Writing as the Practice of Freedom: How Feedback Supports the Development of Creative Scholarly Writers

• In Event: 77.026 - Toward Just Forms of Language and Literacy Learning Re-Mediating Pedagogies of Reading and Writing

Abstract

This paper closely analyzes how written feedback on student writing mediates the cultivation of social and intellectual relations among students and teachers, students’ subjective experiences of feedback as tied to questions of educational dignity, and the development of students as creative scholarly writers. Our study focuses on the writing that students produced in an intensive two-week course, Culture & Cognition, which was part of a summer bridge program serving first-generation and low-income students at a large university. The authors served as designers, instructors, and researchers within this setting.

Specifically, we ask: 1) What are the pedagogical qualities of feedback on student writing in this setting? 2) How did students experience this feedback? 3) If and how did student writing shift over time? What are the relationship between these shifts and the feedback offered? Primary data sources include: drafts of student writing over time (including written feedback on those drafts), retrospective interviews with students about their experiences with this feedback, curricular materials and pedagogical reflections. Our analytic approach involves developing rich cases of individual student’s trajectories as writers alongside detailed analyses of the feedback offered on their writing, and their commentary on the subjective experience of that feedback within interviews (Erickson et al., 2008).

Our analysis draws from and contributes to three areas of scholarship: critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987), socio-cultural theories of learning (Nasir et al., 2006), and research on feedback in the context of writing instruction (Ambrose, et. al., 2010; Mory 2004). While studies of feedback on student writing have done important work in identifying features that improve student “performance,” we analyze student writing and instructional feedback as a way to re-imagine and re-organize what writing is for. We are also concerned with understanding how feedback can support students from historically non-dominant communities to write in ways that center their cultural, linguistic and intellectual histories (Creel Falcón, 2017). Our findings therefore name and exemplify the specific qualities of feedback that support expansive approaches to academic writing, and argue for conceptualizing feedback on writing as its own form of writing.

This study contributes new insights into ongoing debates regarding remedial vs. more expansive approaches to writing instruction (Cole & Griffin, 1983; Gutiérrez et. al., 2009), and the ways students’ histories and everyday lives can be meaningfully leveraged to support academic development and productively desettle and expand disciplinary domains (Bang et al., 2012). We frame writing as a social act and as a practice of freedom in order to emphasize the consequential role of social and pedagogical relations in the development of student writing, the place of writing in social critique and change (a central focus of the course curriculum), and the ways transformative moments of learning connect to broader social and political struggles.

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Kalonji L. Nzinga, Northwestern University

• Allena G. Berry, Northwestern University