Developing Teacher-Writers in Pre-Service Teachers Across the Disciplines

Today’s blog post serves as an introduction to a new book written for students pursuing a career in education. As a teacher, teacher educator, and writer in education, I found A Student’s Guide to Academic and Professional Writing in Education to be a practical resource for students and teacher-educators. When it comes to writing, some teacher-educators “assign” rather than show or model just how to approach the project, minimizing the importance of context, purpose, audience, voice, and genre. The authors in this new release show just how to approach writing the many genres teachers are expected to compose, and the annotated examples support student-writers and their professors in the process.

Ethical ELA welcomes Katie O. Arosteguy, Alison Bright, and Brenda J. Rinard, senior lecturers in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis, where they teach professional writing, including a course on writing in education. They are all National Writing Project Teacher-Consultants.

It is not uncommon for upper-division, undergraduate students to enter our Writing in Education courses with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, the undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis (UCD) are high achieving, driven students who are typically excelling academically at our large, research university. Many of our students are juniors or seniors, who have not taken a writing class since their first year at UCD. Some students even tested out the first-year writing requirement, and have not taken a writing-intensive class since high school. Thus, their skepticism for our classes derives from the fact that many of them believe that they do not need to take an upper-division writing course because they have excelled in their university studies up to this point without one. The fact that our class completes a graduation requirement can make them even more skeptical: they don’t want to take our class, so why should they have to take our class? After all, our students will report their (misinformed) beliefs early on in our courses that teachers only write lesson plans, and our students are confident that they will learn how to write plans in their credential programs or in their teaching practicums.

More troubling still are those students who come to our classes feeling defeated or apprehensive about writing because somewhere along their educational trajectory, they have internalized the idea that they are bad writers. This, typically false, self-assessment of their writing abilities is problematic on several levels. Our students have internalized a negative reaction or assessment of their work by one of their previous teachers, and as a result they have often devalued the role of writing in the field of education. In our Writing in Education classes, and in our new book A Student’s Guide to Academic and Professional Writing in Education, we work to reduce both the skepticism and the apprehension we see in our students. We reject the idea that our students don’t need our classes or that they are “bad” writers. Instead, we encourage our students to think of themselves as both as pre-service teachers and as writers, and that the two are inextricably linked. 

In order to show our students this link, we take a rhetorical approach to teaching writing in education. That is, we require our students to produce authentic genres that they may write either in their education or credential courses as well as in their careers as educators. As they produce these assignments, our students must consider the audience, purpose, context, and voice for each writing task. And while our assignments ask our students to complete a standardized task, the rhetorical situations for which our students write are extremely varied. Like many universities in California, our students are only offered the opportunity to minor in education, instead of majoring in the discipline. Thus, our students come to our courses from a variety of different majors with a variety of different career goals. As teacher educators, we believe that it is our responsibility to instill in all of our students, regardless of the type of educator they will become, that writing will be a critical aspect of their careers. Indeed, that writing is part of the intellectual responsibilities of educators.

In some respects, the skepticism and apprehension our students display on the first few days of our courses conflicts with the high degree of self-awareness they display in other areas of their lives. Increasingly, our courses are being made up of students from Chicano Studies and psychology majors, who are empowered young folks: in touch with themselves, their own needs, and how they will help others in their future careers. After taking our course, our students often come to see writing as an empowering tool for themselves, and their future students. Conceptualizing the varied rhetorical situations in which educators write allows our students to value the important role audience plays in writing in education and to consider the various stakeholders that may be present in their future placement. Ultimately, we model for our students that students themselves are the most critical audience for whom educators write. Valuing our students as an esteemed audience allows us, as educators, to demonstrate the manner in which we respect our students as learners. Consequently, the purpose of every rhetorical situation in which teachers write is to ultimately facilitate student learning. 

As writing teachers, we are unable to state with certainty that all of our students drastically improve their writing skills and identify as writers by the end of our 10-week course. However, we believe that our rhetorical approach to teaching writing education sets our students on a journey of writing development that will continue far into their professional careers. After taking our courses, our students have come to see writing as a process, and a non-linear one at that. Our students realize that, regardless of whether they think they are “good” writers or “bad” writers, writing will play an important role in their future careers as educators. More than just a job requirement, we demonstrate that writing is a method to represent their voices as pre-service teachers in the educational discourse–and that their voices matter. More importantly, the majority of our students are able to discern that writing is a resource that they can use to facilitate change in education. Our aim as teacher educators is to begin developing our students early on in their professional development. It is our hope that by doing so, our students become as self-aware of their writing selves as they are in other areas of their lives.

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