Writing studies scholars have long examined how race- and class-based hierarchies shape teachers’ and students’ experiences of writing in US universities. But universities are also workplaces that profit from a racialized writing economy in which laborers of color () underpin writing production. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative case study that examines the writing practices of university custodial workers, this article addresses the following research questions: What kinds of writing do university custodial workers use and practice? What are the conditions for their writing? And what do these practices and conditions tell us about writing in race- and class-stratified workplaces, including educational institutions? Using critical race (; ; ; ; ; ; ) approaches to literacy sponsorship (), and observations and interviews with university custodians, this article discusses two main findings: (1) labor conditions restrict participants’ writing as a part of race and class hierarchies; and (2) the participants employ writing practices that run under the radar of institutional restrictions to serve their own purposes. This study’s findings have implications for workplace writing scholarship and higher education policy, because they expand definitions of and purposes for workplace writing in institutions of education.

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Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

Although current research and professional development on teaching of argumentative writing focus on “best practices,” we offer the construct of argumentative epistemologies to consider how English language arts teachers approach teaching and how they understand their students’ capacity for and interest in argumentation. Drawing on historical emphases in writing theory, we describe and illustrate three argumentative epistemologies: structural, ideational, and social practice. In an observational study of 31 high school English language arts classrooms, teachers’ enacted writing instruction foregrounded either formal elements of students’ arguments, the ideas and content of students’ arguments, or consideration of the complexity and variability of social contexts within which students wrote arguments. Case study analysis of three teachers illustrates the three argumentative epistemologies, how these epistemologies were socially constructed during instructional conversations, and how they were made visible through language use in and about classroom literacy events. These argumentative epistemologies have significance for teacher education, school writing research, and professional development, furthering our understanding of how and why teachers choose to adopt particular approaches to argumentative writing.

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers’ writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to analyze how one teacher learned to teach writing within and through the emergent, nested, interacting systems of teacher education and the school where she took her first teaching job. Data sources were fieldnotes of her teaching and interviews about her instructional decisions, which were coded using constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and the theoretical lens. Findings indicate the teacher’s understanding of writing instruction emerged through interactions between systems as she reproduced and recombined the ideas, values, goals, and activities she encountered within her undergraduate and graduate courses, her school district, and her sixth-grade classroom. The study concludes with discussions of the dynamics of learning to teach writing that emerged through the research and the implications of these dynamics for teacher education, educational policy, and future research.

This article discusses the ways issues of audience and authority are encountered and addressed by classroom teachers who write journal articles for publication. Drawing on an interview study of K-12 classroom teachers who have published articles in NCTE’s journals Language Arts, Voices from the Middle, and English Journal, we show that teachers developed and deployed strikingly different conceptions of audience at different points in their composing process. Before and after writing, they acknowledged the wide and mixed readership of those journals, including university-based scholars; however, while drafting their articles they thought about a much more limited group of “teachers like them.” In doing so, these teacher-authors found a concrete way to navigate the contested place of classroom teachers in wider education discourses. We highlight two major implications of this work. First, it complicates the standard advice to writers to “know your audience,” showing instead how considerations of audience are closely linked to questions of one’s status relative to members of that audience. Second, our work might complicate understandings of legitimate peripheral participation and how members of communities of practice are positioned relative to one another vis-à-vis authority: teacher-authors manipulated notions of authority, temporarily redefining some readers as more central and others as more peripheral, in ways that shifted according to the authority stances those definitions allowed them to take in composing.

In this study we take up challenges regarding researcher positionality, representation, and the construction of difference as a launching point to reflexively analyze our own practices within aresearch project exploring multilingualism, multiliteracies, and teacher development. Our data were drawn from a teacher study group we facilitated during the first phase of a two-year study.We draw on poststructuralist understandings of discourse, power, and performativity and use elements of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to conduct a close thematic reading of two moments of discomfort in one study group meeting, and we critique our own complicity in the discursive production of difference. Further, we engage tools of process drama to theorize how we might have structured and responded to interactions differently during one of these same moments in order to address these challenges more successfully. We conclude by arguing for approaches and interpretive tools for researchers that could help to reimagine as well as respond both ethically and analytically to issues of representation in language and literacy research.

This study explored how voice developed in the English writing of 57 Chinese teachers of English who participated in a three-week writing workshop during a summer institute in a large, urban school district in southeastern China. Teachers from grades 3 through 12 wrote daily in English in a workshop environment. Primary data sources were pre- and post-workshop writing samples. Supporting data included various teacher writings completed in the course of the workshop, daily written reflections, a final essay exam, anonymous course evaluations, and biographical and professional surveys. The pre- and post-workshop writing samples were assessed using the 6 + 1 Trait® analytical model of scoring writing (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2006). Scoring showed that the teachers’ writing improved significantly in the course of the institute, but the greatest gain was made in the trait of “voice””the distinctive, individual way in which a writer speaks to a reader. This finding will be considered in light of the current direction of educational reform in China and of current debates over the value of teaching voice in diverse writing contexts. The study had implications for the teaching of writing to English language learners and for the professional development of teachers of writing, including those who teach English as a Foreign Language.

Teachers who have participated in Summer Institutes of the National Writing Project (NWP) have often claimed “it changed my life.” What do teachers mean when they say this? What does it mean to “transform” in a professional development setting, and what might researchers and professional development providers gain from an understanding of teacher transformation as a kind of teacher learning?

A successful collaboration resulted in a researcher and a teacher linking professional development with change in small-group reading instruction and student achievement.

We live in a time of the celebration of high technology and symbolic analysis, even predictions of the end of common work, yet physical work, work of body and hand, surrounds us, makes everyday life possible. For about six years now, I have been involved in a research project exploring the thought it takes to do physical work, the cognitive processes involved in various blue collar and service occupations like waitressing, hairstyling, plumbing, welding, industrial assembly, and the like. The study has led me to consider the way we categorize occupations, define intelligence, and think about learning and schooling. Of particular interest to readers of RTE will be my findings in the realm of literacy and numeracy. A number of people have already done important research on job-related literacy. What follows is in line with their research, though I would like to use it to help us reconsider some of the traditional ways we define and discuss written language, numbers, and graphics.

Presents annotations of 37 selected recent research in the teaching of English and related fields. Addresses bilingual/foreign language education, discourse processes, literacy, professional development, reading, teaching and learning of literature, teaching and learning of writing, and technology and literacy. Notes that most of the studies appeared during the six-month period from July through December 2001.

Presents a semi-annual annotated selected bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English. Offers 45 annotated bibliographies addressing: bilingual/foreign language/second language education; classroom discourse; curriculum; exceptional learners; literacy; professional development; reading; and writing. Notes most entries were published between January and June 2000.

Presents a selected, annotated bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English, with most studies appearing in the period between January and June, 1999. Includes sections on assessment; family and workplace literacy; literature; media, society, and literacy; moral education; professional development; reading; research methodology; technology and literacy; and writing.

Presents a 48-item selected annotated bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English (most published in scholarly journals between July and December, 1997). Organizes the annotations into sections on assessment; bilingual education and foreign language education; discourse processes; family/workplace literacy; professional development; reading; research methodology; teaching and learning of literature; technology and literacy; and writing.

Presents a selected bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English. Subdivides the 51 items into sections on assessment, bilingual and foreign language education, discourse processes, family/workplace literacy, professional development, reading, research methodology, teaching and learning of literature, technology and literacy, and writing.

Presents a selective list of recent research studies in the teaching of English. States that most appeared during the six-month period preceding the compilation of the bibliography (July through December 1996). Contains 57 items divided into sections on bilingual education, cultural studies, literacy studies, literature, professional development, research methodology, and writing.