the words

and thoughts of others (conference 3/15/08). As he revised his first essay on “What it

means to be a high school writer?” I asked Jared, “Why did it seem to be so difficult to

integrate the ideas of others in [his] own writing?” His reply marked the clear division

Jared saw between his own ideas and ideas presented to him in an academic context.

Reading and writing are totally separate processes. When I am writing something, it might be inspired by something that I read but the idea for my paper should be wholly mine. Reading helps me to think, but when I am working on a paper, I need to think separately from what I read.

173

(conference, 2/13/09).

Sophia expressed this same concern that she was unwilling to surrender her individually

constructed ideas. In her first writer’s memo, she explained that she “did not include a lot

of quotes because [she] thought that it might take away from [her] idea” (essay writer’s

memo, 1/31/08).

Yet over the course of the semester both of these students came to recognize two

things. First they came to recognize that they did not have to surrender their own insights

when they included citations from other texts and talked back to these insights in their

own writing. Second, they came to recognize that because their insights were not

definitive did not make them less credible. In her final, Sophia described the generative

potential she felt in developing her own ideas in light of conceptual ideas, like liminality,

that we discussed in class.

I am between places. Not only am I in between high school and college, I am also in the very strange place of being between teenager and adult….Sam raised an interesting question in class about being liminal. “If you are in between two people or two places, don’t you give up knowing one in its entirety?” In other words, isn’t it better to be just one person that you completely understand or to hold on to one simple idea because it is easy to explain? I don’t believe so. At least not now. It is far more interesting to be in the in-between, constantly changing and always trying to figure out who and why you are.(final, 5/1/08)

Her ultimate inquiry into writerly identity was not about gaining some specific teacher-

determined content or understanding some essential writing self. Instead, she used the

inquiry into writerly identity as a vehicle to understand herself in complex and dynamic

ways. This final inquiry—where her writing was guided by her own questions—allowed

her to feel invested in her writing and ideas in ways that she felt previously distanced.

174

Even her excerpted writer’s memo demonstrates this nuanced position as she discussed

both her personal experiences growing up in a family of artists and her academic

experiences as a writer and thinker.

Jeanne also internalized this idea of meaningful writing being principally guided

by her own questions. In a private conversation with me, Jeanne suggested that this way

of thinking about writing as guided by students’ own questions could be generated “if

teachers gave more meaningful assignments” (conference, 2/13/08). Yet she asserted that

most of this change comes from students “remembering what it really means to write for

[themselves]” (essay, 2/29/08). Jeanne’s response embraces the paradox that you only

understand something when you can question it deeply, that high school assignments

when done well reveal something about the writer, and that discussions, lectures,

annotations, private thoughts, and personal experiences all inform the writers’

understandings of their world and the text they create to capture that world.

In her final, Maura came to recognize that writing could be guided by her

personal interests rather than by a pre-determined teacher agenda. She recognized “That

it [was] much easier to write a lot if you have ideas/care about what you’re

writing!”(final writer’s memo, 4/30/08). In fact, her final essay, a five-page multi-modal

essay entitled “Top 18 Reasons Why I Do Not Want To Write An English Final,”

concluded with the sentence “unfortunately, writing this final ended up taking a

significant amount of time and thought although, I actually had fun writing it.” The irony

is that Maura felt she could only write about what mattered to her when her grades were

irrelevant, as evidenced by reason number twelve explaining that she didn’t “need to

175

spend my time on a final that according to grade calculator I can get an F on and still get

a B for my final grade” (final, 5/1/08). Because she was unconcerned with the grade, she

wrote on her own terms, which made the process of academic writing both empowering

and engaging. While her final lacked both proofreading and revision, it contained some

of the most original and assertive ideas she generated all semester. Her act of protest,

ironically did not exclude her from the academic discourse of this inquiry-based

curriculum; in fact it was this self-invested idea that gave her entrée to the academic

space of this classroom from which she felt alienated throughout much of the semester.

When these particular students’ own questions guided their writing practices,

these students generated personally meaningful texts that simultaneously met the

requirements of their academic assignments. They began to recognize that they did not

need to surrender their ideas in light of textual understandings they gained through their

annotations and participation in discussion.

Self-Awareness and Self-Representation

Forty of fifty-two electronic postings in response to the initial prompt “what does

it mean to be a writer?” either directly or indirectly referenced meeting the needs of the

teacher, the presumed the audience for students’ writing. Of these forty responses,

twenty-six explicitly described meeting the teacher’s expectations as the central aim of

academic writing. These responses overwhelmingly argued that academic writing tasks,

as assigned in high school, prevented students from developing and sharing their own

ideas. They suggested that academic writing served teachers’ assessment purposes rather

176

than students’ purposes of sharing ideas in meaningful ways. Of the twelve remaining

postings, three centered on the expectations of students as writers and as readers of

classmates others’ writing. While the first part of this chapter explored the impact of

teacher expectations, these few responses suggested the importance of students’

expectations and raised questions about how and why students reacted to their work

being read by others, which is the focus of this next section.

An i-note written by Michael was one of the three focusing on the expectation of

student writers as they hoped to be read by others. In this excerpt, Michael suggested that

students imagined themselves as the central audience for their prose and lived up to the

expectations they set by freely thinking and writing for themselves. Critiquing the notion

of teacher as the singular knowing authority in a classroom and contemplating students’

unwillingness to question this authority, Michael argued that when high school students

write for their teacher, it interferes with what a student writer wants to say.

High school writing is a façade. When reading the arguments of my piers [sic], I noticed that everyone could be simplified into one giant, hypocritical bell-curve…A few students like me, dared to venture our into an uncertain assignment, challenging the colony of ants and disagreeing with the Queen. The masses, however, conformed to the very entity that their writing condemns. Of course an English teacher has an effect on a student’s writing similar to filial imprinting’s effect on voting tendencies, and of course [there is] the possibility that everyone came up with the same idea about high school writing being limiting. Although it is equally possible that everyone preached anti-conformist ideals just because Mrs. Pratt did so. (i-note posting, 1/31/08)

No one posted a comment after Michael’s; the discussion thread simply ended. The

reason for this could be that Michael posted his response late and students, especially

177

those who had posted more than once, considered their work in reading and responding

complete. It could also suggest that Michael’s positions were viewed by classmates as a

critique levied against them to which they did not know how to respond. Or it might

suggest that Michael’s piece captured the sentiment of the class and his words spoke for

the class as a whole. This leaves me with the overarching question: what are the stakes of

students sharing their own writing? What are the impacts of sharing a piece of writing on

the writer and the audience? Does it matter if writers share a text at the behest of the

teacher or of their own volition? Does the sharing of student writing motivate or stifle

conversation and under what conditions? What is the potential for rendering students

risk-adverse in their writing if they may be asked to share?

Regardless of the lack of feedback from his classmates, Michael used this idea as

basis of his three-page essay entitled “The English Patient,” a text written in response to

the course’s framing question: “What does it mean to be a high school writer?” In this

essay, Michael makes visible and explicit the taken-for-granted control teachers have

over students’ writing. Michael’s essay asserts the practice of writing is dying of

disengagement in high school settings because teachers exert too much authority over

students’ ideas and students themselves allow this to happen. He explores this point

when he considers how, in past moments, teachers have cajoled his writing and ideas,

arguing that students often fell into teacher-dominated way of writing and thinking.

There really is an answer that some teachers are looking for. If we just spent the last week talking about Aristotle’s idea of the tragic hero and then read “Death of the Common Man” [as we studied Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman] and then were asked to write an essay that explains how Willy Loman is a tragic hero, there is one answer the

178

teacher is looking for. Paragraph one is about if Willy is of noble birth. Paragraph two is about whether or not Willy causes his own downfall. Paragraph three is about if Willy has hubris. There’s an answer, and to get an A, we just need to provide the answer. We all know that.(essay, 2/28/08)

According to Michael’s essay, successful students devoted their academic time to finding

answers rather than exploring questions because they believed that is what school

demanded of them. He asserted that for students efficiently following teacher directives

trumped the labor-intensive process of generative thought in academic writing

assignments.

Although evidencing structural and technical flaws, his essay offered a harsh

critique of students’ high school writing practices and raised questions that held the

potential to invite the entire class to think about the topics of dialogue, audience, writing,

and identity in more complex ways. In the brief exchange below, I asked Michael to

share his entire essay with the larger audience of the class if he felt comfortable.

Pratt: I just finished reading your essay and thought it might be an interesting piece to share with the class.

Michael: I don’t know. It is all really common sense stuff and not even my best writing. I don’t know what we’d say about it.

Pratt: Well just think about it.

(conversation, 3/5/08)

While initially hesitant, Michael ultimately agreed to share his essay with the class orally

and by posting it on a class bulletin board. Yet Michael, for all his critique of his

classmates’ inability to recognize an audience larger than the teacher, did not consider

179

how different students’ expectations, experiences, and writing practices might influence

the ways his classmates would respond to his essay.

Believing his classmates would feel the same “common sense” sentiments as he

did, Michael’s comments suggested that he believed his writing would be

overwhelmingly accepted and that the majority of his class would concur with his ideas.

This seemed to be the central reason Michael agreed to share this essay. In an earlier

conversation, Michael said that he didn’t really like sharing because it made people who

did seem like teacher’s pets. But Michael was convinced that this essay was not about

teacher-pleasing and that it instead described “the students’ perspective” (conference,

3/5/08)

He was surprised when members of the class questioned some of the positions he

asserted. In his oral reading, one of his classmates reacted strongly to an argument that

he shared with the class.

Writing is not a suit that can be tailored to fit the writer. Either you can write or you cannot. Unfortunately, most high school students think they can write, when in fact they most definitely can not.(class discussion, 3/5/08)

An incensed Jeanne, who described herself in an introductory electronic posting as a

writer who “has been keeping an off and on journal …[and who] would never write

anything that didn’t come from the heart and mind combined, even for school writing”

found her ideas in tension with Michael’s. Michael’s essay critiqued the notion of the

teacher as singular authority and intended audience for ideas (i-note posting, 1/26/08).

Yet instead of considering the social nature of writing, Michael instead positioned

180

himself as the singular authority on high school writing by asserting that “most high

school students think they can write, when in fact they most definitely can not.” Jeanne

questioned, “Are you including yourself in the generalization about high school writers or

does that only apply to the rest of us?” (class discussion, 3/5/08). Michael was taken

aback by the accusatory nature of her question, responding “that is it just my idea about

it.” Alexandra, a shy member of the class for whom this was a first time in an Honors

level course, chimed in “it’s your idea but it is about her…and me” (class discussion,

3/5/08).

Michael initially suggested that both Jeanne and Alexandra overreacted, a claim

that he could comfortably make because he, Jeanne, and Alexandra were members of

three very distinct peer groups outside and inside of class. But this effort to separate the

personal from the academic was interrupted when a later part of this same essay was

called into question by a classmate who participated in the same social circles. Marissa

reacted strongly to a later excerpt.

Like drug addicts, high school writers are so consumed by the technology that all incentive to write academically evaporates. Technocotics are used and sold internationally and no one blinks an eye. Entire words can now be “translated” into a succinct series of letters (lol, brb,g2g), and I am afraid the world will forget the meaning of words altogether, literally and metaphorically….Marissa Smith, a second semester high school senior for example, spent four times as much time on Facebook as she did working on her Environmental Science presentation, and is not the only one. (essay, 3/3/08)

After this paragraph, she interrupted Michael’s reading with, “That’s reeeeeally honest,”

falling hard against the back of her chair. A few minutes later, after everyone in the

181

class finished re-reading a print copy of essay in its entirety, our class discussion

continued:

Pratt: Any questions you want to pose to the author in general, or about his process. Thoughts, reactions, comments? What kind of conversation does this essay invite us to have? Hushed laughter followed by about fifteen seconds of uncomfortable silence

Marissa: This is the first time that I read it, but last week he said the audience for it should be in a newspaper for adults who want to know what it is like to be in school...to see what has happened. How everything has changed. You know.

Pratt: This is a great example of how you can show an unexpected perspective. I didn’t realize that about the essay at all. His argument…well, Michael can you say for the class what you were working to argue. About six seconds of silence. What you said to me five minutes before class began. You said it brilliantly.

Michael: I forgot……it’s something about high school writing that limits, that strips us of creativity, that puts us in these little boxes.

Pratt: Is that all? That idea that you just said echoed in so many other people’s paper, but Michael, is that all you’d like to say?

Michael: I’d actually like to clarify.

Pratt: Please.

Michael: Marissa really does do all of her work. I don’t want anyone to think that she is a slacker.

(class discussion, 3/5/08)

This interaction between Michael and Marissa suggested that Michael’s initial

understandings of academic writing practices became, in this moment, increasingly more

complex as he realized that his academic arguments and his personal relationship with

182

Marissa are intertwined in this particular essay. While Michael initially viewed the

sharing of his writing as a broadcast of ideas to which he believed everyone subscribed,

he recognized that each member of his class brought their own experience to the text and

that when texts are invested with our personal ideas or those ideas reflect others it is

impossible for them to be shared neutrally. After Joyce, Alexandra, and Marissa

questioned his position, he recognized the impact his writing had on his classmates.

Their reactions invited him to reconsider ideas and to recognize the larger social

implications for his relationship with Marissa, who sat next to him each day in class.

Yet, it was not just Michael’s understanding of the social nature of text that

evolved. This discussion invited other students to raise their own questions and to work

against narrow conceptions of whose knowledge counts in a classroom. Alexandra and

Marissa questioned how they and their positions about writing and themselves as people

were represented in the work of others. Jeanne questioned “the generalizations about

high school writers in other people’s papers,” troubling essentialized images of students

and writers.

This questioning stance was also evident in each of Alexandra’s revisions of her

second inquiry essay. After the subsequent discussion prompted by Michael’s essay,

Alexandra met with me in a conference the next day, asking for additional time to rethink

and revise the piece she previously submitted.

Alexandra: I kinda had a breakthrough last night. I realized that parts [of my essay that I turned in] sounded really cliché….too simple. I just ….I just wanted [pause] to question something that really mattered. [Pause] What happened is when I was in fifth grade I was sexually assaulted on the bus. It was by kids in my grade. They jumped on me, started

183

assaulting me. I told my mom and she got them suspended from school. One of the kids lives on my street. It makes it so uncomfortable. I hate him…That’s why I hate taking the bus.

Pratt: I would too.

Alexandra: That kid, one of them got suspended again for pretty much the same thing. But what annoyed me is one of the boys…he is a really good soccer player and he goes to [private school in the area] now and he got into a really good college because he is a really good soccer player but he is a really awful person. Anyway….I want to write about this because after our discussions about writing that matters it is all I keep thinking about.

Pratt: So what will you write?

Alexandra: I think that what I learned from this [experience] was that you can’t take anything from anyone, like it made me realize how I should be treated. My parents had taught me manners—like to say please and thanks and stuff like that—but they hadn’t taught me how I was supposed to be treated and then I think that I learned…what’s the word I’m looking for?

Pratt: Like you had strength, or confidence [pause] or self-assurance?

Alexandra: No I didn’t have that. They were making fun of me for a while. And I just kind of laughed it off, and maybe they thought well she’s ok with this. But I wasn’t. After all this, I had taught myself that you can’t just go with things like that because it will keep getting worse.

(conference, 3/6/08)

Alexandra who rarely spoke in class and who did not complete one of the two previous

essays felt an urgency to write after she built on Jeanne’s comment about representations

of the self and how you allowed others to read you. This positively complicated

Alexandra’s depiction of herself as she pushed her essay that she was deeply invested in

writing beyond the “something bad happened and I learned from it, making me a stronger

person” formula.

184

His classmates’ reaction to and Michael’s intended audience for his essay opened

up important questions about the nature of audience in this particular socio-culturally

shaped, inquiry-based classroom. In this context, the audience for Michael’s writing was

different than in a typical high school classroom, where the audience is likely the teacher

assigning a grade to the essay. As evident in Michael’s two episodes of sharing his piece,

his understanding of and reaction to his audience was not some static conceptualization

made at the beginning of his writing process. Instead, he, Jeanne, Alexandra, and Marisa

were left to consider the impact their words and ideas would have on other people. By

sharing this piece of writing and considering the reactions to it, these four students came

to more deeply recognize the importance of social context in how meaning is constructed

and how their words could be understood by others in ways they had not initially

intended.

Difficulties Conceptualizing Writing as a Mode of Inquiry

By the end of the semester, the majority of students in this particular class began

to use their annotations as a way to mine scholarly texts in service of their own

arguments. Students more readily shared their essay arguments and essay drafts with

their classmates and me. They developed nuanced understandings inspired by multiple

re-readings of scholarly texts and used these understandings to inform their own insights.

In each of these ways, the personal experiences students brought to a text and the

academic insights they culled from the texts they read were largely viewed as mutually

185

constitutive. Writing as a mode of inquiry became a largely accepted practice. Yet not

every member of the class embraced these positions.

A hardworking student dedicated to her own self-improvement in writing,

Candice struggled to generate and sustain her own inquiry questions and responses. She

found it challenging to develop inquiry-based writing topics and questions, as evidenced

by the numerous writing conferences she felt she needed “to get started” on her writing

(writing conference, 2/20/08). Developing and asserting her ideas about and in relation

to the scholarly readings proved challenging, even when we worked through these texts

in advance of a class discussion. So while Candice worked diligently to craft meaningful

annotations in response to texts and to integrate notions of writing as a mode into her own

work, she experienced great difficult in realizing these aims.

I recognized this challenge early in the semester and invited Candice to meet with

me. During an early conference, I suggested that she focus her attention on building

meaningful annotations. I made this suggestion in the hope that rich annotations could

lead to potential inquiry questions that might develop into positions taken up in Candice’s

writing; I imagined the practice of crafting annotations as a process for Candice to

generate ideas. In this vein, Candice dutifully crafted marginal annotations that

attempted to negotiate the novel and nuanced arguments of the complex scholarly texts

that she was assigned to read. But as Candice confessed in this same writing conference,

“these texts [were] hard to read. There were so many new words and hard words, [she

didn’t] know how to start” (writing conference, 2/20/08).

186

Due to the challenging nature of these reading and annotation tasks, Candice’s

early annotations consisted of key words and definitions, often verbatim from the text,

that honored the text’s language but often missed important elements of the text’s

meaning. For example, in her initial marginal annotations in response to Gee’s excerpt,

Candice wrote: “literate/non-literate and civilized/primitive are two kinds of cultures”

(field notes, 2/13/09). While these annotations demonstrated Candice’s ability to locate

key words, they also illustrated that Candice didn’t fully understand the complex points

that Gee’s essay attempted to make. In this way, Candice successfully highlighted the

existence of some key phrases from Gee but did not necessary fully interrogate their

meaning. To her credit, she scheduled a time to meet with me each time I pointed out the

possibility that her annotations contained a misreading.

In this way, Candice was eager to figure out how she could learn to inquire more

deeply into the course readings and develop her own inquiries into writing. As a

testament to her dedication, not one of the eight extended reading/writing conferences I

had with Candice lasted fewer than thirty minutes.

However an underlying tension was also at play in our conferences. At the

beginning of most conferences, Candice would often ask some form of the question:

What did this excerpt really mean? Evident in this question was the internal conflict she

experienced between the demonstrated clarity of content to which she had become

acculturated in her secondary school experience and the potentially powerful

indeterminacy underlying the process of inquiry. Candice was largely uncomfortable in

187

the adoption of an inquiry framework that lacked a definite answer as to what a text

meant.

Because of this, she often adopted the ideas of others or vetted her ideas with me

before they were shared orally or in writing. She sought confirmation in a variety of

ways that her responses were correct. For example, as a precursor to one particular

conference, I offered the example of various literacy practices being valued differently

based on social circumstances in a class discussion. In my example, I suggested that

students at this particular affluent high school could read literary texts and find themes

but many of them could not necessarily read a subway map. I asserted that both are ways

of being literate but are valued differently in different social contexts. Candice heard this

ideas in class, captured it in her notes, and then met with me in conference to try to figure

out how she could use this idea that had piqued her curiosity in her own writing.

Pratt: ….What counts as being literate depends on where you are from. Like the how many kids at [this school] couldn’t read a subway map example.

Candice: Yeah, that’s why it’s like where you come from cause…. I’m not saying that everyone feels this way but here it is not a big deal to graduate high school and go to college. It is expected. It’s a big deal to where you get in. In the city my friends are happy that they get to go to college; here you have to go to the right college. … So like [the majority of students at this suburban and affluent school] see them as illiterate, but if [those same students] go [into a setting more familiar to my city friends, my city friends will] be like you don’t know how to take a bus or like you don’t know what that means.

Pratt: That could be your paper. … Doesn’t this feel like something really worth writing? Might you enjoy, as much as you will enjoy writing a paper, this paper [about you finding a personal connection to this academic discussion]? ….

188

Candice: I’ll enjoy it. But I feel like my opinion, what I think is wrong because nobody ever sees it the way that I see it. (conference, 3/3/08)

I was surprised a week later when this same idea was inserted directly into a version of

her inquiry essay.

Philly students are given those skills [to read subway maps] as early as first grade. Suburban students wouldn’t see that knowing how to use public transportation is a factor that shapes being literate or illiterate.(essay, 3/10/08)

As suggested by the content of our writing conference and the inclusion of the previously

vetted example in her essay, Candice on some level understood Gee’s scholarly positions

on the social nature of literacy and found a personal connection between that abstract

concept and her own life. These ideas seemed to resonate powerfully with Candice. So

why was Candice hesitant to take up the questions most interesting to her in her writing

and whole class discussion? Why did the notion and practice of inquiry remain illusive

to Candice?

In the class discussion of Gee’s excerpt that occurred following our March 3

conference, she hesitantly offered an insight about the social nature of literacy we

discussed yet stopped short of offering her own impression or applying it to her own

experience.

Jared: [Literacy is] like the civilized/savage thing about bringing the caveman out of the dark and teaching him what he needs to know, either though explicit school teaching or a life experience.

Pratt: Why bring up the civilized/savage distinction?...

Candice: I don’t feel it’s like bringing the caveman out of the cave. When you bring a caveman out of the cave, they don’t know how to do

189

anything. But in literacy, when someone doesn’t know how to do something one time or doesn’t know one thing, then it’s not like you have to teach them like a whole new language. I dunno know, I could be wrong.

(class discussion, 3/3/08)

As Candice recognized this topic from a pre-class writing conference, she shared her

understandings, which rightly clarified a point Jared attempted to make. Yet even in this

moment, she was tentative in her assertions as underscored by the “I dunno know, I could

be wrong” that served as her final words and were interrupted by the bell. Candice’s

seemingly high sensitivity to the social pressure of performing inquiry muted her

willingness to participate in this act of “talking back” to the text in a public way.

While Candice continued to echo positions discussed in class and in conference,

she ultimately came to expand on these concepts, using her essays to prove the existence

of varying understandings of literacy but not necessarily analyzing what these differences

might suggest. As a part of her inquiry essay, entitled “I am a high school writer!” she

included data from a survey she created. This survey polled students from City School

High School and Suburban School High School with regards to their views on writing

and literacy.

I took the liberty of contacting a few City School High School students and questioned them of what their viewpoints on being literate, and what they felt would make me more successful in proving my point that environment and personal goals shape your idea of literacy. One City High School student said, ‘School doesn’t teach you all the skills necessary to be successful, you have to take what they give you and put your own twist on it to see what you want to do in life. No one is going to give you your dream, and I feel as long as I am taking steps to accomplish my goal, then I have to be literate because I am going to be somebody.’ I began getting into an in-depth conversation and I also asked the question that if she went to Suburban High School would she

190

still have that same outlook of literacy, but she gave the simple response ‘I don’t go to Suburban, and therefore I am not able to define what my idea of literacy would be, because that is in a different environment.’ I wanted my argument to have evidence on both sides so I then asked a Suburban High School student what their take on literacy was. ‘Literacy is being able to read and write,’ a junior stated, its interesting that they went back to the traditional way of literacy. (essay, 3/10/08)

She used pseudonyms for the names of people and schools to protect the integrity of

other people’s stories, quoted her source’s exact words, explained the context of those

transcribed words, and made sure that all sentences pointed to a single, overarching

argument. These efforts towards the creation of her own ethnographic research were

largely inspired by the work of this course. But the writing did not rise to the level of

essay, a text where a writer asserts her own perspective as she tries to weigh different

ideas in service of reaching a deeper understanding.

This absence of essaying was not for a lack of trying. Later in this same essay,

Candice’s writing attempts to move in the direction of independent analysis and inquiry.

This furthers my point of the environment shapes your idea of literacy, because most 16 and 17 year old intercity students don’t own a car so they have to use public transportation.

(essay, 3/10/08)

In this excerpt she seems unsure of what to argue but desirous to make an argument. To

this end, she conflates the notion of competing conceptions of literacy with questions of

access and affordability in her writing.

This analysis of Candice’s experience suggests three elements that made writing

as a mode of inquiry particularly challenging for her in this particular curricular

191

experience. The first involved the difficulties inherent in embracing indeterminacy in

writing as a mode of inquiry, especially in light of Candice’s expectation that writing

demonstrated content understandings. The second involved Candice’s seeming

uncomfortablity in engaging in inquiry within the public spaces of the classroom. The

third involved Candice’s genuine desire to build a meaningful inquiry coupled with her

struggle to generate arguments in light of challenging and complex scholarly texts, whose

reading was a novel experience for Candice.

While these challenges colored her curricular experience, Candice importantly

still gained a tremendous amount from her participation in this inquiry-based curriculum.

While these gains might not have been neatly codified in a summative essay, she became

aware of writing as a mode of inquiry as an alternative to writing as demonstration of

skills and content, a framework to which she was accustomed. She experienced a

meaningful curriculum that stretched her to think beyond the more discrete and

measurable skills that she came to expect from her English classes.

Conclusion

While Chapter Five considered students’ conceptual understandings of the notion

of inquiry and the ways students’ reacted to this as a course framework, this chapter

considered what this particular group of twelfth-grade students wrote in terms of their

own inquiries into writing in academic contexts. In this way, Chapter Five involved

students thinking about the notion of inquiry and Chapter Six analyzed students’

engagement in developing and completing their own inquiries into academic writing.

192

Through their engagement with self-developed inquiry questions, these particular

students grappled with the core concepts of this course—meaning is socially constructed,

writing is an act of identity, language is not neutral, individuals influence discursive

norms and vice versa, and writing is personal, albeit not necessarily autobiographical.

Through these inquiries into academic writing, they engaged with these concepts in rich

and personally meaningful ways.

Many of these students’ inquiries challenged their self and institutional

characterizations as students of writing, where they concerned themselves primarily with

task completion, and instead invited them to see themselves as writers who made

purposeful decisions about their ideas and language. It provided students the opportunity

to consider, question, and critique what, how, and why they wrote in light of school

assignments. In the process of doing this, many, but not all, students in this particular

class came to understand the importance of social contexts and the identities they crafted

for themselves within the particular social context of this class guided by an inquiry

curriculum. They also came to understand that their writing practices involved multiple

complex decisions and that they were not specific kinds of writers.

These same students also came to understand that in each act of academic writing,

an element of the personal was revealed and that the ways they wrote suggested how they

would likely be read. They recognized in their own writing practices—even though they

did not necessarily name them as such—kinds of previously unexamined writerly moves

that guided their completion of assignments. In the process of crafting their initial

inquiries, they made a series of decisions based on their personal investment in a

193

particular assignment and their assumptions and realizations about the audience’s

expectations.

In the process of crafting these inquiries, many of these students realized that

writing guided by their own questions was potentially engaging and that they had the

potential to reclaim as their own almost any academic assignment. In this recognition,

several students realized the hollowness of complaints about a particular writing

assignment being boring because they had the ability—if not always the desire—to shape

writing tasks to fit their needs and purposes. This last finding was tempered by the fact

that in crafting their inquiries, students came to understand—or at least meaningfully

confront—the fact that the freedom to inquire did not mean that they were free from all of

the external expectations, especially as they considered how their work would be read by

other members of the class.

As described in Bryan’s “School of Fish” essay, many of these particular high

school seniors wrote widely in various academic contexts throughout their secondary

educational experiences. They were assigned to write often in their English classes, as

well as in other disciplines. Yet the sheer volume of what students wrote, an increase

Hillocks (2002) suggests occurred across school contexts over the last thirty years, did

not necessarily interrupt students’ thinking of themselves as students of writing as

opposed to writers. Their experience with writing was writing intensive, but was not,

what Lea and Street (2006) in their view of an academic literacies model would term

writing-conscious.

194

Their participation in this inquiry curriculum where students constructed their

own questions about and considered their own experiences with academic writing offered

them the opportunity to become more writing-conscious. In light of this opportunity

many students recognized the powerful distinction between identifying themselves as

writers as opposed to simply viewing themselves as students of writing.

For all of these positive shifts in thinking, this chapter also highlights the

possibility that engagement in an inquiry curriculum, especially over a short period of

time, might prove especially challenging for some students. While the majority of these

particular high school students seemed to have benefited from inquiring into their

academic writing experiences and practices, not all did. Some students, like Candice,

struggled to envision and to engage in writing as a mode of inquiry. This begs the

question: what are the stakes for an inquiry-based curriculum when even one student

experiences difficulty transitioning from skills-centered to inquiry-based frameworks for

thinking about and engaging in academic reading and writing?

195

Chapter 7

ACADEMIC WRITING PRACTICES THAT TRAVEL OUTSIDE OF THE

CLASSROOM CONTEXT

In their introduction to Travel Notes from the New Literacies Studies: Instances

of Practice, Pahl and Roswell (2006) describe the importance of recognizing and

analyzing the impact of “discursive crossings,” which are where one set of implicit social

norms is layered unquestioningly upon alternative contexts. This imposition occurs

mostly when academic practices, or ways of doing, knowing, and being deemed valuable

in school, are positioned as more credible or valuable than out-of-school practices. By

recognizing that academic writing practices are simply different—not better or worse

than out-of-school writing practices—students can intentionally draw upon their

repertoire of out-of-school writing practices while completing in-school tasks.

This desire to encourage the crossing of out-of-school literacy practices into

school settings is echoed in the work of Kirkland (2008), Moje (2007), and Hull and

Schultz (2002), which each suggest that bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom

practices allows students opportunities for greater academic success.

This applies to both traditional and electronic media. Specifically, Alvermann

(2008) theorizes students’ online personas and writing practices need to be theorized so

that these understandings can be applied to classroom settings. Similiarly, Lankshear and

Knobel (2006) and Genishi and Dyson (2009) seek to understand and to interrupt what

196

they recognize as a disconnect between home and school literacy practices, many of

which involve the use of Web 2.0 technologies.

Each of these scholarly texts highlights the importance of recognizing that

students arrive in the classroom with a rich repertoire of reading and writing practices.

Yet these texts overlook an important aspect in the relationship between home and school

literacies; they frame the potential impact of home literacy practices on school literacy

practices as largely unidirectional. This seems to suggest that the ways students read,

write, and think outside of the classroom travels, or should travel, into the classroom

without fully considering the ways that students’ reading, writing, and thinking might

travel from academic to non-academic contexts.

This chapter addresses this, often, unexamined aspect of how writing practices

travel across and between home and school contexts. In asserting that students’ writing

practices travel, this chapter suggests that academic and out-of-school writing practices

hold the potential to inform and shape each other. This means that not only did these

particular students appropriate ways of writing in school but also applied these to out-of-

school contexts. These writing practices in turn influenced their out-of-school

discourses. Then these out-of-school writing practices returned to the classroom and

meaningfully informed students’ curricular work. So while these particular students’

writing practices cannot be understood outside of their specific social context, these same

writing practices were not necessarily contextually bounded. This meant that these

particular twelfth-grade students adapted school-taught practices to their out-of-school

writings and vice-versa.

197

The first part of this chapter, then, explores how these students’ notions of

academic writing were expanded in light of these writing practices traveling across

contexts. It illustrates how some students’ conceptions of academic writing began to

include texts prompted or inspired by, and not simply submitted to, school. This allowed

academic work to gain a kind of authenticity as students made it their own, something

Millard (2006) terms a “literacy of fusion” (p. 235) and something Street (2003) theorizes

as “hybridity.”

The next section explores questions of ownership and privacy in electronic

mediums from two different student perspectives: technology as publicly-private and

technology as privately-public. In the first instance, the majority of students in this

particular class believed Web 2.0 technologies belonged to them and resisted my attempts

to integrate these technologies into the classroom. In their view, the internet and social

networking applications were technically “public” but students had private and personal

uses for these technologies with which, they believed, school should not interfere. In the

second instance, a select few students were open to the possibilities of infusing their

personal online practices into the classroom and of their own volition brought them to the

classroom. These students made “public” their online writing selves, revealing aspects of

their identities not typically shared within school settings.

The next part of this chapter explores the nature of students’ experiences when

writing was shared with an audience larger than the teacher. It details students’ initial

hesitance to share their writing and their unexpected responses to others’ readings of their

work.

198

The final section troubles the common belief that high school students in the late

2000s possess an automaticity in using educational technologies, suggesting by extension

that teachers simply need simply to tap into the technological prowess students already

possess. This dissertation complicates the belief that students in the 2000s are digital

natives in all aspects of technology. Instead I suggest two opposing technological

realities existed in this classroom—(1) students believed that certain technologies should

not be appropriated by schools and (2) technologies used mostly for educational purposes

were not an intimate part of students’ educational or personal repertoire and required

explicit instruction. This final section raises questions about the nature of technology

applications in this particular educational setting.

Expanded Notions of Academic Writing

As this study progressed, it became evident that the term “academic writing”

became imbued with simultaneous and double meanings. “Academic writing” came to

describe both (1) the physical texts generated in response to a school assignment as well

as (2) the insights or texts informed or inspired by the physical texts of the class. The

very nature of academic writing became what philosopher Walter Benjamin (1986/1969)

would describe as an “[an oscillation] between different meanings, where multiple

meanings exist[ed] simultaneously” (p. 257-8).

In the same conversational thread, various students sometimes used the word

academic in these two distinct, yet related ways. When Candice asked, “to meet [with

me] before [her] class peer-edited [their] finals” to make sure she was “doing everything

199

correct,” she wanted to make sure that the assignment’s grading criteria were met (e-mail,

4/27/08). She wanted confirmation that she was meeting the academic, in the first sense,

expectations of the class. Yet there was a different purpose at work when Blake e-mailed

to ask questions about “the effectiveness of the sketches he included in his final” (e-mail,

4/24/08). The same is true of Jeanne’s e-mail asking “if [I] understood her academic

metaphor of falling down the rabbit hole and if it was alright that is wasn’t fully

developed,”(e-mail, 4/25/08). Both Jeanne and Blake, by the nature of the work they

imagined and crafted, viewed the concept of academic writing differently than Candice.

As I learned from my conferences with Candice, she continued to view academic work as

a product crafted for school. Conversely, Blake and Jeanne adapted a larger conception

of academic work to include how their out-of-school literacy practices and experiences

informed school assignments and how school assignments shaped their out-of-school

writing and thinking.

In particular, Blake and Jeanne used various school assignments to show how the

academic work of the semester shaped their out-of-school texts. They connected their

personal understandings of the larger world that they experienced to their academic

assignments. In this way, Blake and Jeanne realized a kind of transformative potential

inspired by the academic writing exercises of this particular curricular experience. These,

then, reverberated into the parts of their lives they once held as separate from school.

Since transformation suggests a change from one way of thinking or doing to

another, it is an apt description for Blake’s and Jeanne’s expanded notion of academic

work. In this expanded sense, Blake and Jeanne generated texts that met the

200

requirements for an assignment and that, in personally meaningful ways, simultaneously

explored their confusions surrounding and their epiphanies regarding their constructed

writerly selves.

In the writer’s memo attached to her final, Jeanne framed her final academic

assignment in high school as a vehicle for exploring questions deeply important to her.

There are a lot of deep metaphors that are not only in reference to this class and writing, but to my own life (outside of school as well). I’m sorry if you won’t fully comprehend them. I’m still working through them myself.

(final writer’s memo, 5/1/08)

Her first sentence suggests that this writing impacted the way that she thought about her

writing and herself inside and outside of this particular classroom context. She

recognized her writerly identity as something in process, an indeterminacy she willing

shared in the English 4 final. In this final Jeanne interrogated some of her own questions

about the stakes of writing.

Do I really want to do this? You’ll be lonely you know. You always are when you learn things about yourself you didn’t know. Dirt is lodged under my fingernails from double guessing. And here I am, halfway again, the middle of the rabbit hole.

(final, 5/1/08).

Jeanne described the process of completing this particular final and the process of writing

as a mode inquiry in general as a dangerous, lonely, but necessary project. Asking

questions about who she was as a writer made her “double guess” the identity she shaped

for herself. Her final inquired into her efforts to make sense of and satisfactorily

201

complete school assignments in personally meaningful ways, a tension she understood

more deeply but did not necessarily resolve.

Blake’s final writer’s memo also captured the tension between writing for himself

and writing for school. He described this in his writer’s memo.

It was hard to talk about my learning disorder and difficulties in school without being melodramatic or cliché….so I took a chance on both parts [of his final]. This [was] the first art I have done that wasn’t strictly humorous and the essay was the first time I tried to merge humor with a serious topic for a class assignment. (final writer’s memo, 5/1/08)

In his essay he described how the decisions he made about how he would represent

himself—as academically talented, as struggling with a learning disability, as serious, as

dutiful, as artistic, as humorous—were not ones he explicitly considered before this

semester. And because the thought about these issues of representation, he confessed that

he felt nervous showing me the text that he created for his final.

Blake’s essay began with an artistic rendering that represented how he

experienced being in school.

202

Figure 8: Blake’s Illustration for His Final. This artistic rendering was

both the cover and first piece of text Blake wanted people to read.

Blake began his essay with this uncaptioned image that captured his school experiences.

He then worked backwards chronologically through his experiences of writing

throughout high school. This culminated in what he considered a description of the

middle school origins of his, until now, narrowly constructed academic writerly identity

as it was informed by a particular punitive writing assignment.

I distinctly remember the first time I bullshitted an essay. It was eighth grade and I had just been kicked out of gym for wearing pants that were baggy. My gym teacher had sent me to the library and told me to write an essay on the importance of basketball to me and turn it in tomorrow. I was seething. Basketball was the least important thing to me in the world….I made a decision that if my gym teacher wanted

203

an essay explaining why Basketball was important to me, he would get it in spades. I don’t exactly remember what I said in the essay, but recall showing a love for basketball that bordered on the sexual. I didn’t care that this sarcastic essay would probably land me a lunch detention. This was a rebellion against my gym teacher and how basketball skills were how he apparently measured people’s value in society. But as it turns out, he completely loved the essay….I realized a major epiphany: if I stopped writing my opinion and starting writing the teacher’s opinion, I was guaranteed good grades.

(final, 5/1/08)

This essay and Blake’s analysis of this essay provided the background of his experience

in “learn[ing] to be a human mirror” (final, 5/1/08). Blake did not reflect on this in an

abstract sense. He printed and reviewed a series of essays that he had written over the

course of the last five years, trying to describe where and why he wrote to please his

teachers and where he saw glimmers of his own thoughts shining through a text. Like

Jeanne, he did not arrive at a singular conclusion of what this meant for him as a writer.

Instead the experience of analyzing his own academic experiences with writing provided

him with more questions to consider. What does this mean for me next year in college?

What if professors don’t realize they give assignments that dictate a way of thinking

instead of allowing me to share my own thoughts? How willing am I to write about my

own ideas, especially if I don’t place out of the freshman composition seminar? What if I

do place out of freshman composition; will I be more or less willing to reveal who I am in

my writing? (final, 5/1/08)

Additionally these new conceptual understandings of academic writing and

writerly identity resonated in powerful ways that shaped and were shaped by these

particular students’ experiences outside of, yet informed by, the classroom. For example,

204

Jeanne shared with me an unsolicited IM exchange between her and a friend, who was in

a different English class and used the screen name olDskEwlRokR. Her e-mail, which

included a complete four page IM transcript, read, “I’m not sure if this is appropriate to

share in school, but with everything that we are talking about, I knew that you would find

it really interesting. I can come in during lunch to talk” (e-mail, 4/8/10). Jeanne, whose

screen name was summergirl 0717, and olDskEwlRokR exchanged 141 instant messages

and engaged in an electronic conversation lasting over 50 minutes, from 10:06 p.m. to

10:57 p.m.

When we met, Jeanne called this transcript their “academic dialogue”

(conference, 4/10/08)—a term that highlights her newly broadened sense of academic as

inspired by or prompted by school-based text. In the transcript, Jeanne and

olDskEwlRokR, discussed how they situated themselves as students, the purpose of

writing assignments, and how they constructed themselves as writers—the very subjects

of our inquiry curriculum. In an exchange early in the electronic dialogue, Jeanne

writes the following assertion.

“summergirl0717 (10:17:12 PM): everyone can find something interesting about any topic if you dig deep enough.”

This is the central argument that Jeanne made in a previous essay about what it means to

be a high school writer, an essay assigned for class but whose ideas and writing shaped

this private conversation outside of school. As the conversation continued, Jeanne

elaborated on the connection between the academic and this particular out-of-school

conversation, making a kind of writerly move that fused the academic and personal

aspects of her writerly self.

205

summergirl0717 (10:17:21 PM): in fact, i wrote an essay about it two weeks ago.

Jeanne makes public her sense of writing purposefully, even for assignments submitted to

a teacher.

As Jeanne and I discussed this transcript during a lunch period, and I asked her

why she called this conversation “academic” when it wasn’t assigned for school? She

explained that “academic conversations [were] any discussions where you bring up what

you learned in school” (conference, 4/10/08). Her conception of “academic writing” was

broadened to mean both a product submitted to her teacher and the learning about school

topics she share with friends in out-of-school contexts. This broad conception of the

academic was evidenced deeply when Jeanne explained her decision to “break” her

conversation into parts to give olDskEwlRokR an opportunity to process the ideas that

she asserted about the purpose of school. She said that she did this much “like we broke

down terms [that we questioned when we read the literacy scholarship] in class”

(conference, 4/10/08). Instead of writing in a block of text like olDskEwlRokR, she

breaks at points in the electronic dialogue. In this way one of our classroom writing

practices was internalized, adapted, and transformed to meet her private writing needs.

summergirl0717 (10:11:03 PM): everyone has to pay their dues at some pointsummergirl0717 (10:11:10 PM): i'd rather it be now than when i'm 30summergirl0717 (10:11:18 PM): if this can get me where i want to besummergirl0717 (10:11:22 PM): comfortablysummergirl0717 (10:11:26 PM): then everything was worth itsummergirl0717 (10:11:41 PM): plus the majority of what i learn really is facinating stuff.summergirl0717 (10:11:59 PM): if i learn at a younger age, summergirl0717 (10:12:04 PM): the more likely my brain is to remember it longtermolDskEwlRokR (10:12:15 PM): i don't doubt that.  but there is no guarentee that cramming the last two months of high school will help.  your true training comes in college, and all it takes to get into college is a reputable transcriptsummergirl0717 (10:13:04 PM): one could see it that way, and i suppose most high school students do.summergirl0717 (10:13:17 PM): but i believe everything we do and learn is worth something.

206

Rhetorically, she created points of emphasis at the same time that she gave

olDskEwlRokR an opportunity to add to her insights, as can be seen by the time that

lapses between lines. Jeanne internalized two of the ideas from class. (1) That the way

an argument is presented is just as important as the argument itself; form and content

work together to make meaning. (2) In dialogic engagements, when we are open to the

thoughts of others, is when we can learn the most. As the on-line dialogue continued,

Jeanne became more insistent on her point that learning how to “inquire” into the most

seemingly mundane academic tasks is what opens up school assignments to personal

engagement.

For all its interesting conversational turns, the online conversation ended in a way

that frustrated Jeanne.

olDskEwlRokR (10:52:06 PM): but i think that the required classes should be cut back a littlesummergirl0717 (10:53:54 PM): because as children, we really DONT know what we're fully interested in.  there will always be something new to learn, and there are yet-to-be explored subjects, that in 25 years, we could be fully invested in - if someone: a teacher, introduces it to ussummergirl0717 (10:55:25 PM): sometimes, its neccessary to conform.  but in this slight conformity state, its FULLY possible to be your own and think, write, voice your own opinions on the stated "english subject of the day" - like Socrates, or the Barack Obama campaign.summergirl0717 (10:56:58 PM): you can be yourself, and think for yourself, within the stated topics.  and its possible to do this in every aspect, every assignment of the liberal arts departments. summergirl0717 (10:59:26 PM): got to go do my psych HW

As Jeanne discussed this part of transcript, she said she felt “frustrated that

[olDskEwlRokR] didn’t really finish” the conversation with her, that he just kind of

“gave up” (conference, 4/10/08). Within her newly developed inquiry-informed writing

framework, she wondered why her friend seemed to lack the sense of dialogic

engagement she embraced. This more dialogic way thinking had become habitual for

207

her and she could not understand why her friend did not share what had become a taken-

for-granted way of thinking for her.

In these ways, Jeanne and Blake moved between in-school and out-of-school

writerly practices and identities with increasingly great ease and fluidity. As their

conception of academic writing expanded, their writing and thinking were increasingly

shaping and shaped by both out-of-class and academic experiences.

Public and Private Writerly Selves

While these moves towards the intersection of the academic and out-of-school

were evident in the writings of Jeanne and Blake, other students questioned how and if

these separate selves overlapped. Concerned about what this might mean for them as

students, writers, and people, some of the twelfth-grade students participating in this

study worked diligently, especially in the early weeks of the course, to keep these spheres

of public and private separate. Students participating in this inquiry felt that academic

writing, in some ways, never really belonged to them. It was simply something that they

were required to submit to school. Conversely, they also believed that their out-of-school

thinking and writing evidenced a personal investment that needed to remain outside of

school.

When quoting Linda’s Collier’s (2007) essay on 21st-century literacies, Samantha

suggested that, “teachers must adapt and know the new communications of students”

(class discussion, 2/14/08). Jeff quickly interjected, “No, I don’t want my teachers trying

to quote rap lyrics in class or use words like jaun or emo. They just sound stupid” (class

208

discussion, 2/14/08). To Jeff a clear line existed between his reading and writing outside

of school and the kind of writing and reading he expected to complete in school. Michael

agreed, arguing that he “texted his friends” and “posted on Facebook,” but would feel

violated if doing either of those things became his homework or classwork (class

discussion 2/14/08). Even Samantha who initially concurred with Collier’s idea relented

to the fact that she “gave teachers credit for trying to use [students’] technologies but it

never really worked” (class discussion, 2/14/08). In an earlier conversation, Joyce

asserted that “IMing and texting don’t have a place in school” (class discussion, 1/28/08)

and Dylan also accused school of “violating his space” when I suggested a social

networking site and blog explicitly for our classroom inquiry (class discussion, 1/28/08).

Like Samantha, Jeff, Michael, Joyce, and Dylan, the majority of the twelfth-grade

students participating in this inquiry curriculum embraced this stark distinction; these

high school seniors expected teachers and school to respect the integrity of the

boundaries between home and school. Interestingly many of these same students crossed

these thresholds between home and school/public and private in complex and

contradictory ways, though. I describe their rationale for doing so as guided by two

beliefs: (1) a belief in the “publicly-private,” where students made their ease with out-of-

school technologies known but attempted to keep it separate from their academic writing,

and (2) a belief in the “privately-public,” where students shared their out-of-school

writerly identities in the public sphere of school.

The “Publicly-Private”

209

The majority of students participating in this study believed that ideas posted in

public spaces belonged to anyone who wanted to use them; public ideas, disseminated in

any form, were no longer privately owned. This was the majority of students’

overwhelming sentiment when I posed a question about who owns the ideas placed in

online forums? Students vehemently defended the position that private ideas become

public once they are shared. This was why, according to Joyce, “you don’t need to cite

Wikipedia” and why, according to Jared, “google.docs is a melting pot of ideas that are

no longer your personal property once your express them to others” (take-home

questions, 2/22/08). Jared asserted “if a writer wants to claim something to be solely

theirs, they should not put it on a site where it can be edited by anyone who chooses”

(take-home questions, 2/22/08). According to Samantha, “Nobody owns the ideas on

google.doc; they are a compilation of our best ideas, which surface when we confide in

each other” (take-home questions 2/22/08). Marissa concurred, suggesting that “ideas are

not anybody’s property” (take-home questions 2/22/08). According to students, once

information is posted on a public electronic forum, it belonged to everyone.

As pointed out by Joyce, this question about ownership and privacy is even taken

up by the google.doc site itself. The term “owned” is used in the organizational format

where you can browse the files “owned by me” and well as the files “owned by others”

who have been extended reading and/or writing privileges. But the legal language of the

google.docs user agreement suggests something different: that the site and not the author

“own” ideas published there. Joyce cited this statement of terms, one that users must

“agree” to before an account is created.

210

Google owns the ideas placed on google.docs. When I looked up the terms and agreements section it says that Google has the right to ‘adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute any Content which you submit, post, or display on or through the Service” meaning that they have total control over anything submitted. (take-home questions, 2/22/08)

This revelation was years ahead of the official technology guidelines for the school

district that issued this statement over a year and a half later:

The Google Docs and Google Apps user agreements contain language that brings into question the ownership of files uploaded to the Google Docs and Google Apps services. Google may retain the rights to published files including documents, webpages, presentations, etc. uploaded to the Google Docs service.  At this time, ownership is still unclear when uploading files to the Google Apps services.  Therefore, no files containing confidential student information should be published using Google Docs or Apps. In the event you already have student information posted, please remove the information immediately.

(E-mail from the School District’s Supervisor of Technology to all district staff, 9/2/10)

This points to an interesting and, in my view troubling, social belief that the aggregator of

information, be it a student or an application, is considered the “owner” of ideas and

written product rather than the creator. Even more interesting is the fact that this did not

seem to trouble students much at all.

The “Privately-Public”

Yet there is another side to this discussion. Some of these same students who

posted their writings to social networking sites, willingly relinquishing ownership of

ideas, believed this sense of public ownership was true only in a narrow sense of

211

“academic work,” where students complete a task to be handed in to a teacher. They

believed the rules were different when content was personally meaningful. These

students, many of whom vehemently opposed the incursion of academic uses onto their

private, personal electronic communications, were often the very ones who infused

private ideas and technologies to public school-based forums, but then were angry when

their “private” work was taken up by others in public ways.

For example, as students developed arguments for their second essay of the

course, they used google.docs to share ideas, to form and join writing groups, and to

support each other throughout the writing process. Since students made it clear that they

had specific expectations about in-school and out-of-school literacy practices around

technology, I made it explicitly clear that our google.doc was an academic text that I

would read and to which I would contribute. Yet students often used this electronic

forum for both academic and conversational purposes. This point was made strikingly

clear to me as I logged on to google.doc, an application that lists the people “currently

editing” across the top of the screen, and watched as students engaged in a rich and

complex banter about the stakes of their upcoming paper.

google.docs automatically saves files every fifteen seconds when a member of the

group is on-line editing. This explains why this singular google.doc to which I am

referring contains 2,344 revisions in its revision history, a chronological database that

allows a collaborator to revisit and replace any current text with any previous version. It

also allows a reader to return to any previous version of the text that a more traditional

electronic medium might have permanently deleted. The lines marked by a strikethrough

212

were deleted by students, an effort at effacing the private aspects of their thoughts that

students made public the moment they posted them on the class google.doc. The

excerpted revisions #1648-1653 occurred over the span of fewer than three minutes. In

the excerpt Sophia and Grace included and then deleted their personal feelings about

waking up during the darkness of daylight savings on a particular March day, about their

mutual feelings of writer’s block, and about their feelings towards an upcoming

assignment and me, their teacher. While these may seem like off task remarks, the

comments were a way for them to engage with the page when they were unsure what to

write. This changed in the final line in when Grace wrote “Pratt’s online.”

Revision #1648: [Sophia and Grace conversing on-line on the evening of March 18, 2008]daylight savings time is not morally correct.  very very dark this morning. it was technically waking up an hour before usual.i can't think or put my nonexistent thoughts into words.woooo me.i got a word rightnow lets get 750 more words to put in this essaysounds like it's time to take another risk.

Revision #1649: [Sophia and Grace still conversing on-line, additions to the previous text in bold]

daylight savings time is not morally correct.  very very dark this morning. it was technically waking up an hour before usual.

i can't think or put my nonexistent thoughts into words.woooo me. wooooo me too!

i got a word rightnow lets get 750 more words to put in this essay

sounds like it's time to take another risk.whatttt?

pratt is testing me.  i need to get creative again to get this essay done.she loves you

at least you are creativei have no creativity when it comes to writing. i can't think

i have no brain basically

Revision #1650: [Sophia and Grace conversing on-line, changes to the previous text in bold, deleted items with a strike out. Ms. Pratt recognized as being on-line but not adding to the text.]daylight savings time is not morally correct.  very very dark this morning. it was technically

213

waking up an hour before usual.i can't think or put my nonexistent thoughts into words.woooo me. wooooo me too!i got a word rightnow lets get 750 more words to put in this essaysounds like it's time to take another risk.whatttt?pratt is testing me.  i need to get creative again to get this essay done.she loves youat least you are creativei have no creativity when it comes to writing. i can't thinki have no brain basicallyby the way - you already have TWO creative ideas to write about. and i don't think she is. but she's probably expecting something good out of you.write it in hebrew.  it's making a statement.  probably.  you could totally connect that to the reading we did about literacy.  oh man, that's actually such a good prompt.  way to go!you just gave me a really good idea, although i think writing in hebrew might create a little issue. given i can write crap or write my name and she won't know. i'll be like.. "toooo bad no one can understand it, but i can"Pratt’s on-line.

Figure 9: google.doc Revision History, #1648-#1650.

This figure illustrates revisions to a google.doc students made.

When Sophia and Grace realized that I was online, I watched as lower case letters

magically morphed into capital letters and as generative conversations emerging about

identity construction and language choice shifted into an academically stale conversation

about thesis generation and assignment completion. Instead of wrestling through the

genuine questions they had about the assignment, both Sophia and Grace erased any hint

of content that they feared I might find objectionable. But because their personal

negative senses about the assignment were intertwined with the content they were

exploring, they erased both personal feelings and seminal ideas, leaving only a series of

generic statements.

I witnessed this interaction by the pure chance of logging on to this particular

google.doc at this particular moment, I realistically missed countless other highly

214

provocative conversations that students held in check because they believed that their

private musings were separate and off-topic from the academic work they were required

to produce in school.

Revision #1652: [Sophia and Marissa conversing on-line, changes to the previous text in bold, deleted items with a strike out.]i have no creativity when it comes to writing. i can't thinki have no brain basicallyby the way – You already have TWO creative ideas to write about. and i don't think she is. but she's probably expecting something good out of you.write it in hebrew.  it's making a statement.  probably. Writing it in Hebrew… you could totally connect that to the reading we did about literacy.  oh man, that's actually such a good prompt.  You just gave me a really good idea, although i think writing in hebrew night create a little issue. given i can write crap or write my name and she won't know. i'll be like.. "toooo bad no one can understand it, but i can"

Figure 10. google.doc Revision History, #1652. This figure

Illustrates aspects of the text students deleted from a teacher’s view.

Like Dixon’s (1998) sense of “outbursts” as untapped spaces filled with potential,

students’ publicly-private selves, or when students wrote private thoughts in public

forums when they believed no one was watching while cognizant of the fact that people

could be watching, functioned as a kind of “outburst.” For example, Joyce posted the

following question to our e-board discussion.

What are we going to be doing on the day of the final? My part 2 is very personal, and I do not really want to share every detail out loud.

(i-note posting, 4/26/08)

This occurred four days before final papers were due and was deleted, at her request,

soon after I responded to her question. Almost immediately following Joyce’s initial

215

posting, students asked a flurry of questions about what kinds of things they could and

could not share and Joyce became annoyed when people asked her about the content of

her final, whose private content was made public, albeit not explicit.

Even more interesting is when students opted to use what they guarded as private

electronic forums to voice their completion status regarding academic assignments.

When Michael cited Marissa’s time on Facebook in his “Death of English” essay,

detailed in the previous chapter, he violated the very separation between academic and

personal writing he fiercely advocated. And he was not alone; many students used their

Facebook status to write about their work in and for school. Samantha admitted that her

“Facebook status was almost always about school work because her school work was

such a big part of her life” (conference, 3/31/08). During our conversation Jeanne pulled

up her Facebook page; her status described her as “happy to be done with eng and gov.”

She pulled up Joyce’s status, which read “still working on Pratt” and Marissa’s status,

which read “I’ve just got to turn in something” (conference, 3/31/08). Even though

Twitter was in its infant stages, classmates reported that Jeff “tweeted” that he was “In

Pratt hell. [And he had] no idea what to write [for his upcoming paper]” (conference,

3/31/08). Seemingly “off topic” instant messages during small group work, “text

message asides” during writing conferences or peer critique, “private” comments after an

on-line discussion formally concludes, and “marginal electronic postings” on class

discussion boards or google.docs — each held the possibility for students’ dynamic

constructions of “publicly-private” selves in electronic forums.

216

Sources like Scientific American (Solove, 2008) and books like The End of

Privacy (Sykes, 1999) warn that social networks and electronic communications have

brought about the end of privacy. Yet these high school seniors maintained that they are

entitled to a sense of privacy in what they wrote and shared electronically. They deeply

believed that they ultimately controlled what aspects of themselves were made public and

which remained private. Perhaps this is perhaps one of the reasons students felt so

comfortable participating and revealing aspects of themselves on social networking sites.

On-Line Writing Communities

Student membership in online writing communities offered yet another view of

the writerly moves students made as they constructing identities that were “privately-

public.” Independent of real-world social communities to which they belonged, several

students created screen names and online personas to develop and share writing in virtual

communities. This means they shared, without the prompting of an assignment, the

personal writings that they often viewed as intimate creations with the millions of people

on the public forum of the internet.

The participation of students within these online writing communities came to

light when student-prompted discussions began to center on writerly artifacts not directly

a part of our inquiry but inspired by or informed aspects of class. Jeanne shared that she

prepared to write for NaNoWriMo.com7 in April, where members joined online writing

communities and committed to writing intensive goals to self-publish works of

7 NaNoWriMo is the abbreviation for National Novel Writer’s Month.

217

imaginative fiction, like writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November and

writing 100 original scripted pages during the month of April (conference, 3/23/10).

Jared developed the print-content for the webpage promoting his three-song musical

demo recorded by Birdhouse Studios and released on May 20, 2008 (conference,

3/23/10). As we talked about the difficulty of writing in purposeful ways for school

assignments, Sophia shared her experience writing, reviewing, and revising “fanfiction,”

which is original fiction posted to online forums where fan create stories building from

the characters or plot of a particular television show, movie, or book. Sophia described

the allure of fan fiction to me in this way.

Fanfiction is a way of writing that is really interesting to a whole community of people and because so many people are interested, you have to write about in the right way. I care about what I post on fanfiction sites.

(conference, 3/27/08).

Sophia was a registered member of terrafirmscapers.com8 since 2005, reading widely and

following favorite contributors through an RSS-feed. This means that Sophia received an

update in her e-mail every time one of her favorite contributors posted new or revised

materials. Yet Sophia herself did not post her own writing nor did she serve as a “beta

reader” for other people until January of 2008 because she was hesitant to share her own

private writing. So at the exact moment that this inquiry project was beginning, Sophia

was beginning to wrestle with the question, “What is at stake when you post your own

writing in an online writing community?” The undercurrent of this question was evident

8 terrafirmscapers.com is a online fanfiction community devoted to the series development of novel fiction that honors the conventions, plot, and characters of select science fiction television shows and movies. It is an example of what Gee (2006) would term an “affinity group.”

218

in her “being a high school writer essay” where she wrote about “the lightning fast ways

that stories change that require new methods of communication created by the lightning

fast speed of the internet, text messaging, and the digital age redefinitions of rules, words,

and literacy” (essay, 3/24/08). In her analysis, Sophia pointed out that the process and

product of writing for the fanfiction community was incredibly dynamic and immediate.

Sophia shared with her class the fanfiction site, terrafirmscrapers.com, which

contained 316,681 posted stories in 10,219 topic forums by 2,164 members as of March

24, 2008 when we looked at the site in class. Initially Jeanne, Sam, Jared, and I thought

this site was the equivalent of an online message board where people could post their

reactions to episodes of science fiction-based shows that they enjoyed or critique

elements of a show they did not like. “I don’t mean to be offensive,” said Jeanne, “but

this is just like ratings for a t.v. show?” Sophia interjected that it “wasn’t that simple.”

Sophia, then, proceeded to lead us through the very intricate writing systems and

discursive norms at work in this virtual world. For example, I suggested that I

understood the appeal of writing fanfiction because writing is always risky and you can

assume a persona different from who you really are by adopting a screen name. Sophia

quickly corrected me, “No, it’s not about hiding behind a screen name. People on

terrafirmscapers know me as nearchild631 just like you know me as Sophia. It is not

about safety or hiding” (conference, 3/27/08). Her online persona was not a way to

shield her identity; it was a way to make her constructed identity more explicit since she

used this screen name for all her published stories and reviews, which are catalogued on

the fanfiction home page. To Sophia her screen name made her identity public within

219

this specific community, even though her participation in this community was previously

private from/unknown by her classmates and teachers.

Sophia’s connection and belonging to this community was based on a deep

knowledge of the discursive norms for how this community functioned; in fact

understanding both the community and the canon of the universe in which her fanfiction

Figure 11: E-Mail from Sophia. Sophia felt I needed extensive

background information to read her fanfiction.

220

was set was one of the most important elements in understanding her writing. When she

shared one piece of herfanfiction with me, she thought it critical that I understood the

show’s landscape and gave me thirty-pages of background source material.

Sophia had previously been reserved in sharing these kinds of texts with people

she knew in real life, although she felt incredibly comfortable posting her writing online

for millions of people to read. “It’s just different,” Sophia said (discussion, 3/27/08). A

totally different sense of “ownership” existed, but more importantly the “rules” for how

people read and responded to each others’ writings were very clear, which is not always

the case in high school classroom. On fanfiction sites all readers and contributors hold the

same goal—to read and create strong pieces of fiction—and support each other when

doing it. This is the essence of what Gee (2006) terms an “affinity group.” But high

school classrooms, for all teachers’ best intentions, do not often function the same ways.

For example, prior to my discussion with Sophia, we spent class time posting ideas for

upcoming essays into discussion forums where a writer could describe what kind of

feedback he/she wanted based on where his/her inquiry was at that particular moment.

Sophia commented that the “people in [her school assigned] discussion chat group

didn’t get it. No one was really interested in helping [her] get [her] idea out” (conference,

4/2/08). On the other hand, Sophia’s experience within the fanfiction community was

deeply contextualized.

People take this [fan fiction] really seriously and if you are serious about it people give you really thoughtful feedback and because the other readers are so knowledgeable, you don’t want to say things that are stupid. You want the writing to be really good, which is why I seem to care more about this writing than about my writing assignments at times.

221

(conference, 3/30/08)

For Sophia, the academic inquiries of our class helped her to more deeply understand her

commitment to her online community and led her to yearn for elements of community,

like those in affinity groups, that could be present in academic writing groups but often

are not because teachers rather than writers themselves largely determine the stakes of

writing assignments.

Realized Reception, Not Imagined Intention

As suggested by Sophia’s description of how she presented herself to her online

fanfiction writing community, these particular high school students’ writerly identities

often centered around the ways they hoped these identities would be understood by an

intended audience as well as the ways these identities gave them access to a particular

community. As students completed and received feedback from a larger audience of their

choice, a component part of the inquiry curriculum, several were surprised by the ways

their writing was taken up by others. These students began to wonder, “What if people

don’t understand what I really mean?”

For example, in Jeff’s reflection with a larger audience, he shared his writing with

a former English teacher, whom he loved as a teacher and to whom he felt endeared. He

worried that she did not think highly of him as a writer because he was a self-confessed

“slacker” when she taught him the previous semester. He chose his former teacher as his

larger audience because he “thought she’d be proud of the work that [he] wrote” (essay

writer’s memo, 4/4/08). He was surprised by what his former teacher wrote back to him.

222

Thanks for the email Jeff. The paper is beautiful and sings with truth. You are a great writer and I am sorry I failed you. I am so happy to see your desire to write is back in full swing. I guess that is why some teachers are better for students and some are not. My "teach the soul" over "teach the skill" has its fallbacks. I guess we (teachers), too, are like a box of chocolates. Continue to pursue and master your word craft. Thanks for sharing with me and I am so proud that I have been able to see both sides of you- that which aims to ignite and that which aims to delight. (e-mail, 4/4/08)

Stunned by her reaction, he crafted what was probably his most thoughtful and thought-

provoking reflection explaining that, “When I sent that paper to Mrs. Hartley I had no

intention of critiquing her style of teaching, which clearly she thought I was trying to do.

I was just trying to show her how much talent I have as a writer”(essay, 4/4/08). Jeff’s

receipt of a response different than he presumed complicated his understanding of the

social nature of writing. Instead of assuming that the misunderstanding was due to the

ignorance of his reader, he contemplated the relationship between himself as a writer, the

text, and his audience. He made efforts to amend the communicative misunderstanding

on a relational level in the hopes of both conveying his ideas and maintaining a positive

relationship with the person he asked to read his piece.

Grace also faced a surprise in how her work was taken up by the audience of a

high school administrator. Grace worked on her “What It Means to be a High School

Writer” essay for weeks before she finally forwarded it a grade-level assistant principal in

mid-March. Before this, she corresponded with me often via e-mail as she, according to

her for the first time, made very purposeful decisions about how she wanted to represent

her ideas since she wouldn’t necessarily have the chance to clarify what she meant (field

notes, 3/1/08).

223

The essay that she intended to share with her grade level principal was incredibly

formal, yet the e-mails and drafts she shared with me were incredibly informal. Lenhart,

Madden, and Hitlin (2005) found that when adolescents send an e-mail, especially to an

adult, it is more formal in tone and more crafted in its message; yet Grace’s messages to

me was neither of these. Her run-on sentences, lack of capital letters, and divergent focus

juxtaposed her question about positive ways of representing herself. For Grace, what was

important was how her essay would be read by the particular high school administrator

who would only be reading the final draft and who she viewed as the primary audience.

This led to great disappointment when the assistant principal did not respond to

Grace until I sent a follow up e-mail.

Figure 12: E-mail from Grace. This figure illustrates

Grace’s informal solicitation of feedback.Later that afternoon, I received a photocopy of the returned essay with a single sentence

written across the top: “This was really interesting.” Before I could follow up with

224

Grace about her essay, she sent me a dejected e-mail, explaining that she did not think the

assistant principal read her paper.

When I spoke with her about this experience and her subsequent reflection, I

pointed out how I had read through her paper and would be happy to talk with her more.

Grace: But you were not the audience.

Pratt: Oh is that why your e-mails and drafts to me read like texts?

Grace: I honestly didn’t even think about that. (conference, 4/15/08)

Because she was so caught up in the thinking about what the assistant principal would

think of her work and what the final product would “look” like, Grace did not consider

readers of any of her in-process pieces an audience. So the formality that Lenhart,

Madden, and Hitlin (2005) point to is not simply the nature of electronic communications

to an adult audience, but also likely about a reflection on the seemingly conclusive and

evaluative nature of that exchange.

I argue that this is the same thinking that supports students’ failure to consider the

images they post electronically as representations of themselves that cannot be erased.

Instead, they believe that as long as any inappropriate images—the images of them in-

process —are removed before they apply to college or for jobs, they have nothing to

worry about. In the same way, Grace viewed her process writing as a personal space as

opposed to a public, collaborative space where people, including her teachers and

classmates, could make judgments about the ways she presented her ideas and her self.

Complicating the Belief in Students as Digital Natives

225

This final section troubles the common belief that high school students in the late

2000s possess an automaticity in using educational technologies and that teachers simply

need to tap into the technological prowess students already possess. The findings from

this dissertation complicate the belief in 21st Century students as digital natives to

educational platforms. An oversimplified sense of students’ educational experiences with

Web 2.0 technologies underlies the belief that teachers can meaningfully connect to

students if they work hard to use the students’ technologies in academic, in the primary

sense of the word, spaces. Yet many technological resources used for educational

purposes are not an intimate part of students’ repertoire.

Students, like Michael, had a very clear sense that “certain technologies existed

for school and others were for [them]” (class discussion, 1/28/08). This was evident in

students’ ease with some electronic mediums but self-proclaimed inability to navigate

others. For example, every student could post a photo to a social networking site, but few

knew how to respond to posts meaningfully via threaded, rather than listed conversations,

on course management software like Moodle. Students knew how to download music

and ringtones, send and edit photographs, and how to complete Google and Wikipedia

searches for information. Yet, a majority of students had never heard of google.docs, was

unsure how to effectively access and search electronic scholarly databases like JStor

using Boolean language, and was unfamiliar with Questia to read and annotate texts on-

line. Since students viewed these applications as a part of school, and something they

needed to be “taught,” these particular students waited for me to explicitly address how

these various instructional technologies would be used in this particular classroom. This

226

is in contrast to the process of trial and error students used as they navigated personal

computing applications.

For example, students were highly skilled in using e-mail, connecting to each

other on social on-line cites, and word-processing, but when asked to apply these to

educational contexts, the range and variation of problems students had applying these

technologies educationally surprised me. For example, Grace wrote that she “did not

know what it meant to forward an attachment” so she cut and pasted a part of her final

essay into the body of an e-mail when she was unable to print it out (e-mail, 4/20/08).

Brennan continuously forgot to add the .doc extension when saving his work (field notes,

3/13/08). Once this issue was resolved, he uploaded a different document to our class’

electronic dropbox while it was still open on his computer, thwarting my efforts to open

and read his text (field notes, 4/29/08). Marissa didn’t “know how to change the

docx/doc thing,” having some of the same issues with document naming and the

importance of extensions that plagued Brennan (e-mail, 3/12/08). Joyce was unsure how

to be invited to the class google.doc, writing “I have no idea how to access the document

that you wanted us to respond to. What should I do?” (e-mail, 1/30/08). Christian

“wondered how [he could] create an account on turnitin.com?” even though instructions

were posted on the turnitin.com site as well as on my e-board (e-mail, 1/31/08). Candice

was “hoping [I] could invite [her] to the google class so that [she could] add my google

doc” (e-mail, 1/29/08). Greg “didn’t think [he'd] been invited to the google.doc

document” and asked if I could you please invite him even though every member of the

class was enabled to add members to the group (e-mail, 1/29/08). Maura asked, “if I

227

could invite [her] to the google docs thing?” (e-mail, 1/29/08). Instead of working to

resolve these very small technical issues, which were within the realm of student

problem-solving, students placed the problem at the feet of their teacher. It was as if they

had been schooled out of solving these kinds of problems, instead dutifully awaiting

instructions for how to proceed. I asked Jeff, who sat next to me during class, what

would happen if he encountered a problem like this downloading music or on some social

networking site? He said, that he would “just figure it out” (conference, 2/1/08). This

sense of agency and ownership marked another distinction between tasks students

engaged with meaningfully and those students merely completed as an assignment.

This unwillingness to independently solve issues that emerged with educational

technological resources became even more evident when students were asked to make

use of the school’s electronic databases. Students found themselves unable or unwilling

to meaningfully search databases. Instead of searching for resources that would help

them to answer their own inquiry questions, they found materials so that they could

complete the “task” of researching. In an e-mail Jeff captured how he, and many of his

classmates, used electronic resources to find answers rather than to research a question or

inquire into a topic.

I wanted to know if the sources we use from Gale ought to be articles we find based on our topic or some other sort of source. I was a bit unsure about what exactly we need to find on Gale and exactly how to use it.

(e-mail, 3/8/08)

In his e-mail, Jeff raises the question if the purpose of this inquiry is to (1) complete the

task of finding a specific “thing” on-line, much like a scavenger hunt OR (2) to use any

228

resources at his disposal to get his question answered. Once Jeff’s group “found” a

worthwhile resource, Candice sent an e-mail asking if the class could get a copy of Jeff’s

group’s resource so that “people didn’t have to keep looking” (e-mail, 3/10/08).

Searching for information electronically is a practice with which the National

Educational Technology Standards suggests students are intimately familiar by grade

twelve (International Society for Technology in Education, 2000). Yet this was not

necessarily true when these particular students were required to use more educational

applications. In these instances, these students didn’t necessarily apply their out-of-

school practices to technology applications as they were used in the context of academic

assignments. This suggested that while these students were digital natives who were

largely comfortable and familiar with technology, this did not necessarily guarantee their

engagement with technology for educational purposes from which they felt disconnected.

Conclusion

This chapter described how a particular group of twelfth-grade students’ came to

recognize how their writerly identities shaped and were shaped by both academic and

out-of-school writing practices. For many of these students, their academic writing

practices infiltrated their out-of-school writing in ways they had not previously

considered. Even more striking, when these out-of-class writing practices returned to the

context of the classroom, they held the potential to transform the academic discourse.

This suggests that these particular students’ academic and out-of-school writing practices

recursively informed each other, complicating the already rich array of writing practices

229

at work in the classroom. This sense of recursive adaptation and transformation was the

center of this chapter.

These students’ adaptations and transformations of writing practices allowed for a

broadening of the concept of academic writing, a kind epistemological shift that occurred

over the course of the semester. In this way, the term academic writing came to mean

both assignments completed for or within school as well as intellectual work inspired by

classroom discussion regardless of their context. In this way, the concept of “academic”

was no longer bounded by the physical space classroom or school-based assignment. For

these particular students who shared their out-of-class writing and writing experiences

with me, this suggested an internalized disposition towards inquiry, a recognition of the

self in writing, and a fluidity between the discourses of students’ in-school and out-of-

school lives.

This notion of in-school writerly practices shaping out-of-school writerly

practices, and vice-versa, complicates the discussion among literacy scholars about the

intersection of in-school and out-of-school literacy practices. Literacy scholarship

explores the relationship between the in-school and out-of-school literacy practices from

an inverse perspective than the one I have suggested above. This scholarship largely

suggests that out-of-school literacies should be honored within school contexts yet often

are not. Yet the findings in this chapter suggest that academic literacies hold the

potential to impact out-of-school literacies in equally powerful ways. In this particular

study, they transformed the nature of classroom discourse as some of the students made

230

the academic language of this particular inquiry-based course their own, impacting both

their individual writings and class interactions.

This marked a change from earlier in the semester when a large number of

students worried that teachers and school assignments violated students’ private space

when online social networking resources were used for classroom purposes. These

particular students initially viewed teachers’ use of some Web 2.0 technologies as the

world of school encroaching on their private lives. In light of this, many students tried

very hard, albeit often unsuccessfully, to separate their academic and personal selves.

They believed public forums like Facebook and Twitter were “private” and had little

place in the classroom. This created sense of the publicly-private where these high

school seniors engaged in this inquiry curriculum expected me, the teacher, to keep

certain technologies “private”—although the students themselves often crossed the

threshold between academic and non-academic uses of electronic resources in complex,

and sometimes, contradictory ways. Yet as some students became more invested in

developing responses to their own inquiry questions, many of these divisions between in-

school and out-of-school technologies began to dissipate.

A smaller number of students initially adopted a second perspective, which

became more of a norm later in the semester. These particular students recognized their

out-of-school online identities were in, sometimes tenuous, relation to their academically

constructed online identities. These particular students questioned how the in-class and

out-of-class texts they generated reciprocally shaped each other. Unsolicited and

unassigned by me, these students shared academically inspired texts on internet

231

discussion forums and engaged in electronic forums about class with people outside of

our class. They did this in ways that were highly public, academic (in both senses of the

word), and personally revealing.

Perhaps, this is one of the reasons that students initially insisted on clear

boundaries between in-school and out-of-school writing technologies at the same time

they embraced the bridging of other home literacy practices. If anything made public

was now communal, then school would “own” some of the very things students felt

identified them as individuals. But this leads to a kind of conundrum where social

applications contain publicly owned private ideas. This is a way of thinking about

ownership and privacy antithetical to that held by many teachers like me, a mere half-

generation removed from the secondary writers involved in this inquiry.

232

Chapter 8

HOW AND WHY THIS WORK MATTERS

The inquiry syllabus for this course centered on seven core concepts, each of

which invited students to consider the practice of writing through a socio-cultural

perspective. Specifically this involved students and I, as their teacher, working together

to re-imagine what it means to be a writer in a high school context. In this vein, students

were invited to consider how: (1) meaning is socially constructed; (2) writing and

identity are linked; (3) language is not neutral; (4) multiple, competing, and contested

frameworks for writing exist; (5) identities, including writerly identities, are multiple,

complex, and evolving; (6) individual writers influence their classroom community at

the same time that the classroom community influences individual writers; and (7)

writing in academic contexts is personal, albeit not necessarily, autobiographical. As

they inquired into and wrote about and in light of these concepts, the seniors in this

particular class, through social engagement with each other, came to recognize an

alternative framework for conceptualizing writing that was different than the skills

orientation to which they had been academically acculturated. Through processes of

composing, sharing, and revisiting texts they created, the students came to understanding

the possibility for writing as a mode of inquiry and ultimately engaged into the own

inquiries into writing.

My intention is this dissertation, then, was to understand how this particular group

of twelfth-grade students socially constructed identities for themselves as writers in light

233

of this novel conception of academic writing, a conception framed by the inquiry-based

curricular framework outlined above. I was interested in how these particular students

took up the invitation to inquiry, how they gained a sense of “talking back” to texts

through practices of annotation that interconnected their reading, writing, thinking, and

revising experiences, how their inquiries into academic writing shaped their

understandings and representations of who they were as writers, and how these

understandings and representations transferred to out-of-school spaces and often

simultaneously transformed academic ones.

These analytical findings offer implications for the framing of writing pedagogy

and curriculum in other multiple contexts, especially those in which teachers make efforts

to invite students to see themselves as writers rather as students of writing. These larger

implications are possible because the social context of this particular classroom is not

wholly unique. While the physical resources available to these particular students may be

more abundant than in other educational contexts, the initial dispositions towards writing

with which many students entered the high school classroom was markedly similar to

most other high school contexts. The students in this study, similar to most high school

students, entered their twelfth-grade English class with conceptions of writing as a skill

taught to them and assessed for them. Like many high school students, the majority of

them did not ponder why they wrote or consider how academic writing might serve their

own intellectual purposes; they focused on completing writing requirements.

While this may not be the norm in most secondary contexts, it is also far from

unique. Many schools around the immediate Philadelphia area, including those that, to

234

varying degrees, are resource-rich and resource-lacking, contain teachers who invite

students to consider, question, and trouble taken-for-granted assumptions about writing

and what it means to be a writer. The practitioner inquiry work generated by teachers

affiliated with the Philadelphia Writing Project, the Pennsylvania Writing Project, and

The Philadelphia Teachers’ Learning Collaborative invite students to re-conceptualize

writing in similar ways, underscoring the fact that a resource-rich suburban English

classroom is not the only context in which this kind of inquiry work is possible.

What was different from many other school contexts was mostly pedagogical in

nature. As a teacher, I drew from socio-cultural pedagogical and theoretical frameworks

that honored the educational abilities and experiences of my students and invited them to

consider why they wrote instead of directing them how to write. As a teacher, I made a

conscious decision to not teach writing, but instead invited students to write often and

then consider what and why they wrote. I made the conscious decision not to

prescriptively teach them how to generate questions and arguments, instead orchestrating

classroom contexts where students themselves could engage in this work. In the simplest

sense, I offered different expectations grounded in my own assumptions about writing,

assumptions that run counter to skills-based orientations.

Chapter Eight, then, begins with a summary and discussion of my findings from

each of the four data analysis chapters, illuminates their relative importance across other

school contexts, and links them to current discussions in the research or pedagogy

literature. Specifically, the first section highlights students’ initial resistances to an

inquiry curriculum and explores the implications of a teacher’s pedagogical frameworks

235

on students, especially as they navigate the novel experience of an inquiry-based writing

curriculum. The second section describes the complex negotiations students make as they

formulate insights and understandings through the experience of reading text, rereading

annotations and text, and crafting annotations that “talk back” to text. The third section

highlights the importance of the social interactions between and among students as they

confronted issues of self-presentation and self-awareness. Emphasizing that the embrace

of writing as a mode of inquiry is not the product of a solitary mind but rather a social

interaction informed by and informing each member of the class, it analyzes the

importance of the writerly moves students made and their responses to how their writing

was taken up by others. The fourth section highlights how academic writing practices

hold the potential to travel from school to out-of-school/online settings and offers a

critique of the unidirectional movement of writing practices implied in the literature on

out-of-school literacies.

I then examine my role as a teacher engaged in practitioner inquiry within my

own classroom. I discuss the pedagogical implications for the findings in this

dissertation, both how they are potentially useful to other inquiring practitioners as well

as relevant to my own teaching practice. I outline aspects of this particular inquiry

curriculum that have sifted into my pedagogy even though I am not currently teaching a

class so explicitly centered on inquiry. I also describe what I would do if presented with

the opportunity once again to position a class as an inquiry into writing in the future.

In the third part of the chapter, I address the implications these research findings

hold for practice, research, and policy.

236

The Challenge and Necessity of Framing Writing as a Mode of Inquiry

In Chapter Four, I describe and analyze the varying degrees of initial resistance to

an inquiry-based writing curriculum as experienced by a particular group of high school

seniors. Through my analysis, I found that students’ resistance to the notion of inquiry

and to the possibilities for writing as a mode of inquiry depended upon: (1) the

expectations and experiences they brought to the English 4 classroom, (2) their

willingness to interrogate previously normalized conceptions of writing as skill-based,

and (3) their acceptance of the notion that inquiry was a process experienced by them not

a skill taught to them.

Students’ initial resistance to this inquiry-based writing curriculum highlighted

their deeply engrained skills-based orientations towards writing. In light of this

orientation, overwhelmingly students wanted clarity with regard to expectations for an

essay’s content, sequential processes to guide them through writing task completion, and

rubrics that outlined the specifically parsed components of their writing against which

their written products would be assessed. They initially demanded these kinds of explicit

directions, as a form of resistance to novel conceptions of writing that challenged their

largely unquestioned academic writing practices.

Students’ skills-based framework for writing was not something that I, or any

teacher, could simply discredit or render marginal; it was the unseen framework that

provided the only way of “doing school” these particular, as well as the vast majority of,

high school students knew. Instead, I needed to orchestrate pedagogical spaces where

students could confront these implicit understandings regarding the nature and purpose of

237

academic writing, articulate these understandings, question how these understandings

shaped their written texts and writing practices, and imagine different possibilities for

writing. Through the challenging and difficult confrontation of these academically

normalized writing frameworks, the majority of writers in this twelfth-grade class came

to understand the potential value in an alternative framing of writing as a mode of

inquiry, a possibility that can be realized in a variety of secondary contexts.

Annotation as Dialogic Engagement

Chapter Five teased out how the writing of annotations acted as both a mode of

and a subject of inquiry. It highlighted the complex negotiations a particular group of

twelfth-grade students made as they formulated insights and understandings through the

experience of reading text, crafting annotations as and after they read, writing in response

to a text, and rereading annotations, source texts, and created texts. In this way, the

crafting of annotations became more than a teacher-prescribed note-taking exercise. It

functioned as a central component of a different kind of writing process.

When many people claim they are “teaching writing,” they typically mean they

embrace a belief about writing that holds as its central value “the writing process.” This

conception of writing that was prominent in the early 1980s marked a positive shift away

from the 1970s assessments of writing as de-contextualized tests of grammar and usage

(Hillocks, 2006). While some current writing frameworks are seemingly reverting to

measures of grammar and usage as a measure of writing competency in light of

standardized assessment, the process writing movement of the 1980s demanded that

238

assessments of writing involved students composing their own sentences and paragraphs

and not simply responding to de-contextualized questions of grammatical correctness.

This changed writing instruction dramatically. In the 1980s, teachers regularly assigned

multi-paragraph essays, provided writing scaffolds, and devoted class time to talk about

writing and peer critique (Hillocks, 2002).

Yet even this largely positive shift away from grammatical correctness as the

measure of writing competency contained negative aspects. The writing process came to

be narrowly codified as a series of pre-determined, sequential steps to which all writing

tasks adhered; in this vein, students were required to evidence proof of brainstorming,

drafting, writing, revising, and editing. This took a series of internalized writing

practices, ones that researchers like Emig (1971) and Elbow (1998/1973) recognized in

the habits of successful writers, and turned them into a series of de-contextualized,

delineated steps. In light of task requirements and irregardless of their helpfulness or

lack thereof, students worked to complete reading reaction sheets, marginal annotation

tasks, brainstorming maps and outlines, and rough drafts, often failing to connect their

tasks to their own ideas. They completed the writing process but did not necessarily

engage in writing. This thirty year-old conception of writing as task rather than process

for understanding continues to dominant secondary writing pedagogy.

Yet this conception of the writing process, one framed within a skills-orientation

and grounded within a cognitive rather than a socio-cultural model, actually inhibits

students from inquiring into their own writing frameworks or taking up writing as a mode

of inquiry. To counter this, annotations framed as dialogically “talking back” to texts

239

emphasize that the process of writing belongs to the student, beginning during his/her

experience of reading and writing in response to a text. As students generate annotations

containing questions and ideas worthy of deeper consideration, the annotations hold the

potential to become both fodder for students’ ideas as well as a process through which

students come to their own ideas. This suggests that through recursive written

engagement with the texts students read, their insights are always in the process of

becoming and their writing frameworks are continually evolving. Like Fecho’s (2011)

description of oral discussions as sites for dialogue, the crafting of annotations becomes a

kind of dialogic engagement on the page.

Additionally this novel writing process grounded in the notion of “talking back”

to text also positively unsettles students’ belief that assignments submitted to school

contain no trace of their personal experience. Because students’ annotations capture both

content understandings and personal experiences, the once clear, though always

imaginary divide between academic and experiential insights is obscured. Additionally,

students’ conception of the word academic necessarily expands to include not only tasks

completed in or for school but also insights inspired by school, regardless of whether they

were shared in out-of-school or in-school contexts.

Writerly Identities

Writing is an act of identity, a claim supported by this dissertation and new

literacies research and theory, especially the work of Ivanic (1998, 2004) on writer

identity. In this conception of writing, textual representations shape and are shaped by

240

how writers see themselves as well as by how writers hope to be seen by readers both

inside and outside of a particular classroom context. In this way, writing is not a neutral

product that singularly conveys information nor is it a product of a solitary mind. Rather

within a socio-cultural perspective, writing involves a series of complex writerly moves

as well as nuanced and evolving understandings of writing as a representation of the self

within specific social contexts, two component parts of what this dissertation terms

writerly identities.

Learning in this view transforms the writers’ dispositions towards writing as well

as their writing practices, processes, and knowledge. In this way, students learn from

each other what it means to be a writer as they write and make public their writing

products and practices. These intellectual aims are achieved in collaboration with other

writers. Students do not acquire writerly moves or methods of self-representation by

being taught. Instead they develop dispositions towards both through unscripted,

informal, thoughtful access to each others’ ideas and writing. This allows students to

develop a more sophisticated view of their writerly identities, which translate to many

more choices in their writing and the opportunities to use these choices.

To engender this inquiring stance where knowledge about writing is created rather

than received by students, teachers can invite writers in their classrooms to recognize the

writerly moves they make and the ways these moves are taken up by their readers. This

is important because each of three kinds of writerly moves I identified—memetic moves,

efficient moves, and subversive moves—suggest specific ways a writer will likely be or

hope to be read. Memetic moves, which involve the simultaneous imitation and

241

alteration of recognized writing structures or conventions, identify writers as cognizant of

prescriptive writing structures and simultaneously working against those expectations.

Efficient moves, evident in writing structures, styles, conventions, or content that

privilege the expeditious completion of writing tasks, suggest a dutiful adherence to the

completion of writing tasks in service of earning a credential, like a grade. Subversive

writerly moves are the closest approximation to writing-conscious practices seen in high

school contexts. These moves overtly critique unthoughtful repetitions through inventive

style, content, organization, structure, or conventions. The existence of these three kinds

of moves underscore the complex ways that students position themselves within and in

light of academic writing assignments.

The existence of these various writerly moves highlights the importance of

understanding “why” students make the writerly choices they do instead of simply

evaluating the content of “what” students wrote. Asking these “why” questions allows

teachers to offer feedback in service of a writer’s development; focusing on “what”

students wrote, alternatively, leads to an evaluation of the textual content evident in what

students wrote. Asking “why” questions continues a conversation about writing choices

between and among students and teachers; focusing on “what” students wrote offers a

last word on the quality of a particular piece of writing. Asking “why” questions creates

opportunities for unstructured, informal, and spontaneous exchanges among students in

which they collaboratively negotiate what it means to write and be a writer; evaluating

“what” students wrote invests expert status regarding the skill of writing singularly in the

teacher. This emphasizes that learning to write within an inquiry-based writing

242

curriculum does not mean acquiring specifically, delineated writing skills. Rather

learning to write means internalizing socially negotiated dispositions towards and

practices of writing.

For this to occur, students need to have access to each other’s ideas and writing,

opportunities for responsive engagement with these ideas and writing, and access to

relevant expertise provided by a teacher’s guiding hand to students’ processes. This

offers a pedagogical compliment to the work of Ivanic (1998, 2004), Street (2007), and

Lankshear and Knobel (2006), who largely theorize notions of writer identity. This

pedagogical to theorized notions of writer identity hold the potential to offer instructional

opportunities for students’ to recognize and collaboratively inquire into their writerly

identities. This suggests that writerly identity is not only a useful theoretical concept to

understand writers but also is a potentially useful pedagogical construct that leads to

students to recognize and capitalize on their own evolving dispositions towards writing.

Writerly Identities and Out-of-School Spaces

Students bring their out-of-school writing practices to bear on their academic

work at the same time that their academic work holds the potential to impact their out-of-

school writing. This is an example of the kind of “hybridity” Street (2003) theorizes

where academic writing can be used by students for their own purposes.

This claim—that hybridized academic writing practices hold the potential to

shape out-of-school writing through a process of adaptation and transformation —

underscores that writerly identities move back and forth between school and home

243

contexts. The writerly moves students make and the self-representations students craft in

academic settings hold the potential to travel to out-of-school settings. Specifically, they

creep into online and artistic renderings. Conversely the ways students write and the

topics about which they write outside of school also potentially impact their academic

writings.

This finding complicates the literature on out-of-schools literacies. Kirkland

(2008), Lankshear and Knobel (2006), Pahl and Roswell (2006), Hull and Schultz (2002),

and Alvermann (2002) suggest that out-of-school literacies unidirectionally travel to

school contexts, where they should be honored. The literature is largely silent on the

implications of academic practices impacting out-of-school literacies, which this research

finds to be bi-directional.

The findings also complicate the overly simple characterization of current high

school students as digital natives who are perfectly at ease integrating online writing

practices into their academic word. Instead, students make complex and sometimes

seemingly contradictory decisions about what parts of their out-of-school online writing

experience they would make known or public in school and which they aspects they

would keep private. These decisions create two different dispositions towards the

inclusion of out-of-school writing practice within academic contexts. The first

disposition is “the publicly-private,” where information posted online is held as distinct

and separate from academic contexts. This would include teachers’ cognizance of social

media engagement by students coupled with students’ resistance to this social media

being integrated into the classroom. The second is “the privately-public,” where students

244

insist on teachers respecting a clear boundary between students’ personal writings and

school assignments. Yet in embracing the disposition of “the privately-public,” students

often crossed these self-created boundaries on public electronic forums and often brought

their own online writing practices to the classroom.

This changes the narrative of students in 2000s as digital natives, eager and

willing to embrace new literacies and Web 2.0 writing applications, suggesting the

question: Are schools asking the right kinds of questions about technology integration

with regards to students’ writing? Most research on technology integration in secondary

classrooms—e.g. Rodriguez and Knuth (2000), Richardson (2006/2010), and McLeod

and Lehmann (2011)—suggests the successful and meaningful integration of technology

in classroom spaces depends upon teachers fearlessly integrating Web 2.0 applications

that are second nature to students. Yet the findings from this dissertation trouble this

sense of teachers providing to students an online educational experience; in fact, the

findings suggest that teachers should probably not dictate what aspects of students’

digital worlds are included in the classroom. Instead the selection of Web 2.0

technologies should be a collaboratively negotiated determination based on which online

spaces and resources best meet a course’s curricular needs and are willingly shared in the

context of a particular curricular experience.

Understandings as an Inquiring Practitioner Researcher

As a teacher engaged in practitioner inquiry within my own classroom, I began

this dissertation with questions about the nature of writerly identity because, in many

245

ways, I wanted to become a better teacher of writing. As a graduate student and

practicing teacher immersed in the research and literature that framed this study, I aimed

to quiet myself in the hopes of hearing my students’ insights more clearly, allowing them

to teach me from their lived experiences insights that I could not possibly learn

independent of them. At the same time, I hoped as students recognized the potential for

writing as a mode of inquiry, they could learn more about themselves as both writers and

people by engaging in acts of writing in service of their own learning needs. Thus the

aim of this inquiry curriculum and research project was both self-serving and student-

serving. Most inquiry-based curricula are.

The process of engaging in this research project deeply impacts, to this day, my

own pedagogy and reverberates through the courses I currently teach. This is evident as

students write often, in ways are both formal and informal, and share insights about the

content of the literary texts they read as well as their evolving understandings of

themselves as writers. My marginal comments offered as feedback in response to

students’ writing have evolved; comments like, “What makes you think this way?,” have

replaced comments like, “Why not use the quote on page 119 to back up your idea?” To

build on the notion of dialogic engagement with texts, students write back to my marginal

comments and participate in the same annotation as meaning building curriculum

described in this study. The major difference between the courses I teach now and the

ones I taught in 2008: literary texts are used instead of literacies scholarship.

This suggests the possibility and potential for what I am describing as multi-

layered course frameworks, ones that include the scope of content to which students will

246

be exposed and which are used by many school districts as the written curriculum as well

as a curricular framework, detailing dispositions and practices students will be invited to

negotiate. Teachers invested in developing inquiry-based curricula within courses

framed by a district or department content-based scope-and-sequence, then, are able to

successfully serve both of these ends. The intended aim of scope-and-sequence

frameworks is to expose students to specific content-based understandings, explaining

why an administrator, parent, or student asking about a course curriculum is most often

looking for a list of texts or topics to be covered. The findings from this dissertation

suggest the careful study of course content can be used in support of an inquiry-

curriculum that invites students into deeper understandings of their writing practices and

frameworks. In this way, literary texts hold the potential to function as a conduit for what

students can learn about the acts of reading and writing through inquiry. The literary

texts themselves are not the curricular ends of the course. They are the means students

and teachers utilize to negotiate larger ideas about reading and writing.

In this way, the research findings extend beyond the local, inviting teachers in

other contexts to craft more meaningful writing opportunities that serve both students’

learning purposes and teachers’ assessment purposes. Conceptualizing writing

assignments as processes for capturing what students think in a given moment is a novel

concept for many teachers. For students, it is also a novel idea that their academic

writing should work, in some way, for them; their writing is relevant to their own

evolving understandings and not simply a vehicle for demonstrating some static, pre-

determined content. In an inquiry-based writing curriculum, students and teachers are

247

invested both in negotiating the challenging content of the course and in considering

questions about what it means to write for themselves in academic contexts.

An inquiry-based writing curriculum, then, is not an alternative to what is already

occurring in many secondary classrooms; instead it is an amplification and re-orientation

that honors what students themselves bring to the classroom.

Implications

Implications for Practice

First, students’ academic writing processes that involve connecting, revisiting,

and reconsidering texts they read in service of what they write implies a radically

different writing framework from what students have come to expect in academic

contexts. This framework involves reading texts, generating insights, making notes, and

crafting essays based on experiences with both source and student-created texts. This

contrasts with most pedagogical framings of reading texts and writing annotations, most

of which largely center on the capture and organization of authoritative and expert

knowledge provided by a teacher or textbook. For example, Burke’s (2003) Writing

Essentials suggests teachers provide students with a partial advanced outline of reading

assignments that students fill in during class. In “Giving a Lecture from Presenting to

Teaching,” Exley and Dennick (2009) suggest that students print PowerPoint slides in

advance and capture details during class. These methods of note-taking, as highlighted

by the verbs: take, fill in, and capture, suggest that meaning is static and definitive.

Writing annotations in service of generating ideas suggests the opposite. It views

248

meaning as constructed and in process. It implies that the act of writing begins as ideas

are generated during the process of reading. It suggests that the process of writing is a

recursive engagement with texts and ideas, not a linear sequence for completing writing

tasks.

Second, and following in this same vein, the findings from this research demand

that teachers stop teaching writing as a product borne of the strict adherence to a

sequence of steps and prescriptive formats. The inquiry-based annotation writing

practices described in the previous paragraph offer a different kind of writing process, a

new pedagogical framework for writing that runs countercurrent to the writing canon as it

is currently imagined by many teachers. If teachers, departments, and districts abandon

prescriptive writing sequences and formats that privilege the completion of writing tasks

over the contemplation of complex ideas through writing, greater resources could be

invested in offering students’ opportunities to develop their own questions and in

orchestrating classroom spaces where students could write more often and in more

meaningful ways. Offering writers greater authority over decisions regarding content,

organization, and structure also changes the tenor and type of feedback that writers

receive, making a shift from evaluative to educative feedback. Instead of writing being

evaluated in terms of its adherence to a format or structure, feedback could be framed in

terms of students’ writerly moves or how writing is taken up by readers. This suggests a

different and more generative kind of writing process.

Third, abandoning the teaching of “the writing process” allows teachers to focus

more deeply on cultivating a community of writers rather than producing students of

249

writing. This enables teachers to attune more carefully to students’ writerly identities, as

they are enacted through students’ writerly moves and self-representations. In my

identification and analysis of memetic, efficient, and subversive writerly moves, I provide

a lens for teachers to consider why students are writing as an alternative to simply

evaluating what students are writing. In my analysis of students’ evolving

understandings of writing as an act of self-representation, I illustrate how students

confront, grapple with, and eventually overcome the idea that their writing is divorced

from their self. In both of these aspects of writerly identity, the writerly moves evident

in students’ written texts and the self-representations evident in classroom discussions,

students made decisions about how to represent themselves and their ideas. These

complex decisions as well as the challenges faced by and the understandings embraced

by students making these decisions need to be recognized as the real educational work

being completed in writing classrooms.

Fourth, the bi-directional movement of students’ in-school and out-of-school

literacy practices, especially their online writing practices, underscores the mutually

transformative potential of both. This means academic writing practices have the

potential to influence students’ texts created outside of school at the same time that

students out-of-school writing practices can return to the class and meaningfully inform

students’ curricular work. However, this mutually transformative potential is only fully

realized when students control what aspects of their out-of-school literary practices are

included in academic contexts. Students in this study were strongly averse to a teacher’s

violation of their private space by utilizing social applications with the teacher knew

250

students were familiar, a phenomenon I termed “the publicly-private.” Yet when the

students themselves, rather than the teacher, integrated their out-of-school practices,

students were largely receptive, a phenomenon I termed “the privately-public.” This

implies that students are resistant to teachers dictating which technologies will be

integrated into a classroom but are receptive to the inclusion of out-of-school writing

practices in academic contexts when teachers orchestrate pedagogical spaces that allow

students themselves to bring these out-of-school writing practices to the classroom.

Fifth, teachers’ dispositions towards writing and teachers’ investment in their own

writing practices impact the kind of pedagogical moves that drive a classroom. This

implies that teachers need to be deeply invested in their own inquiry stance before they

can successfully invite students to understand the notion of inquiry, to reconceptualize

writing as a mode of inquiry, or to engage in inquiries into writing. Specifically, this

means that teachers themselves need to embrace the philosophical disposition that writing

involves the representation of both ideas and self and that no singular or sequential

process captures a correct way to write. For many educators, embracing this stance

likely involves a reconsideration and reorientation of their own writing frameworks, a

purposeful confrontation and critique of normalized expectations regarding the

frameworks that position writing as a skill instilled in students.

Sixth, these findings highlight the fact that inquiry frameworks are lived and

living stances, not uninvested strategies, born of reflective practice and practitioner

inquiry. They cannot be acquired through administrative mandates, the sharing of best

practice strategies, or adherence to content-based scope-and-sequence guides. Rather they

251

are developed through teachers’ on-going, purposeful, and systematic questioning of their

own frameworks for academic writing. Recognizing this evolved and evolving stance of

practitioner inquiry holds the potential to reshape conversations within and among

departments and districts regarding meaningful professional development in the area of

writing, specifically, and literacy, in general.

In light of these conversations practitioner inquiry stances hold the potential to

interrupt the widely held belief that students’ academic writing experiences should be in

preparation for some next academic step. In 3rd grade, students complete 4th grade work

so they will be ready for the next year. Middle school students learn the writing formats

they will encounter in high school. High school students write the kind of essays

required of them in college. This mindset of engaging a writer in the service of some

future writing experience eclipses the possibilities of honoring a writer’s identity and

understandings in the current moment. An inquiry-based writing framework, on the other

hand, does just this, inviting academic work to be taken up as personally meaningful and

based on the identities a student currently enacts or is in the process of exploring.

Additionally, an inquiring practitioner can recognize the value in inviting students

to see themselves as writers and not singularly as vessels for content knowledge. This

opens the possibility for more meaningful writing experiences across classroom contexts

and disciplines. Writing conversations and feedback can extend beyond mechanical,

grammatical, and content-based concerns. This does not mean that there would simply

be more writing, but rather that academic writing held the potential to be more

meaningful.

252

Lastly an inquiring practitioner can also recognize that the concept of writing as a

mode of inquiry is not simply an alternative framework that students come to embrace

after they have discarded a skills-based orientation. Rather, writing as a mode of inquiry

is itself a socially contextualized framework. It is one conceptualization of writing, not

the conceptualization of writing. Other teachers, college professors, inquisitive

classmates, future employers, and potential readers may or may not share this disposition.

Yet there exists a real value in inviting students to become aware of the existence of

previously uninterrogated frameworks. Armed with awareness of the social construction

of writing frameworks, students can critically interrogate teachers’, professors’,

classmates’, employers’, and readers’ frameworks for thinking about writing and make

decisions regarding how they will work within and/or against those frameworks.

Providing an inquiry framework and introducing it into the consciousness of high school

seniors provides them with the ability to interrogate the often unspoken expectations

underlying writing events.

Implications for Research

This research is both practitioner and university-based, underscoring my dual

location as a practitioner researcher and a university-based researcher. This dual lens of

teacher and researcher allows me to raise questions for future research that are

simultaneously both practitioner and university-based. I suggest these questions for

further research might be best addressed by a scholar, who like myself, locates

him/herself simultaneously in both the worlds of classroom teaching and university

253

research. These questions include: how are/is writing as a mode of inquiry embedded in

stated and taught curriculum? How can researchers within secondary classrooms help

policy makers and administrators deeply understand the complex workings of local,

situated classroom settings? How might research grounded in socio-cultural models

more deeply inform discussions writing pedagogy, which are currently dominated by

discussions of best practices and scientifically-based research interventions? How can

educational researchers and practitioners support each other in the creation of

institutional structures and frameworks necessary for meaningful writing pedagogy and

curricula? What do practitioners, both university and high school-based, understand

about students’ writing practices and writerly identities that cannot be captured by

scientifically-proven research?

Secondly, the findings from this dissertation contradict the over-simplified

representation of inquiry as a strategy, a representation evident in many pedagogical texts

read by teachers. Students’ initial unease with the notion of inquiry and the conception of

writing as a mode of inquiry, as well as the productive disruption that followed, is largely

neglected in pedagogical literature, which focuses on infusing inquiry strategies in

secondary classrooms. Harvey and Daniels’ (2009) Comprehension and Collaboration:

Inquiry Circles in Action, which identifies its audience as K-12 teachers, suggests that

inquiry begins with students’ questions but does not trouble the fact that many high

school students arrive in secondary classrooms with the belief that classrooms center on

the content a teacher must cover rather than on the questions students bring to that

classroom. Wilhelm’s (2007) Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry illustrates how

254

essential questions at the center of a unit of study can frame content as personally

meaningful without troubling the challenges students may face when attempting to

develop and write in response to their own questions. These pedagogical texts largely

frame the creation of an inquiry-curriculum as an alternative series of choices a teacher

makes without necessarily interrogating or challenging the underlying frameworks that

guide teachers’ or students’ conceptions of writing.

Implications for Policy

First, the findings from this dissertation make clear the need to recognize, and in

some cases reorient, the ways that writing instruction and assessment are conceptualized.

Many current skill-based writing frameworks, from the level of the classroom to the state,

largely posit writing as a series of fixed and de-contextualized skills taught in a rote

sequence in ways that are measurable on standardized assessments. This creates an

illusionary sense of writing as a skill that reduces writing instruction and assessment to its

basest and least consequential elements: those that can be validly and reliably recorded

according to psychometric scales. Instead, conversations about writing pedagogy and

curriculum should concentrate on the meaningful writing experiences to which students

are invited to participate and to which teachers meaningfully respond. Assessment

measures should reflect these values and practices, inverting our current system where

skill-based assessment measures largely drive instructional practice.

Second, this work holds the potential to inform critical conversations regarding

how writing is framed, at the level of the class, department, district, and state, as teachers,

255

schools, districts, and departments of education attempt to balance the creation of

meaningful writing curricula with success on standardized assessments. It underscores

that teachers and students do not need to be constrained by the policies of No Child Left

Behind or the Common Core Writing Standards. Students both can participate in a

meaningful inquiry-based writing curriculum as well as gain exposure to specific content

understandings.

Third, these findings suggest that education policy needs to recognize that the

purpose of attending an American public high school is more than an intermediate step to

college and career goals. In this way, I’m not convinced that college and career

readiness, as framed by the delineation of measurable skills outlined in the Governor’s

Report on College and Career Readiness (2006), is really the goal to which public high

schools should aspire in terms of students writing experiences. Federal and state

departments of education, so eager to advocate for school reform, should focus instead on

the more important questions of what we, as a society, want children experience in terms

of writing and what we should expect of good writing teachers beyond knowledge of

explicitly delineated, narrow writing processes.

Final Thoughts

As I reflect on the process of designing and implementing the inquiry curriculum

at the center of this research project, I recognize an important tension worthy of

consideration. This inquiry-based curricular experience was, in a sense, heavily teacher-

directed. In some ways, this makes sense. For students to engage in their own inquiries

256

into academic writing, they need both tools and direction. Yet they do not need a

packaged and delivered inquiry framework. Even as I discuss findings in light of and

implications for my research, I wonder how successfully as a teacher did I orchestrate

pedagogical spaces that provided students with tools and directions without delivering to

them my packaged understandings of inquiry and writing?

In shaping the curricular framework for this course and research study, I, as a

teacher, simultaneously held contradictory impulses. I wanted students to feel

knowledgeable and authoritative about writing yet at the same moment I wanted them to

interrogate the very foundations of this knowledge and authority. I did not want students

to feel overwhelmed by or lost in the process of inquiry while at the same moment I

recognized that working through challenging intellectual conundrums is how meaning is

created. In light of these contradictory impulses, I continuously questioned and

considered how much uncertainty was tolerable to me and to my students.

The initial drafts of this inquiry curriculum, to which I refer briefly in Chapter

Three, attempted to minimize the uncomfortable uncertainty students and I would surely

experience. It did this by espousing the tenants of my own pedagogical inquiry

framework and leading students through writing tasks that would enable them to

understand my conception of inquiry in advance of creating their own inquiries into

writing. These early curricular framings, borne of a well-intentioned desire to insulate

students from the ambiguities and the challenges of inquiry, likely would have also

inhibited students’ deep understandings of socially constructed writing frameworks.

257

These deep understandings, in fact, are only generated in the wake of the challenging and

messy process of inquiry.

So I abandoned those initial curricular frames, inviting students instead to inquire

into academic writing by writing, insisting uncomfortably that they and I feel our way

along. Despite my contrary impulses, the process of inquiry was necessarily uncertain at

various moments. This uncertainly was important, critically important to students’

evolving and deepening understandings about writing as an act of identity, yet also

challenging for me, as the teacher, as well as for the students. Yet I believe, powerfully

and positively, this uncertainty catalyzed a re-conceptualization of writing as the

contemplation of questions that guide writers throughout their lives. What does it mean to

be a writer? For whom am I writing? Whose purpose does this writing serve? What

conventions and expectations am I writing within and against? How will I be read in

light of my writing?

Consideration of these questions is largely a measure of educational rather than

academic success, which is why students attend school in the first place. They do not, or

at least should not, attend school to learn to be successful in school writing tasks. Rather

they enter the writing classroom to consider and internalize ways of thinking, writing,

and being.

The more deeply invested students were in their inquiry questions, the more

confounding and uncertain our understandings of writing became, and the more resources

I shared and negotiated with students. In this way, this inquiry curriculum that delved

258

into questions about academic writing was deeply collaborative; these students and I

wrote ourselves into the questions about writing that sustained us.

259

REFERENCES

Abrams, S.S. (2010, February). Digital communication and ethnography: New pathways For qualitative research. Paper presented at the 31st Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

Alvermann, D. E. (2002). Effective literacy instruction for adolescents. Journal ofLiteracy Research, 34(2), 189-208.

Alvermann, D.E. (2008). Commentary: Why bother theorizing adolescents’ online literacies for classroom practice and research? Journal of Adolescent and AdultLiteracy, 52(1), 8-19.

Andrage, H.G. & Boulay, B.A. (2003). Role of rubric-referenced self-assessment in learning to write. Journal of Educational Research, 97(1) 21-36.

Anagnostopolous, D. (2003). Testing and student engagement in urban classrooms: A multi-layered approach. Research in the Teaching of English, 38(2), 177-212.

Applebee, A.N. (1981). Writing in the secondary school. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Applebee, A.N. (1984). Contexts for learning to write. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. (M. Holquist, Ed.); (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans.) Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Baron, D. (2005). The College Board's new essay reverses decades of progress toward literacy. Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(35), 14-15.

Bartholomae, D.  (1996). What Is Composition and (If You Know What That Is) Why Do We Teach It? In L. Bloom, D. Daiker, & E. White (Eds.), Composition in the Twenty-First Century:  Crisis and Change (pp. 11-28). Carbondale, IL:  Southern Illinois Press.

Bartholomae, D. (2002/1985). Inventing the university. In T.R. Johnson & S. Morahan (Eds.), Teaching composition: Background readings. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins.

Bartlett, L. & Holland, D. (2002). Theorizing the space of literacy practices. Ways of Knowing 2(1), 10-22.

260

Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (2005). Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond communicates of practice: Language, power and social context. (pp. 14-36). Cambridge: University Press.

Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 7-15). New York, NY: Routledge.

Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Beaufort, A. (2007). College writing and beyond: A new framework for university writing instruction. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Benjamin, W. (1986/1969). Illuminations. H. Arendt, Trans. New York, NY: Schocken.

Berghoff, B., Egawa, K.A., Harste, J.C., & Hoonan, B.T. (2000). Beyond reading and writing: Inquiry, curriculum, and multiple ways of knowing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Bergmann, L.S. & Baker, E. (2006). Composition and/or literature: The end(s) of education. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Bishop, E. (1936). The Map. In A. Winslow (Ed.) Trial Balances (pp.9-12). New York, NY: Macmillian.

Bizzell, P. (1994). Contact zones and English studies. College English, 56, 163-169.

Braun, H. (2003). Assessment and technology. In M. Segers, P. Dochy, & E. Cascallar (Eds.), Optimizing new modes of assessment. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer.

Brandt, D. & Clinton, K. (2002). Limits of the local: Expanding perspectives on literacy as a social practice. Journal of Literacy Research. 34(3), 337-356.

Britton, J. (1987). A quiet form of research. In D. Goswami & P.R. Stillman (Eds.), Reclaiming the classroom: Teacher research as an agency for change. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Broad, B. (2003). What we really value: Beyond rubrics in teaching and assessing writing. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Bryant, L. (2005). Voice as Process. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook.

261

Burgess, A. & Ivanic, R. (2010). Writing and being written: Issues of identity across timescales. Written Communication, 27(2): 228-255.

Burke, J. (2003). Writing essentials: Tools, tips, and techniques. Portsmouth, NH: Heineman Press.

Campano, G. (2007). Immigrant students and literacy: Reading, writing, and remembering. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Cisneros, S. (1984). The house on mango street. New York, NY: Random House.

Cleary, L.M. (1991). From the other side of the desk: Students speak out about writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann.

Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. L. (1993). Inside/Outside: Teacher research and knowledge. New York: Teachers College Press.

Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. L. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities. In A Iran-Nejad and C.D. Pearson, Review of Research in Education, Volume 24 (pp.249-305). Washington, DC: The American Educational Research Association.

Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2011). The standards. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards.

College Board. (2006). “Why is the writing section required and not optional?” Frequently asked questions about the SAT. Retrieved from http://www.collegeboard.com/about/news_info/sat/faqs.html.

Collins, B. (2004). “Marginalia.” In Sailing alone around the room: New and selected poems (pp. 94-95). New York, NY: Random House.

Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Leu, D. J. (2008). Central issues in new literacies and new literacies research. In J. Coiro, M. Knobel, C. Lankshear, & D. J. Leu. (Eds.) The handbook of research in new literacies (pp. 1-22). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Collier, L. (2007). The shift to 21st-century literacies. The Council Chronicle. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. 17(2), 4-8.

262

Cowhey, M. (2006). Black ants and buddhists: Thinking critically and teaching differently in the primary grades. Portland, ME: Stenhouse, 2006

Dawkins, R. (2006/1976). The selfish gene. (30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Dixon, K. (1998). Outbursts in academe: Multiculturalism and other sources of conflict. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Dombeck, K. & Herndon, S. (2004). Critical Passages: Teaching the transition to college composition. New York: Teachers College Press.

Donahue, C. (2005). Student writing as negotiation. In T. Kostouli (Ed.), Writing in context(s): Textual practices and learning processes in sociocultural settings. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 137-164.

Drake, B. M. & Amspaugh, L.B. (1994).  What writing reveals in mathematics.  Focus on Learning Problems in Mathematics, 16(3), 43-50.

Dresang, E.T. (2005). The information-seeking behavior of youth in the digital environment. Library Trends, 54, pp. 178–196.

Durst, R. (2006). Research in writing, postsecondary education, 1984-2003. Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 6(2), 53-73.

Dyson, A. H. (1987). Individual differences in beginning composing: An orchestral vision of learning to compose. Written Communication, 4(4), 411-442.

Dyson, A. H., & Freedman, S. W. (1991). Writing. In J. Flood et al., (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Emig, J. (1971). The composing processes of twelfth graders. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Elbow, P. (1998/1973). Writing Without Teachers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Elbow, P. (2000). A map of writing in terms of audience and response and getting along without grades—and getting along with them too. In Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing (pp.28-47 and pp.395-421). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, (3rd ed., pp.119-161). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

263

Exley, K. & Dennick, R. (2011). Giving a lecture: From presenting to teaching. Teaching Theology and Religion. 14(1), 85-86.

Fecho, B. (2011). Writing in the Dialogical Classroom: Students and Teachers Responding to the Texts of Their Lives. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Fecho, B, Allen, J., Mazaros, C., & Inyega, H. (2006) Teacher research in writing classrooms. In P. Smagorinsky (Ed.). Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives of Two Decades of Change (pp. 108-140). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Fecho, B. & Green, A. (2002). Madaz Publications: Polyphonic identity and existential literacy transactions. Harvard Educational Review, 72 (1), 93-119.

Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Reinventing the self and other in qualitative research. In N. Denzin, & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 70–82). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Finn, P. (1999) Literacy with an attitude: Educating working-class children in their own self-interest. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Fishman, A. (2006, December) Writing Assessment Handbook. Pennsylvania Department of Education: Assessment. Retrieved from http://www.pde.state.pa.us/ a_and_t/lib/a_and_t/2006-2007WritingAssessmentHandbook.pdf

Fitzhugh, W. (2007). History research papers. History Matters, 20(3), 2-6.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum.

Gaibraith, D. (1999). Writing as knowledge-constituting process. In M. Torrance and D. Galbraith (Eds.), Studies in writing (vol 4): Knowing what to write and conceptual processes in text production (pp. 137-157). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.

Gee, J.P. (1996). The new literacy studies: From “socially situated” to the work of the social. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanič (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 180-196). London, England: Routledge.

Gee, J.P. (2001). Identity as an analytical lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25, 99-125.

Gee, J.P. (2004). Orality and literacy: From The Savage Mind to Ways with Words. In

264

J. Maybin, (Ed.), Language and literacy in social practice (pp. 168-192). Philadelphia, PA: Multilingual Matters.

Gee, J.P. (2005/1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York, NY: Routledge.

Geertz, C. (2000/1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Genishi, C. & Dyson, A.H. (2009). Children, language, and literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Ghiso, M.P. (2009). Writing that matters: Collaborative inquiry and authoring practices in a first grade classroom. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, PA.

Greco, N. (1999). Reinvention Portia: A reading and writing pedagogy for adolescent women. English Journal 88(6), 70-76.

Hagood, M.C. (2008). Intersections of popular culture, identities, and new literacies research. In J. Coiro, M. Knobel, C. Lankshear, & D.J. Leu (Eds.), Handbook of research on new literacies (pp. 531-551). New York, NY: Erlbaum.

Haneda, M. & Wells, G. (2000) Writing in knowledge-building communities. Research in the Teaching of English. 34(3), 396-431.

Harvey, S. & Daniels, S. (2009). Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Helmers, M. (1994). Writing students: Composition testimonials and representations of students. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Hillocks, G. Jr. (2002). The testing trap: How state assessments of writing control learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Hillocks, G. Jr. (2006). Middle and high school composition. In P. Smagorinsky (Ed.). Research on composition: Multiple perspectives on two decades of change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

hooks, b. (1989). Talk back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Hull, G. & Mike R. (1990). This wooden shack place: the logic of an unconventional

265

reading. College Composition and Communication, 41(3), 287-298.

Hull, G. & Schultz, K. (2002). Connecting schools with out of school worlds. In G. Hull and K. Schultz (Eds.), School’s out: Bridging out of school literacies with classroom practice (pp.32-57). New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press.

Hunt, D. (2002). Misunderstanding the assignment. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton-Cook.

Huot, B. & Neal, M. (2006). Writing Assessment: a techno history. In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, and J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 417-432). New York: Guilford Press.

Holbrook, A. (1999, March/April). Formulaic writing: Blueprint for mediocrity. GED Items, p. 8-9.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2000). National educational technology standards for teachers. Eugene, OR: ISTE.

Ivanic, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education. 18(3), 220-245.

Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and identity: The discursive construction of identity in academic writing. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

Ivanic, R. & Satchwell, C. (2007). Boundary crossing: networking and transforming literacies in research processes and college courses. Journal of Applied Linguistics 4(1), 101-124.

Jackson, H.J. (2001). Marginalia: Readers writing in books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Jacobs, H.H. (2004). Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Johnson, T.S., Smagorinsky, P., Thompson, L, & Fry, P. (2003) Learning to teach the five-paragraph theme. Research in the Teaching of English, 38(2), 136-176.

Johnston, P. (2003). Assessment conversations. Reading Teacher, 57(1), 90-92.

Kirkland, D. (2008). Shaping the digital pen: Media literacy, youth culture, and MySpace. Youth Media Reporter, 2(4), 188- 200.

Knobel, M. & Lankshear, C. (Eds.) (2007). A new literacies sampler. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

266

Knobel, M. & Wilber, D. (2009). Let's talk 2.0. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 20-24

Langer, J.A. (2002). Effective literacy instruction. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (Eds.) (2008). Digital literacies: concepts, policies and practices. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2006). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Open University Press.

Lea, M.R. (2004). Academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design." Studies in Higher Education 29(6), 739-56.

Lea, M.R. & Street, B.J. (2006). The academic literacies model: Theory and applications. Theory into Practice. 45(4), 368-377.

Leander, Y.C.M. (2007). You won't be needing your laptops to-day: Wired bodies in the wireless classroom. In M. Knobel & C. Lankshear (Eds.), A new literacies sampler (pp. 25-48). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Lee, P., & Ashby, R. (2000). Progression in historical understanding among students ages 7-14. In P. N. Stearns, P. Seixas, & S. Wineburg (Eds.), Knowing, teaching and learning history: National and international perspectives (pp. 199-222). New York: New York University Press.

Lenhart, A., Madden, M., & Hitlin, P. (2005). Teens and technology: Youth are leading the transition to a fully wired and mobile nation. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Lewis, C., & Fabos, B. (2005, October/November/December). Instant messaging, literacies, and social identities. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(4), 470–501.

Lillis, T. (2003). Student writing as academic literacies: Drawing on Bakhtin to move from critique to design. Language and Education, 17(3), 192-207.

Lillis, T. &Turner, J. (2001) Student writing in higher education: Contemporary confusion, traditional concerns. Teaching in Higher Education, 6 (1), 57-68.

Lytle, S. L. (2008). Practitioner inquiry and the practice of teaching: Some thoughts on Better. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(3), 373-379.

Lytle, S. L., Portnoy, D., Blackburn M., Browne, S., & Staples, J. (1999, Sept.).

267

Teaching English/Language and Literacy in Middle and Secondary Schools. Course Syllabus. University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education: Philadelphia, PA.

Maxwell, J. A. (2005). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

McBride, J. (1996). The color of water: A black man’s tribute to his white mother. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam.

McLeod, S., & Lehmann, C. (2011). What school leaders need to know about digital technologies and social media. San Francisco, CA: Jossey‐Bass.

Melville, H. (1853). Bartleby the scriver: A story of Wall Street. Retrieved from www.bartleby.com.

Millard, E. (2006). Transformative pedagogy: Teachers creating a literacy of fusion. In K. Pahl and J. Roswell (Eds.), Travel notes from the New Literacy Studies: Instances of practice (pp. 234-253). Thousand Oaks, CA: Paul Chapman.

Miller, S.M. (2002). Reflective teaching the panic of high-stakes testing.  English Education, 34(2), pp. 164-168. 

Moje, E.B. (2007). Youth cultures, literacies, and identities in and out of school. In J. Flood, S.B. Heath, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through communicative and visual arts: Volume 2 (pp. 207-219). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Moje, E., Ciechanowski, K., Kramer, K., Ellis, L., Carrillo, R., & Collazo, T. (2004). Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of everyday funds of knowledge and discourse. Reading Research Quarterly, 39(1), 38–70.

National Commission on the High School Senior Year. (2001). Raising our sights: No high school senior left behind. Princeton, NJ: Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges. (2003). The neglected “R”: The need for a writing revolution. Princeton, NJ: College Board.

National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges. (2006). Writing and school reform. Princeton, NJ: College Board.

268

Neilsen, L. (1998). Knowing her place: Research literacies and feminist occasions. San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press.

Nichols, R. (2008). Negotiating new literacies in "old" spaces: Toward a new literacies research pedagogy. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New York.

Nichols, S. L. & Berliner, D. C. (2007). Collateral damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts America's schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Obama, B. (2008, March). A More Perfect Union. Speech presented at the Constitution Center, Philadelphia, PA.

O’Brien, D., & Scharber, C. (2008). Digitial literacies go to school: Potholes and possibilities. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacies, 52(1), 66-68.

Parker, D. (2007). Planning for inquiry; it's not an oxymoron! Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.

Paul, K. & Rowsell, J. (Eds.) (2005). Literacy and education: Understanding the new literacy studies in the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Paul Chapman.

Pahl, K., & Roswell, J. (Eds.) (2006). Travel notes from the new literacy studies. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Pennsylvania Department of Education. (2010) Standards Align System and Common Core Standards. Retrieved from http://www.pdesas.org/.

Pennsylvania Department of Education. (2009). 11th grade writing analysis and scoring sampler. Retrieved from http://www.pde.state.pa.us.

Pennsylvania Department of Education. (2008). PSSA results. What is the PSSA?

Retrieved from http://www.pde.state.pa.us.

Pennsylvania Department of Education. (2007). PSSA results. What is the PSSA? Retrieved from http://www.pde.state.pa.us.

Pennsylvania Governor’s Commission on College and Career Success Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (2006). Final Report. Harrisburg: Office of the Governor.

Perry, D. (1993). Jamaica Kincaid: Interview. In Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out: Interviews by Donna Perry (pp. 127-144). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

269

Perry, W. (1963). “Examsmanship in the liberal arts: A study in educational epistemology.” In Examining in Harvard College: A collection of essays by members of the Harvard faculty. Retrieved from http://lclane.net/101/examsmanship.html

Pirie, B. (1997). Reshaping high school English. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Potter E.F., McCormick C.B., & Busching B.A. (2001) Academic and life goals: insights from adolescent writers. High School Journal 85(1): 45–55.

Pratt, M.L. (1999/1991). Arts of the contact zone. In D. Bartholomae & A. Petrosky (Eds.), Ways of reading (5th ed.). New York, NY: Bedford/ St. Martin's.

Prior, P. (2006). A sociocultural theory of writing. In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), The Handbook of Writing Research (pp. 54-66). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Purcell-Gates, V. (1993). I ain't never read my own words before. Journal of Reading, 37(1), 210-220.

Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Perseus Books.

Reder, S. & Davila, E. (2005). Context and literacy practices. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 25, 170-187.

Rex, L. A. & McEachen, D. (1999) “If anything is odd, inappropriate, confusing, or boring, it’s probably important”: The emergence of inclusive academic literacy through English classroom discussion practices. Research in the Teaching of English, 34(1).

Richardson, L. & St. Pierre, E. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed, pp. 959-978). Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage.

Richardson, W. (2010/2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rodriguez, G. & Knuth, R. (2000). Providing professional development for effective technology. Chicago, Il: North Central Regional Educational Library. Retrieved from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/technlgy/te1000.htm

270

Russell, D., Lea, M.R, Parker, I., Street, B.V., & Donahue, T. (2009). Exploring notions of genre in academic literacies and writing across the curriculum: Approaches across countries and contexts. In C. Bazerman, A. Bonini, and D. Figueredo (Eds.), Genre in a changing world (pp. 395-423). Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press.

Salahu-Din, D., Persky, H., & Miller, J. (2008). National assessment of educational progress: The Nation’s Reportcard: Writing 2007. Washington, DC: United States Department of Education.

Samuelson, B. L. (2009). Ventroloquation in discussions of student writing: Examples from a high school English class. Research in the Teaching of English, 44(1), 52-88.

Singer, S., Hilton, M., & Schweingruber, H. (2005) America’s lab report: Investigation in high school science. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press.

Shaughnessy, M.P. (1977). Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Shiroff, J. (2009). Group conversations around images, documents, and videos. Resources. National Writing Project, Retrieved from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3018.

Smagorinsky, P. (1997). Personal growth in social context: A high school seniors search for meaning in and through writing. Written communication, 14(1), 63-105.

Smagorinsky, P. (Ed.) (2006). Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives of Two Decades of Change. Columbia, NY: Teachers College Press.

Smagorinsky, P. & O’Donnell, C. (2000). Ideocultural diversity in small groups: The role of the relational framework in collaborative learning.” In C.D. Lee & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smagorinsky, P. and Smith, M.W. (1992). The nature of knowledge in composition and literary understanding: The question of specificity. Review of Educational Research, 62, 279-305.

Solove, Daniel J. (2008, August). "The End of Privacy?" Scientific American. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article-social-networks-bring

Sperling, M. and Woodleaf,L. (1997). Two classrooms, two writing communities: Urban and suburban tenth graders learning to write. Research in the Teaching of

271

English. 31(2).

Strauss, A. & Corbin, J. (1998/1990) Basics of Qualitative Research Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. (1993). Introduction: The new literacy studies. In B. Street (Ed.), Cross-cultural approaches to literacy (pp.1-21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. (1998). New literacies in theory and practice: What are the implications for language in education. Linguistics and Education, 10(1), 1-24

Street, B. (1999). Academic Literacies. In C. Jones, J. Turner, & B. V. Street (eds), Students Writing in the University (pp. 193-227). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

Street, B. (2000). Literacy events and literacy practices. In M. Martin-Jones & K. Jones, (Eds.), Multilingual literacies: Comparative perspectives on research and practice. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamin.

Street, B. (2003) ‘What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice.’ Issues in Comparative Education. 5(2): 77-91.

Street, B. (2006). "New Literacies, New Times." In Scribd. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/49633889/Street-New-Literacies-New-Times.

Street, B. (2007). New literacies, new times: How do we describe and teach the forms of literacy knowledge, skills, and values people need for new times. In B. Street & N. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Volume 2: Literacy. New York, NY: Springer.

Sykes, C.J. (1999). The End of Privacy: Personal Rights in the Surveillance Society. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

Thesen, L. and van Pletzen, E. (2006). Introduction: The politics of place in academic literacy work. In L.Thesen and E. vanPletzen (Eds.), Academic literacies and languages of change (pp.1-29). London, Continuum.

Tierney, R. J. (1998). Literacy assessment reform: Shifting beliefs, principled possibilities, and emerging practices. Reading Teacher, 51(5), 374-390.

Tillotson, J.W., & Kluth, P. (2003). Auto mechanics in the physics lab: Science education

272

for all. In P. Kluth, D. Straut, & D. Biklen (Eds.), Access to Academics. New York, NY: Erlbaum.

Tomlinson, C. A. (2003). Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

United States Department of Education (2002). No child left behind desktop reference [Electronic version]. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/nclbreference/index.html.

United States Department of Education. (2009). Race to the Top. Washington, DCRetrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html

van Rensburg, W. (2006). Making academia transparent: Negotiating academic identities. Zeitschrift Schreiben. Retrieved from http://www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu/cgi-bin/joolma/index.php?Itemid=32&id=17&option=com_content&task=view.

Vasudevan, L. (2010). Education remixed: Digital geographies of youth. Digital Culture and Education. 2(1), 62-82.

Weinstein, L. (2001). Writing at the threshold: Featuring 56 ways to prepare high school and college students to think and write at the college level. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Wiggins, G.P. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Wilbur, R. (2004). The Writer. In New and Collected Poems: 1943-2004 (pp. 53-54). Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

Wilber, D.J. (2008). College students and new literacy practices. In J. Coiro, M. Knobel, C. Lankshear, & D.J. Leu (Eds.), The handbook of research on new literacies (pp. 553-581). New York, NY: Erlbaum.

Wilhelm, J. (2007). Engaging readers and writers with inquiry. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Wilson, J.L. (2002, January). Students connect through inquiry: A qualitative research study in the use of inquiry-based curriculum in a middle school language arts classroom. Paper presented at the College of Education Qualitative Research Conference, St. Louis, MO.

Wilson Reading System. (2009). Just Words. Oxford, MA: Wilson Language

273

Training Corporation.

Winalski, A. (2006). “Bam.” In P. Sullivan and H. Tinberg (Eds.) What is college level writing? (pp. 302-310). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Zhao, Y. (2009). Catching up or leading the way: American education in the age of globalization. Alexandra, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

274