Response and Responsibility: Exploring Student Writing Through Collaborative Inquiry

• In Event: Roundtable Session 44
  In Roundtable Session: Studying Literacy Practices With Teachers: How Writing Gets Taught

Abstract

High stakes testing and accountability increasingly influence writing instruction and assessment. This paper investigates collaborative inquiry as a framework for exploring alternative approaches to responding to student writing: a means of encouraging new literacy teachers to develop more relational, responsible and critical approaches to supporting adolescent authors. I examine a community of student literacy teachers’ uses of oral inquiry processes (Carini, 2001) to conduct close readings of students’ work in an English methods class. This formed a basis for these teachers to regard urban adolescents as authors, creators, and rhetors with intentionality and purpose—as well as to raise questions about writing pedagogy and curricula, and cultivate more equitable approaches to teaching and responding to student writing.

Author

• Rob Simon, University of Toronto