Writing in post-compulsory teacher education : Identities, practices and the profession

Stubley, Rachel and Papen, Uta (2023) Writing in post-compulsory teacher education : Identities, practices and the profession. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines identities and practices around writing in post-compulsory teacher education, based on research in my university workplace. Using ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, I held interviews and writing tutorials with students and focus groups with tutors. I discovered students’ affective experiences of writing, and the constraints and possibilities they encountered in networking linguistic resources from their indexical biographies across domains e.g. home and university, university and teaching placement. For tutors in the study, the identity of ‘teacher’ was a powerful one that seemed to outweigh that of ‘academic’. They regularly referenced professional (rather than academic) identities to support discussions, and identified with students as ‘fellow teachers’. This flattened hierarchy was visible in my own tutorial work with students, who themselves needed their prior professional (teaching and other) experiences and expertise to be recognised, and with whom I engaged in dialogic discourse that I have called ‘collegiate’. My research revealed writing in post-compulsory teacher education as a site of complex ideas about teacher identity in our dual and hybrid discipline, and participants’ views and practices (including my own) were often fluid. Ideas about the purpose of post-compulsory teacher education included normative orientations, socialising students into a profession of fixed hierarchies and prescriptive writing conventions, to more expansive ideas about the transformative affordances of academic writing for developing teachers, and beyond that to a tentative suggestion that disciplinary writing practices might themselves be transformed in response to the diverse linguistic identities student teachers bring. The original three-level model of Academic Literacies (Lea & Street 1998) needs to be refined to capture the complexity of practice-based disciplines. Tutors (and students) can find ourselves facing three ways (rather than the two identified in Lillis and Scott 2007) as we navigate the demands of professional and university institutions alongside our transformative aspirations for writing in the discipline.