How Teachers' Argumentative Epistemologies Shape Instructional Conversations About "Good" Writing

• In Event: 26.025 - Dialogic Perspectives on Classroom Assessment of Writing

Abstract

Objective
This paper reports on analysis of the instructional practice of several teachers selected from a two year federally funded study of 33 ELA teachers’ approaches to teaching argumentative writing. Teachers selected for this analysis were those who enacted different epistemologies of writing in their teaching practice, and also shifted among epistemological orientations in response to student concerns. .

Theoretical framework
A focus on the social and cultural contexts of composing written arguments considers written language as a social and cultural construction (Bakhtin, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978). From this perspective, writing is understood as language-in-context, , reflecting writers’ mediations in the social world, including the ELA classroom. From this perspective, the teacher is, like all readers, a particular and situated reader with her own epistemologies grounded in classroom experience. The social contexts of classrooms are understood to shape constructions of “good” writing that are nuanced and contextualized (Beck, 2006; Author et al., 2005).

Data Sources and Methods

We observed three ELA teachers, recommended for their reputations as excellent writing teachers, during instructional units leading to their students’ completing teacher-sponsored argumentative essays. After observing and video-recording teacher-led discussions, we interviewed the teachers and four case study students from each classroom. All data were digitally recorded for later analysis, supplemented by extensive field notes that recorded classroom activities along with observer commentary.

We employed a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis (Author et al., 2005) analyzing each message unit (Green & Wallat, 1981) in the instructional conversations (focused on student writing samples) with regard to how it builds upon previous utterances, how it implies social relations among people including the readers and the student writer, indexes particular forms of logic, shifts between the topics and the structure of an argument, and links to various social contexts at multiple levels.

Findings
This study makes manifest contrasting ways of writing, thinking, and arguing that teachers with differing argumentative epistemologies offered and that, at times, their students appropriated during whole class discussions of what counts as “good” argumentative writing. These epistemologies were: structural (focusing on essay form), ideational (concerned with the development and authorizing of ideas) or social action (concerned with rhetorical contexts) (Authors, 2013). The interactional analysis of focused and sustained instructional conversations provides material evidence for the epistemologies and for how they are enacted within social context of the classrooms. Also evident during the instructional conversations and interviews were the students’ appropriation of and resistance to the relevant epistemologies. More successful students were more able and willing to articulate uncertainty with the epistemologies than less successful students. Finally, the teachers did not adhere rigidly to a particular epistemology as they shifted their foci to students’ concerns.

Significance
The notion of teacher epistemology as shaping criteria for effective writing and goals for teaching writing has important implications for classroom assessment, particularly insofar as our findings suggest that epistemologies are not fixed constructs within the mind of an individual teacher but, rather, are responsive to influence from dialogic interactions with students.

Authors

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University

• Brent Goff, The Ohio State University

• SangHee Ryu, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Larkin Weyand, The Ohio State University