“I Don’t Have a Single Skill I Could Apply”: The Writing Identities of Social Studies Teachers

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Suppoorting Teachers' Instructional Practices and Writer Identity (Table 18)

Abstract

Writing is an integral part of social studies; however, teaching writing as both disciplinary (Monte-Sano, 2010), and an authentic, culturally sustaining practice (de los Rios, 2020) is complex. In this multiple case study we use the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (Kaplan & Garner, 2017), which is a theory and tool that captures and describes identity construction and situated action, to examine the role identities of pre-service social studies teachers (PSTs) related to writing. Findings suggest that PSTs' identities as writers may mediate their future action possibilities as writing teachers. This has implications for the importance of identity exploration in teacher education, if new social studies teachers are to engage their students in disciplinary, authentic, and culturally sustaining writing.

Authors

• Andrew del Calvo, Rutgers University - New Brunswick

• Amy Guillotte, University of Pennsylvania