Teachers’ work toward humanizing secondary writing pedagogy and supportive response groups for writing
Creators: name: LeeKeenan, Kira
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2019
Subjects: Writing instruction
Writing groups
Humanizing pedagogy

description: The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teachers support culturally and linguistically diverse students’ productive participation in classroom-based writing groups. Building on existing research on peer-based writing groups, this study defines writing groups as spaces for students to develop and share practices as writers, as well as share and respond to composed texts (Dipardo &amp; Freedman, 1998; Loretto, DeMartino &amp; Godley, 2016). I draw on sociocultural theories of language and literacy (Bakhtin, 1981; Cazden, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978), theories of learning spaces (Barton, 2007; Syverson, 1999; Goffman, 1973; Gutiérrez, 1995, 2008) and theories of humanizing pedagogies (Huerta, 2011; Freire, 1970; Salazar, 2013) to analyze the knowledge, practices and discourses central to the teachers’ pedagogy, and their students’ identities and development as writers in writing groups. My strategy of inquiry takes a qualitative ecological approach, which foregrounds the relationship between discourses and the world (Dobrin &amp; Weisser, 2002). Drawing on ethnographic methods for data collection, my qualitative and discourse analysis elucidates four principles of humanizing writing pedagogy: 1) teaching with care; 2) teaching with respect for students’ time; 3) teaching toward independence and agency; 4) teaching through response. Collectively these principles work to support students’ learning and development as writers by respecting their needs as human beings. In my analysis of students’ participation in writing groups, I found writing groups to be learning ecologies full of contradictions. In the best of circumstances writing groups were spaces for students to develop identities as writers, which included being responsible and accountable to the other writers in their community. Students did this by resisting traditional classroom discourses that support hierarchical power, and developing their own counterscripts (Gutierrez et al., 1995) that were supported by their teacher’s humanizing writing pedagogy. However, despite and in light of the teachers’ humanizing writing pedagogy that emphasized students’ individual humanity, independence and agency, for some students, it wasn’t until they moved out of the teacher sanctioned writing group (either temporally or physically) that interactions with their peers around writing became meaningful. In sum, this study builds on current empirical scholarship by affirming previous research on humanizing pedagogies, the mediating role of talk throughout the writing process, and the efficacy of studying the role of contexts and power when working with culturally and linguistically diverse youth. The findings from this dissertation argue that students need other people to support their writing process, which includes teachers and peers responding to their ideas at multiple points during the writing process. These findings also suggest that studying writing from perspectives that foreground the varying contextual variables that shape students’ experiences in school is critical to understanding how students, especially those historically marginalized by school, learn and develop as writers.