Writer’s Notebooks Weave Invisible Threads: Boundary Objects Becoming Institutionally Visible Writing Assessments

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 5:10 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Wicked Renewal: Reframing Problems of Writing Instruction in Secondary Classrooms (Table 3)

Abstract

Overview
Writer’s notebooks have long been a practice common to English language arts instruction (Bucker, 2005). As boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), notebooks simultaneously serve the differing needs of teachers and students. In terms of classroom writing instruction, teachers need evidence of writing and skill development, a record of student writing, and anecdotal data on student achievement. Notebooks support students’ sense of ownership, the opportunity to explore their interests through writing, and freedom from “academic English” that constrains their thinking. In most places, though, notebooks remain institutionally invisible (Bazerman, 2003) as a form of assessment, especially compared to standardized test scores.

Assessing writing embodies the first characteristic of wicked problems: “there is no definitive formulation” (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p. 161) despite the institutional desire to define writing achievement as a high standardized test score. “Competence in writing involves making unique meaning relevant and effective within the particulars of situations, and this competence develops as an individual gains experience with a history of situations and forms” (Bazerman, 2003, p. 353). Notebooks offer a way to make writing skills and abilities beyond test scores institutionally visible and valuable as a tool for assessment.

Context, Data, and Analysis
This study focused on one classroom within a culturally and linguistically diverse, exurban middle school in an under-resourced community. The literacy ecosystem of this school was unique and built over years. It included; a robust YA library collection; “books read” tallies kept on hallway walls and numbering into the thousands; five, of the six, ELA teachers identifying as teacher-consultants with the National Writing Project (NWP), and the principal’s explicit support for this robust literacy ecosystem (Maloch, Hoffman, & Patterson, 2004).

Across multiple years, I visited this classroom, department meetings, and the school as both a research and NWP colleague. Data collected that focused on notebooks included: photographs, observational notes of students working, observations of teachers and administrators watching students write, meeting notes, and interviews with key participants. I engaged in constant-comparative analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2007), focused on identifying the relevant contexts for writer’s notebooks in the classroom. This iterative data analysis allowed me to track the moments when different framings of notebooks surfaced, who was doing the framing, and whether or not the frame altered the practices around the notebooks.

Findings
The routine use of notebooks in classroom instruction, and teachers’ guiding belief that students would write what they cared about, created a classroom culture where all students participated in notebook writing practices. More importantly, students adopted modeled practices like conferencing, peer response, and multimodal composing, for their own purposes. As a result, administrators saw students writing for extended periods of time and students engaged in conversations around their writing.

The typical narrow framing of test scores as the only valid assessment was reframed by the practices around this tool. Conversations between teachers and administrators around instruction moved past test preparation and toward leveraging students’ motivation and engagement to support writing skills that tests were showing they had not yet developed.

Word count: 495

Author

• Ann D. David, University of the Incarnate Word