"Inquiry into Our Past Writing Practices: Multi-Modal Presentations as Data"

Linda Miller-Cleary, University of Minnesota Duluth
(lmillerc@d.umn.edu)

We have a history with writing that will affect the way we teach. As prospective writing teachers, we come to our classes with years of developed assumptions about writing and the teaching of writing and have had years of what we might consider good and less-than-good models of teachers before us. If the meaning we make of what we do affects the way we do it, then, as prospective teachers and teachers who are already in the field, we ought to reflect deeply on their histories with writing so we can understand how those histories might affect their our writing and our teaching of writing. In this way we can make informed decisions about how we want to teach writing without the manacles of the past or without unreasoned rebellion against that past. We can, as the current lingo goes, deconstruct and reconstruct our beliefs about writing instruction. We will do in-depth interviewing to examine our writing experience.

Part One- Interviewing Inquiry with your interviewing partner

In these interviews, ask open-ended questions such as those below and use follow-up questions when you (1) want to know more, (2) have questions, or (3) sense that there is more to be said. I encourage those being interviewed to tell stories whenever possible in response to questions because stories, by their nature, already contain a sense of meaning.

The first interview asks you to reconstruct your histories with writing. The second asks you to explore your current experience with writing. These two interviews ask for the concrete. The third asks you to reflect again on your reconstructed past and present writing experience and to make meaning of it in its relation to your future teaching of writing.

Interview I: What has writing been like for you from the time you first remember until the present? What do you remember of writing before you began school? in elementary school? junior high school/middle school? high school? college? Who helped you with writing and what was that like? What kind of writing did you see your parents/ siblings/ other family members doing? Tell me about a time(s) when writing was really good /bad for you? Can you recreate that experience for me? You haven't said much about that _____ (insert some aspect of your experience).

Interview II: What is writing like for you right now? Can you tell me stories about the kinds of writing that you do in and outside of school? How does writing fit into a typical day? How do you go about a writing project from the beginning until you feel it is finished? What is the process like for you? When is it exciting or hard? What do you worry about? How do other people help or hinder the process? If I had a picture of you at home writing, what would it look like? Where do you write, when, how, with what? If you are teaching writing, what is that like for you? What do you like/dislike about it?

Interview III: Now that you have described what writing was like for you in the past and present, what meaning do you make of your experience with writing? What sense do you make of it? (Asking this question in several different ways helps.) What things are important to you in your life? How does writing or the teaching of writing connect with things that are important? How has the past experience made current experience good/ bad/ exciting/ distressing/ frustrating? How do you understand that? What is there that seems important to you that we haven't covered? Are you realizing anything through these interviews that might shape your way of being (or not being) with future students? Post Interview III dialogue. When you are both done with Interview III, discuss the intersections and contrasts in your experience. Such dialogue can yield critical action in your future classrooms or Adopt-a-Class project.

Part II- Making Sense of Personal Experience through Multi-Modal Presentations

Assignment: Having reviewed the notes taken by your partner in your interviews, consider the story of your experience related to teaching writing or learning to write that you deem as important in your development as a writer or teacher of writing. Hopefully, you will make sense of the experience you had in the context of a classroom or some kind of formal educational setting, but feel free to create this project based on any experience related to writing that is significant to you for some reason. Your presentation should tell the story of that experience. For example, your project might tell the story of your experiences with a particular writing (or English) teacher (or a teacher of another discipline) who was especially influential in your development as a writer (positively or negatively). Or you might focus on a specific incident (such as the writing of a story or poem you had published) that is in some way important to you as a writer. Or you might describe an experience as a teacher of writing that enables your readers (the rest of us in the course) to understand the experience itself and gain some sense of why it was important to you.

Feel free to use whatever style or approach you think would most effectively convey your story to our readers. Try to capture your experience through a multi-genre approach: collage, poetry, song, dramatic scene, photographic essay, a profile of yourself as a writer, a quilt square, a performance, a timeline, a video documentary, a mosaic, a water color, a puzzle, etc. Your presentation to the class should underscore the purpose of this assignment, which is to make sense of your experiences in light of the fact that you are or will be a teacher of writing.

See previous examples of multi-modal presentations.

Part III- Inquiry into the Experience of Writing and Teaching Writing As Experienced by the Class

Before the multi-modal presentations of writing experience, I will ask you to engage not only as colleagues, but also as researchers, listening for common themes that arise from your collective writing experiences. We present, but we don't discuss each presentation individually; the cumulative stories will give us data to analyze. I will ask you to take notes about what you are hearing during the profile reading. Previous classes have gleaned some of the following from the exercise:

Results of 2005 Analysis (To be viewed after interview is complete)