Supporting Writing Identity in Multi-Age Classrooms
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means for a child to see themselves as a writer — especially when that child is sitting next to kids several years older or younger. This past school year, my teaching skills made a big stretch from doing intensive Tier 3 interventions with students in K-3 to being an ELA instructor with students spanning 7th to 12th grade. It’s been quite the pivot.
Koshkonong Trails School (part of the School District of Cambridge) not only boasts students spanning from 7th grade to 12th grade, but is also place-based, project-based and environmentally-focused. Think one-room schoolhouse except we have three classrooms, a kitchen/library, indoor plumbing and is housed at the Severson Learning Center, 80-acres of land that is farmed, forested, cultivated for gardening and cares for llamas, goats, ducks and chickens. This is my first year at KT, but not my first year teaching at a school this unique. Recent past instruction at KT has been inconsistent and centered away from our students. At the beginning of this year, nearly all students did not identify as a reader or a writer. I was essentially starting from scratch and scrambled to give extra scoops in all the basics — spelling and morphology, book clubs, writing an argumentative essay.
Reflecting on last school year, I came to my coaching session for my GMWP Summer Institute Teacher Workshop with a question: How do I support a writing identity for multi-age groups? There were absolutely things I LOVED about teaching writing last year, and there were things I NEVER want to do again. It was a learning year for both myself and my students, and I realized it was an opportunity to reimagine how literacy instruction could be for my students. What if I, like Luke Reynolds, imagined it better? What growth would I see for students if I cultivated a writing identity? In particular, what if I embraced supporting that identity in a multi-age group rather than trying to backwards design a curriculum to support all of them while also burning me out?
Thus, my research began. Or returned, I should say. I started with the thesis from my action research project during my graduate program: building confidence for writers using M.A.K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory (Derewianka, 2016) and Ken Hyland’s “Genre-based Pedagogies” (2003) to approach instruction. While the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted that work, I had a starting point for how I could move forward with supporting writing identity. I also had previous experience from teaching in a similar setting for most of my early career. I had spent time working in another project-based, environmentally-focused, multi-age school where I had successfully used several strategies to cultivate a writing identity — the workshop model, writer’s notebook, conferring, peer editing. I found these strategies recommended in Steve Graham and Dolores Perin’s work in “A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students” (2007) and their work with Carnegie in “Writing Next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high school” (2007).
One theme that consistently kept appearing in my research — in particular with Thea Williamson’s Author Selves in School: Adolescent Writing Identity” and Thomas Newkirk’s Literacy’s Demonstratic Roots: A Personal Tour Through Eight Big Ideas was the need for student discourse. Students need to be engaged in talking about their writing, not just the physical act of writing. Williamson even noted the need for students to engage in platicá — what we might categorize as small talk but also the kind of talk that “is critical for building trust and providing space for reflection, learning and addressing social issues” (pg. 253, 2019). My research into answering my essential question curated a list of ideas for moving forward. I realized in this process that I already knew some of the answers to this question. I had just forgotten and needed a reminder from the newer research on this idea.
For the upcoming school year, I am going to return to some of these best practices: I plan to return to the writing workshop model and incorporate writing notebooks in our daily and weekly practice. Alongside that change, I want to confer with them about their writing and set goals. I also want them to engage in peer editing and mentoring each other — they have so much to share with one another and with me about all that they know already about writing. I also want to encourage them to play around with genre — our sandbox for practicing with all those tools of language. Supported by both educational research and my own classroom experience, I know these specific practices are transformative for student writing. Revisiting these strategies allows me to cultivate student confidence and foster the essential agency they need to take ownership of their writing.
I am also going to challenge myself by giving time for students to engage in platicá, and discourse around writing (and reading!). In a school already designed to cultivate community, it is something that I can utilize to not only strengthen our community but help my students to situate themselves as writers.
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At the beginning of my teacher workshop for the GMWP Summer Institute, I asked my colleagues to respond to this question: Think of a time you felt like a ‘real writer’ — in school or out. What made you feel that way? Their responses were so beautiful, eclectic and powerful! All I could think about was: What if we provided each of our students with some of these powerful memories by starting first with supporting their writing identity? What might our world look like or be?
References:
Derewianka, B., & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching language in context (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools: A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Alliance for Excellent Education.
Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 445–476. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.99.3.445
Hyland, K. (2003a). Genre-based pedagogies: A social response to process. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12(1), 17–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1060-3743(02)00124-8
Johnson, K., & DeHaan, K. (2021). Real writers: Perceptions of writer identity. English Journal, 110(5), 80–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/27115285
Newkirk, T. (2023). Literacy’s democratic roots: A personal tour through eight big ideas. Heinemann.
Williamson, T. (2019). Authoring selves in school: Adolescent writing identity. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 68(1), 250–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/2381336919870291
