Studying Writing as an Asynchronous Transcript of Adolescents' Participation in Classroom Writing Events

• In Event: Emerging Methods for Studying Adolescent Writing Across Spaces and Over Time

Abstract

Purpose
This paper offers a methodology for a multi-faceted analysis of classroom writing. In addition to studying the written essay, we account for how students negotiate curricular opportunities and classroom interactions while composing.

Perspectives and Theoretical Framework
Typical research methods studying students’ learning of writing consist of pre/post-test measures of achievement, think-aloud protocols, and analysis of classroom discourse. Using a sociocultural lens, we position students as agentive, developing writers and afford a view of students’ writing as interconnected within a larger ecological system of texts. Writing is multi-voiced reflection and refraction of its context (Bakhtin, 1981; Prior, 2006; Volosinov, 1929). Student essays, then, are an entry point for understanding the ways student writers negotiate and make meaning. Analysis of this participation must account for the interrelationship of texts, individual action, and social context.

Data Sources and Methods
We examined two ninth-grade, urban high school students’ essays and participation within a 17-day argumentative writing unit by conducting an intertextual analysis (Prior, 1995). Similar to the analytic process of backward mapping (Dixon & Green, 2005), we began with the final essays and looked for tracings of argumentative and discourse moves that also took place in previous texts and events. To locate tracings, we highlighted sentences in the final essay that suggested connections to previous texts and events, marking each highlighted sentence with an annotation for an origin: the assignment sheet, homework/peer review worksheets, transcripts of classroom conversations, essay drafts, and transcripts from student interviews. We discussed highlights and annotations to reach agreement, dropping connections for which we did not agree and noting aspects of previous texts and events that the students did not include in the final essay.

Findings
This methodology affords a new way to consider students’ learning of writing. Analysis of the final essays revealed multiple, overlapping tracings from instructional conversations, the assignment sheet, in-progress worksheets, and literature. We consider these tracings intertextual links that students produced not only to write the essays, but to participate in the social context of the classroom; metaphorically, we see the students’ composing as asynchronous transcripts of their participation across multiple conversations and events over time and within the classroom ecology. Specifically, the two students’ asychronous transcripts revealed their different negotiations within a shared curriculum, prompting us to notice differences across students, a consideration of how students contribute to classroom learning, as well as how students learn to write over time.

Scholarly Significance
Studying final essays or the 5-step writing process does not make visible how students participate as knowers in classroom spaces. Rather, studying writing asynchronously allows us to look at both the texts students produce and the social interactions students participate in surrounding the production of those texts. Such an analysis complicates our understanding of how students compose over time, redefines the writing process to a set of interrelated, relational and intertextual processes that collide in the classroom, and raises questions about how we might better enact teaching and assessment practices that account for ways students participate in becoming writers.

Authors

• Allison S. Wynhoff Olsen, Montana State University

• Brent Goff, The Ohio State University

• Jennifer Lynn VanDerHeide, Michigan State University

• Mandie B Dunn, Michigan State University