Teacher as Inquirer

My inquiry began by reading Peter Johnston's book, Choice Words, the book I picked for my book review.  There is passage, shown below, in which he discusses changing the language we use with readers, the language that creates a good/bad binary (p.20).

I decided as soon as I read that passage that I wanted to explore changing the good/bad binary by changing the way I talk about writers and writing.  The second day I began thinking about language and writing in connection with identity.  I blogged about how I associate writing with identity and wondering what kind of language I can use with students when they are revising to help them feel as if I am trying to help in their writing process rather than criticizing them, which they may do if they associate writing with their identities.  A large portion of Choice Words discuses helping students put the word "writer" into their identities.  So, the combinations of Johnston's words and my thoughts in my blog added another part of my inquiry: How do I help students build "writer" into their identities?  Going forward into SI, I jumped both from one to the other and played in between these two inquiries.  While we talked about writing metaphors and responding to papers, I started thinking about the language I had been using to replace my good/bad binary language.  Lil said, "Revising does not equal improving; it's fluidity" and I really started thinking about the word "improve" and other words I've been using and trying to figure out if they still perpetuate the binary.  The freak-out was part of my reflection of the day.  I continued to play with my language as I thought of more words I could use to describe the writing community I want in my classroom and made a Tagxedo with them.  This Tagxedo was also part of a thought process for how talking about using digital platforms for writing as a way of expanding students' understanding of genres, and, therefore, of writing.

Lil's Workshop on Inquiry helped push me to start examining the conversations and vocabulary surrounding my inquiries.  I was able to start looking at buzz words and, after looking at a few bibliographies, created a list of articles to start exploring.

Reading into the field began pushing on my thinking immediately.  I reread an article by Bruce Horner called "The Sociality of Error", which encourages readers to rethink what they immediately label as "error," partly because it's a social construct, and begin a conversation with students about their writing.  He also emphasizes the writing and writing conferences in the classroom are negotiations and that students choosing to push back against the teacher's suggestions may be part of that negotiation.  I walked into SI saying that "negotiation" was my new favorite word.  Then, because of the work I did during Lil's workshop, I found an article called "Rethinking Negotiation in Composition Studies" by Thomas West and Gary A Olson, who discuss how negotiation can be used to aid a collaborative environment or to maintain control.  I did someone thinking out loud on paper in my blog that night.  This is always where I started thinking about finding a space for negotiation in the classroom and what it would actually look like to negotiate in a classroom when a student rebels or tries to renegotiate something in the class.  Soon, (later that night, in fact,) I would learn that the space would be a third space.

The first day of SI, I was talking with Sally about my thesis, which was (and mostly still is) only a vaguely formed idea. I know I want to look at how taking a Barton, Brandt, Heath, Gee view of literacy will change the way one does X.  The X will be something in the ELA classroom or in the writing center.  Anyway, as Sally and I talked, I started thinking about third spaces and wanted to learn more about them.  I posted on the blog with this inquiry and Lacy gave me a few suggestions for articles to read.  I read articles by Gutierrez et al (Rethinking Diversity) and Moje (Working Toward Third Space in Content Area Literacies) and learned about hybridity and third spaces.  These are the spaces in which I can both join in and out of school literacies together and negotiate with students when either students or I break out of the standard societal expectations of the classroom. 

On day six, as people were responding verbally and through writing to my demo, my two inquiry questions and my thesis work finally collided together.  I worked through these thoughts in my reflection.  Then, as Carrie asked us about what constructing an identity means (day seven), I began thinking about Discourses and how teaching the writing identity as a Discourse can open the conversation to more than an abstract concept of "writing".  Again, I blogged this as a reflection of the day.

I have found a few words I really want to integrate into the enviroment: reclaiming the word "assessment", using "studio" instead of classroom, playing around with "composing" or "creating" instead of just "writing", using "yes and" and using "could" instead of "should".  In addition, I've been zooming out a little since day 1, recognizing that I also need to focus on the broader conversation I set up in my classroom around/about writing and writers.  I would like the conversation to allow me to answer "yes" to the first half of the questions below.