Unsettled Liminality: How Do Teachers in an “Underperforming” High School Navigate Writing Praxis and Theory?  

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Learning Toward Remedy, Repair, and Equity in Literacy Instruction (Table 2)

Abstract

This proposal investigates the views of English teachers at the end of their first-third year of teaching in a historically “underperforming” high school. Through an inductive coding process leading to Discourse analysis, this study queries the ways teachers engaged in praxis to build a theory of writing while facing pressures to increase student scores on the state mandated writing exam. Critical literacy, critical sociocultural literacy, and writing as liminality theories are used as a framework to analyze teacher Discourse. Findings reveal that teachers had to navigate between multiple tensions in three dimensions of their work as they developed a theory of writing: identity, practice, and the professional/instructional environment. The study concludes with implications for professional development and teacher preparation programs. 

Authors

• Mellinee K. Lesley, Texas Tech University

• Staci Lynne Tharp, Texas Tech University