CP 90-1 Transforming future teachers' ideas about writing instruction.
Abstract
The curricular intervention analyzed in this paper attempted to challenge and enrich future teachers' thinking about children, text, and writing instruction. Juniors in a Language Arts methods course were initially surveyed about their views of teaching writing. Six of the juniors were then studied in depth by means of interviews and analyses of their written work. Findings suggest that the curricular intervention broke with beginning teachers' ordinary ways of thinking about children, text, and teaching. In place of their taken-for-granted assumptions about these topics, the curriculum substituted formal knowledge from several fields: developmental psychology provided new ways of thinking about children's emergent writing; rhetoric provided alternate ways to categorize the forms and functions of children's texts; and social science offered new ways of understanding the social organization of school writing tasks and the negotiated nature of knowledge.
New formal knowledge and applications of that knowledge to the study of children and their writing created some resistance and discomfort among the future teachers. It is painful and threatening to have one's views of teachers, childhood, and literacy shaken at precisely the moment one hopes to draw on those views for help in teaching. However, without such transformations, future teachers are apt to reproduce the writing instruction they have experienced as pupils--despite the fact that they report not having found that instruction very helpful and acknowledge a need to do better. Most resisted in this project were ideas contradicting future teachers' views of knowledge and the teacher role. In contrast, formal knowledge about children's acquisition of language in general and writing in particular was embraced by the future teachers and led to a gradual transformation in their thinking about the teaching and learning of writing in school.