BECOMINGWRITER PRESERVICE TEACHERS RELATIONSHIPS WITH TEXTS KRISTIDEL MCGREGOR
BECOMING-WRITER: PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ RELATIONSHIPS WITH TEXTS KRISTIDEL MCGREGOR UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
RESEARCH ON TEACHING WRITING OFTEN FOCUSES ON WRITING, NOT ON THE TEACHER Move to thinking of writing as a process: Lucy Calkins (1984), Donald Graves (1983), Donald Murray (1985). More attention paid to writing as a form of inquiry: • Writing as part of phenomenological practice: Adams and Van Manen (2017) • Writing and autoethnography: Austin & Hickey (2007); Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, (2013)
Cremin & Oliver (2016): a lit review of teachers’ writing identities TEACHER’S WRITING IDENTITIES: WHAT WE KNOW • Most teachers don’t closely consider what “counts” as writing, and report having negative memories of and low confidence in writing. This can make teaching writing challenging Teacher’s writing identities are formed though: • relations with others – their own teachers, their students, their professional life (Mc. Carthey & Moje, 2002; Hall, 2008) • Institutional factors, like emphasis on testing (Cremin & Baker, 2010, 2014) • Their own writing history (Mc. Kinney and Giorgis, 2009; Yeo, 2007)
WHAT COULD NEW MATERIALIS T THEORY BRING TO INQUIRY INTO TEACHERS’ WRITING IDENTITY? • Re-conception of the idea of “text” • Shift view of writing from an isolated act to an inherently intra-active experience
ST. PIERRE, 2017 • The movement of writing takes over, and the writer, the person (neither noun works in post qualitative inquiry) loses control and finds herself barely able to keep up in the thinking- writing as words appear on the computer screen she could not have thought without writing.
• Barad muses, in the preface to her book Meeting the Universe Halfway, that she and the book “have written each other” (2007, pg. x).
The common understanding of writing as a procedure for textual production is essentially teleological, conceiving of writing in the service of content learning or the development of communicative skills or even the sorting and norming of students. By contrast, I am proposing that we understand writing ontologically, as a way of being in the world, as an act of living. (Yagelski, 2012, p. 190)
Critical to distinguish from interaction, no matter how intimate; not just a matter of interdependence, but an ontological inseparability. ENTANGLEMENT/INTRAACTIONS/CYBORG Barad: intra-action, entanglement; materialdiscursive becoming Braidotti (building on Deleuze and Guattari): a nomadic, transversal ‘assemblage’ that involves non-human actors and technological media Haraway and Puar: conception of the cyborg, natureculture
DO PRE-SERVICE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHERS SELFIDENTITY AS WRITERS? DOES THAT SELF-IDENTIFICATION SHIFT AFTER SUSTAINED INTRAACTION WITH MENTOR TEXTS? RESEARCH QUESTIONS, THOUGHT WITH NEW MATERIALIST THEORIES
When you remember to become what you are – a subject-in-becoming – you actually reinvent yourself on the basis of what you hope you could become (Braidotti, 2014)
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