ABSTRACT
In the United States, teacher writing has been advocated by the National Writing Project (a network of sites across the country anchored at universities and committed to improving the teaching and learning of writing in K-12 schools; see National Writing Project and Nagin, 2006), the Writing Across the Curriculum movement (programs centred at universities to incorporate and teach writing in disciplines beyond composition; see Shea, Balkun, Nolan, Saccoman, and Wright, 2006), and both process writing (a pedagogical focus on writing processes over writing products; see Murray, 1968) and teacher research (a movement to empower practitioners to engage in research and enter into conversations about policy, research, and practice; see Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1992) and educators/researchers for over forty years. Advocates focus on teacher writing as: a way to concentrate on writing activities rather than evaluation, an instructional strategy, reflection, participation in the profession, and personal experience (see Dawson, 2011). Inherent in many of these approaches is the idea that teachers who identify as writers teach writing better. However, many studies have documented that both seeing oneself as a writer and capitalizing on writerly identities in instruction are complicated (Brooks, 2007; Cremin and Baker, 2010, 2014; McKinney and Giorgis, 2009; Robbins, 1996). The study reported upon in this chapter explores how an elementary English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in the United States, Hannah (all teacher, student, and school names are pseudonyms) narrated and performed writing and teaching identities across contexts. I share data from a case study of her voluntary participation at a four-week National Writing Project Summer Institute and subsequent observations of her classroom instruction over the course of seven months to explore Hannah’s complex positionings of herself and her students as writers.
