TA's and the Teaching of Writing Across the Curriculum: Introduction

Writing requires a high level of nuanced decision-making related to language, purpose, audience, and medium. Writing teachers thus need a deep understanding of language, process, and pedagogy, and of the interface between them. This article draws on reflexivity theory to interrogate the pedagogical priorities and perspectives of 19 writing teachers in primary classrooms across Australia. Data are composed of teacher interview transcripts and nuanced time analyses of classroom observation videos. Findings show that teachers experience both enabling and constraining conditions that emerge in different ways in different contexts. Enablements include high motivations to teach writing and a reflective and collaborative approach to practice. However, constraints were evident in areas of time management, dominance of teacher talk, teachers’ scope and confidence in their knowledge and practice, and a perceived lack of professional support for writing pedagogy. The article concludes with recommendations for a reflexive approach to managing these emergences in the teaching of writing.

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Artefacts, practices and pedagogies: teaching writing in English in the NAPLAN era

The Australian Educational Researcher ◽

10.1007/s13384-020-00416-6 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Susanne Gannon ◽

Jennifer Dove

Keyword(s):

Secondary Schools ◽

English Teachers ◽

Teaching Writing ◽

Pedagogical Practices ◽

Deep Dive ◽

Geographically Dispersed ◽

English Classes ◽

Novel Method ◽

Teaching Of Writing

AbstractIn secondary schools, English teachers are often made responsible for writing results in national testing. Yet there have been few studies that focussed on this key group, or on how pedagogical practices have been impacted in the teaching of writing in their classrooms. This study investigated practices of English teachers in four secondary schools across different states, systems and regions. It developed a novel method of case study at a distance that required no classroom presence or school visits for the researchers and allowed a multi-sited and geographically dispersed design. Teachers were invited to select classroom artefacts pertaining to the teaching of writing in their English classes, compile individualised e-portfolios and reflect on these items in writing and in digitally conducted interviews, as well as elaborating on their broader philosophies and feelings about the teaching of writing. Despite and sometimes because of NAPLAN, these teachers held strong views on explicit teaching of elements of writing, but approached these in different ways. The artefacts that they created animated their teaching practices, connected them to their students and their subject, suggested both the pressure of externally driven homogenising approaches to writing and the creative individualised responses of skilled teachers within their unique contexts. In addition to providing granular detail about pedagogical practices in the teaching of writing in the NAPLAN era, the contribution of this paper lies in its methodological adaptation of case study at a distance through teacher-curated artefact portfolios that enabled a deep dive into individual teachers’ practices.

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