“20 Quiet Seconds to Think”: Positioning Pre-K Students as Writers through Collective Idea Generation

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Writing Development and Assessment Practices across Literacy Contexts

Abstract

Using a sociocultural lens, this study describes how an expert pre-K teacher leveraged idea generation to position students as writers. Data sources included all documented whole group shared writing events from a diverse pre-K classroom, collected over nine months using ethnographic techniques. Results showed the saliency of idea generation during collaborative writing, where 88% of writing events included open idea discussions. Analyses further clarified the way discussions like this required students to negotiate the relevance of ideas, consider the purposes of a text, attribute credit to other authors’ ideas, and support the transcription of print. These findings illustrate how collective idea generation can position emergent pre-K writers not only as passive participants, but joint authors of a meaningful shared text.

Authors

• Erica Lee Payne, Vanderbilt University

• Deborah Rowe, Vanderbilt University