The Role of Craft Knowledge in Composing Processes

• In Event: How Writing Works: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Processes of Composition

Abstract

Objectives
1 To investigate what ‘knowledge’ of writing professional writers possess;
1 To consider the implications of this for a model of teacher content knowledge for composition.

Theoretical Framework
The Hayes and Flower cognitive model of writing (1980) positions topic and audience and ‘stored writing plans’ as representing the knowledge for writing a writer brings to the task. Successive models of writing elaborate upon this idea of knowledge for writing: for example, content space - what to write, and rhetorical space - how to write it (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987); and linguistic and genre knowledge (Hayes 1996). However, this notion of the knowledge needed to write is poorly developed in cognitive models, and assumed as unproblematic. At the same time, research in teacher education has drawn attention to the importance of teachers’ subject knowledge, building on the seminal work of Schulman (1987) and his theorisation of subject content knowledge (knowledge of an academic domain); pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge of how to teach that academic domain); and pedagogical knowledge (knowledge of how to teach). However, successive studies in this field have focused more heavily on pedagogical content knowledge in Mathematics and Science (e.g., Rowland and Ruthven 2011, Loughran et al., 2008). This presentation will address this gap by investigating the craft knowledge that professional writers describe, and considering its relevance as subject content knowledge for the teaching composition.

Methods and Data sources
The data are drawn from a nationally-funded study investigating the effect of a residential writing program, where teachers are mentored by professional writers on student outcomes in writing. The study involved a randomised controlled trial, plus a qualitative study, including 20 interviews with professional writers before and after the intervention. These interviews explored professional writer identities, their understanding of the composing process, and their view of what knowledge or understanding they wanted to convey students when working as a writer in school. The interviews were fully transcribed and analysed using NVivo, following an inductive process of open, then axial coding, clustering the codes into conceptual themes.

Results
This presentation draws one substantive theme that was identified through coding, that of ‘craft knowledge’. The writers did not talk about knowledge but some made specific comments about writing as a craft - ‘Craft, I suppose is what I’m talking about, the craft of what we do’ – whilst others talked more indirectly about ‘this is what I do and this is how I do it’. What was much more strongly evident, when they were talking about their own writing, or their work with teachers and students, was that these writers possessed a strong craft knowledge, and they spoke with conviction about language choices, grammatical choices, narrative structuring, sentence shaping, character development, point of view and managing narrative plot.

Significance
The study reveals the depth of craft knowledge of composition possessed by professional writers, and offers a new way to think about subject content knowledge for teaching writing composition.

Author

• Debra Ann Myhill, University of Exeter