thesisthoughts

Am I a writer? Are all bloggers writers? Are teachers who write narratives about their experiences writers? Are students writers? Are all academics writers? These questions have been keeping me busy over the past few days as well as those concerning the contribution of teacher-writing in the teaching of writing.

Now that the first draft of my methodology chapter is on paper, I am moving on. I have written a few narrative pieces and have also found some wonderful blog posts containing teacher narratives on writing and the teaching of writing. More about that later…

Frank writes about herself as a teacher before and after she discovered that she could and should write and also about the writing courses she runs for teachers. She proposes that teachers who do not see themselves as writers often have difficulties teaching writing to children. In her experience, teachers who do not write are less inclined to spend time on writing instruction and respond more to “lower-level corrections” (p. 185) in their students’ texts.   

The article mentions “writing apprehension” a term coined by Daly and Miller (1975, as cited in Frank, 2003).

Frank runs courses in which she uses a technique of neighborhood mapping to evoke personal childhood memories in preparation of writing narratives. In her experience, as a result of the writing experience and the group collaboration involved in the process, teachers begin to see themselves as writers and in turn improve their teaching of writing.

Frank describes her own story and I saw that in several ways it is similar to my own. I could have written the following few sentences about myself:

“I defined writing in narrow terms, believing that authors were gifted human beings. Because I did not see myself as ever being able to write like the authors I was reading, I did not identify myself as a ‘writer’” (p. 185-186).

Frank quotes Blau (1988) who explained that the difference between “basic writers” and “experienced, capable writers” is that the accomplished writers believe that what they want to say is significant enough to warrant writing about it.

Studies on how personal narrative and autobiographical writing can enhance elementary teachers’ lit instruction:

• Blake, 1995
• Brinkley, 1993
• Florio-Ruane, 1994
• Meyer, 1993
• Wimett & Blachowicz, 1997

Frank quotes Blau (1988, p. 31):

“A central principle for the NWP is “that writing teachers must write: that their authority as teachers of writing must be grounded on their own personal experience as writers – as persons who know firsthand the struggles and satisfactions of the writer’s task”" (Frank, 2003, p. 187).

Frank observed that as the teachers in her courses gradually began to see themselves as writers, they began to take risks and concentrate more on the content of their writing than on mechanics. They became less apprehensive as they saw writing as a process, that revision could always improve a piece later.

As I read I was reminded of Parr’s distinction between private and public writing. Many of the pieces created in Franks courses began as private pieces and went on to further empower their writers as they transformed into public texts.

Again quoting Blau (1996), Frank writes:

“In his theory of revision, Blau (1996) acknowledges that writing is a difficult frustrating, and time consuming process that inexperienced writers see as evidence of their own incompetence. On the other hand, experienced writers know that frustration and feelings of incompetence are among the most difficult challenges of writing” (p. 192).

I think the most important point is made by Frank on page 193 . She proposes that it is not enough for a teacher to become a writer in order for him/her to improve their writing instruction, teachers must write and reflect on their writing process in order to bring about change in their classrooms.

“Learning about writing pedagogy andidentifying themselves as writers who could reflect on the difficulties of the writing process enabled them to change instructional strategies within their own classrooms…” (p. 193).

Frank, C. R. (2003). Mapping our stories: Teachers’ reflections on themselves as writers. Language Arts, 80(3), 185-195. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/la

This morning I began looking into the area of self-study research. The article by Bullough and Pinnegar clarified for me what the role of the researcher is in this kind of work and explained what the reader is expecting while reading an autobiographical educational study.

The article gives 14 useful guidelines for ensuring that research of this kind is of a high quality. Personally I am quite daunted by the requirements and am not sure that I will ever be capable of  meeting them.  

 The article explains four historical developments which encouraged the onset of self-study research forms in education.

“When biography and history are joined, when the issue confronted by the self is shown to have relationship to and bearing on the context and ethos of a time, then self-study moves to research” (p. 15). There must be a balance made between the individual and public issues and interests. The writing must not be too self interested but at the same time not fall back to the distance of traditional research forms. This balance must be evident both in the data gathered and in its analysis.

Questions of authority:

“Self-study is a mongrel: The study is always of practice, but at the intersection of self and other, and its methods are borrowed. Thus in order to assert authority the study must do so from the frame or frames of the borrowed methodology, the standards of scholarship of the embraced tradition still must be met”. (Pinnegar, 1998 as cited on p. 15). 

Where is the difficulty?

“researchers face the difficulty of representing, presenting, legitimating, analyzing, and reporting one’s own experience as data – and of doing so in honest, not self-serving ways…” (p. 15).

“each researcher must prove herself as a methodologist and a writer” (p. 15).

Guidelines for autobiography (p. 16-19):

1. Autobiographical self-studies should ring true and enable connection.
2. Self-studies should promote insight and interpretation.
3. Autobiographical self-study research must engage history forthrightly and the author must take an honest stand.
4.  Biographical and autobiographical self-studies in teacher education are about the problems and issues that make someone an educator.
5.  Authentic voice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the scholarly standing of a biographical self-study.
6.  The autobiographical self-study  researcher has an ineluctable obligation to seek to improve the learning situation not only for the self but for the other.
7. Powerful autobiographical self-studies portray character development and include dramatic action: Something genuine is at stake in the story. (Standards of good fiction apply)
8. Quality autobiographical self-studies attend carefully to persons in context or setting.
9. Quality autobiographical self-studies offer fresh perspectives on established truths.

Guidelines for correspondence, E-mail, and recorded correspondence (p. 19-20):

  10. Self-studies that rely on correspondence should provide the reader with an inside look at participants’ thinking and feeling.

11. To be scholarship, edited conversation or correspondence must not only have coherence and structure, but that coherence and structure should provide argumentation and convincing evidence.

12. Self-studies that rely on correspondence bring with them the necessity to select, frame, arrange, and footnote the correspondence in ways that demonstrate wholeness.

13. Interpretations made of self-study data should not only reveal but also interrogate the relationships, ccontradictions, and limits of the views presented.

14. Effective correspondence self-studies contain complication or tension.

“A self-study is a good read, attends to the ‘nodal moments’ of teaching and being a teacher educator and thereby enables reader insight or understanding into self, reveals a lively conscience and balanced sense of self-importance, tells a recognizable teacher or teacher educator story, portrays character development in the face of serious issues within a complex setting, gives place to the dynamic struggle of living life whole, and offers new perspective” (p. 19).

                                                       This really says it all!

I will definately need to return to these important points if in the end I decide to do a thesis which involves self-study. 

Bullough, R. V., & Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study research. Educational Researcher,30(3), 13-21. Retrieved from http://edr.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/cgi/reprint/30/3/13