Conceptualizing Students' Essays as Asynchronous Transcripts

• In Event: 60.084 - Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: 60.084-17 - Examining Adolescent Peer and Teacher Writing Feedback Across Contexts

Abstract

In order to explore how social interactions influence individual writers and their writing, we conducted an intertextual analysis (Prior, 1995) of one 9th grade student’s argumentative essay. Our analysis foregrounded the student’s final argumentative essay and looked for traces of both content and argumentative and discourse moves present in the final essay that also took place in previous classroom texts and events. Analysis of the final essay revealed multiple, overlapping tracings from instructional conversations, the teacher’s assignment sheet, in-progress worksheets, and literary texts and images. We conceptualize students’ essays not as static text; rather, we situate student writers as creators of their own aysnchronous transcripts revealing their participation across multiple conversations within the ecology of the classroom.

Authors

• Allison S. Wynhoff Olsen, Montana State University

• Jennifer Lynn VanDerHeide, Michigan State University

• Brent Goff, The Ohio State University

• Mandie B Dunn, Michigan State University