Tracing Contexts' Development Across Time

• In Event: Taking the Long View: Learning From Longitudinal Studies of Writing

Abstract

Drawing from two longitudinal studies of writing development, we take up the provocation to consider not just the development of an individual writer across time, but the development of the contexts with, in, across, and from which writers write (Bazerman et al., 2017; Andrews & Smith, 2011). Just as writers are developing bodily and cognitively—orchestrating units of cognitive action (Berninger & Richards, 2002), as well motor activities of the body (eyes, hands, body position; cf. Haas & McGrath, 2017)—development is also occurring with and through the development of surrounding, shifting configurations of people, practice, place, etc. (Dyson, 2007).

In this work, we highlight the interconnected nature of writer, writing, and context through the concept of practices (Erickson, 2004; Scollon, 2001). Practice, as we see it, creates context: it is a mechanism through which people act as “environments” for one another (McDermott, 1976, qtd in Erickson & Schultz, 1997). Through the deployment of practices, we construct understandings of ourselves, actions of self and others, and environmental possibilities. The practices that we deploy are sedimented within complex histories that enable the practices to serve as social indicators for ourselves and others (Prior & Hengst, 2011).

The first longitudinal case focuses on the development of an out-of-school spoken word-focused organization. Based on a connective (Hine, 2015), ethnographic study of young men’s transcontextual writing development, the analysis traces genesis and disruption (Latour, 1999, 2005; Vygotsky, 1999; Wertsch, 1991) across interviews with the study’s focal young men, their peers, and mentors, fieldnotes from two years of observations, and youths’ compositions. The second longitudinal study traces the literacy practices of two undergraduate STEM majors through the first two years of their postsecondary careers. Students met for text-based, retrospective interviews each semester in addition to providing sketches of their writing environments (Prior & Shipka, 2003), literacy history narratives (Brandt, 2001), and samples of their writing. These interviews were analyzed via a grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and sociohistoric (Roozen & Erickson, 2017) methodology.

Across the two studies, we see that when writers develop, they also—if only subtly—change those contexts through their entry into and interactions across them. When we watch a writer move into and across a new environment, we are not simply witnessing the development of a writer, but the “myriads of tactical moves through which the local social actor changes the game subtly through each reanimation of it,” (Erickson, 2004, p. 139): the activity of actors across a social landscape changes that landscape, even as the landscape changes the writer.

It is this reciprocal impact that we suggest requires further methodological, if not ontological, attention in longitudinal studies. How can we attend to this reciprocality in productive ways as we study the ongoing transformation of writers and writing across lifespans? If we hope to make claims regarding the developments of individuals, it is not enough to merely acknowledge this ontological conundrum. We must find ways to account for and come to understand the shifting landscape they are not just treading across, but co-producing. It is this puzzle that our presentation will address.

Authors

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University

• Ryan J. Dippre, University of Maine