Jen Scott Curwood

Writing in the Wild: Writers’ Motivation in Fan-Based Affinity Spaces

In order to understand the culture of the physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we build on Gees concept of affinity spaces. Drawing on our ethnographic research of adolescent literacies related to The Hunger Games novels, the Neopets online game, and The Sims videogames, this article explores the nature of interest-driven writing in these spaces. We argue that fan-based affinity spaces motivate young adults to write because they offer multiple modes of representation, diverse pathways to participation, and an authentic audience. As scholars and educators, we posit that these out-of-school spaces can offer youth new purposes, modes, and tools for their written work.

iPoetry: Creating Space for New Literacies in the English Curriculum.

This article explores the use of digital poetry in a secondary English classroom and its implications for adolescents’ multimodal composition and identity development. The authors—an English teacher and a library media specialist—collaborated over the course of three years to design, implement, and reiterate a digital poetry curriculum. Through their work, they sought to infuse new vitality into literacy practices in order to enhance students’ engagement, increase their awareness of audience, and encourage their progressive use of media and technology. After students read, critiqued, and wrote poetry using traditional print text, they then employed digital tools to reinterpret those poems using multimodal elements. The authors argue that if teachers are to successfully implement new literacy practices in their classrooms, they must first establish a community of practice with other like-minded educators in order to engage in ongoing, critical dialogue around issues of literacy, learning, and technology.

English Teachers' Cultural Models about Technology: A Microethnographic Perspective on Professional Development.

Prompted by calls for research on technology-focused professional development, this ethnographic case study investigates how teachers’ participation in learning communities may influence technology integration within the secondary English curriculum. In this article, I draw on educational psychology, cognitive anthropology, and sociolinguistics to build a theory of teacher learning. I then take a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis to show how teachers’ use of language and contextualization cues within a learning community reflects their cultural models, or everyday beliefs, about technology. This study addresses two gaps in the literature. First, it explores the role of situated language in constructing English teachers’ cultural models related to technology. Second, it examines micro-level interactions within a professional learning community to understand how teacher learning occurs in social and cultural contexts. The analysis suggests that the implementation of educational reforms, including reforms associated with technology integration and literacy education, is often dependent upon teachers’ skills, values, and cultural models.

Applying the Design Framework to Technology Professional Development

AbstractBuilding on contemporary research on teacher professional development, this study examined the practices of a technology-focused learning community at a high school in the United States. Over the course of a school year, classroom teachers and a university-based researcher participated in the learning community to investigate how technology can promote student achievement and engagement within the secondary English curriculum. This analysis used the design frame-work to identify key practices within the learning community, which included writing a mission statement, innovating with digital tools, engaging in critical discussion, and examining student work. Findings suggest that the design framework can offer a common discourse and visual representation to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of professional development.Abstract Building on contemporary research on teacher professional development, this study examined the practices of a technology-focused learning community at a high school in the United States. Over the course of a school year, classroom teachers and a university-based researcher participated in the learning community to investigate how technology can promote student achievement and engagement within the secondary English curriculum. This analysis used the design frame-work to identify key practices within the learning community, which included writing a mission statement, innovating with digital tools, engaging in critical discussion, and examining student work. Findings suggest that the design framework can offer a common discourse and visual representation to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of professional development.

Between Continuity and Change: Identities and Narratives within Teacher Professional Development.

This year-long ethnographic case study examined high school teachers’ participation in technology-focused professional development. By pairing a dialogical perspective on teacher identity with a micro-level analysis of narratives, findings indicate that teachers use language and other semiotic resources to express their own identity as well as to acknowledge, expand on, and counter others’ identity claims. Moreover, technology integration may challenge teachers’ established identities or threaten their authority in the classroom. This analysis suggests that teacher educators need to value teachers’ established and emergent identities as well as create space for dialogic narratives in order to facilitate technology integration in schools.

Multidimensional motivation and engagement for writing: construct validation with a sample of boys

Given recent concerns around boys’ literacy, this study examined multidimensional writing motivation and engagement among boys. We explored internal and external validity of 11 adaptive (e.g. self-efficacy for writing) and maladaptive (e.g. disengagement from writing) factors of writing motivation and engagement. The sample comprised 781 male Australian high school students (aged 11–18 years). We used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to conduct our analyses. Results confirmed the internal structure of the factors and revealed that parent education, and to a lesser degree language background, predicted several motivation and engagement factors. In addition, the adaptive motivation and engagement factors were associated positively with several writing (e.g. enjoyment of writing) and literacy outcomes (e.g. literacy achievement), whereas the maladaptive factors tended to be negatively associated. Invariance was found in the associations among the motivation and engagement factors and the outcomes across several participant subgroups (e.g. by gender, language background). There was also measurement invariance between the study’s sample and five randomly drawn samples of students from archived data on domain-general academic motivation and engagement. Combined, our analyses shed light on a domain-specific area of motivation and engagement – writing – that could benefit from an integrative multidimensional examination.

Update your status: exploring pre-service teacher identities in an online discussion group

A substantial body of research indicates that a teacher’s identity is an essential aspect of their professional practice. As this body of research grows, researchers have increasingly sought to investigate the nature of pre-service teacher identities. This paper reports on a study that examined identities in the context of a pre-service cohort’s online discussion group. By examining the group, this study attempted to address a gap in research knowledge, as research to this date has been unable to investigate pre-service teacher identities in non-course-endorsed or instructor-occupied spaces. A thematic and quantitative analysis of online postings by and interviews with group members provided an insight into how identities performed and related to one another within the online discussion group. The findings indicate that one category of identities emerged from a commitment to the social expectations and values of the group, whilst another emerged out of a personal resistance towards the social norms of group participation and involvement. This study may be useful for teacher educators deliberating the use of online spaces to support pre-service teacher identity development.

Reader, Writer, Gamer

Today’s youth are increasingly using online spaces to collaborate, communicate, and innovate. In fact, research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates that 80% of adolescents use online social network sites, 38% share original creative work online, and 21% remix their own creative works, inspired by others’ words and images (Lenhart, Ling, Campbell, & Purcell, 2010; Lenhart, Madden, Smith, Purcell, Zickuhr, & Rainie, 2011).

From Research to Practice: Writing, Technology, and English Teacher Education

Abstract Writers, their practices, and their tools are mediated by the contexts in which they work. In online spaces and classroom environments, today’s writers have increased access to collaborators, readers, and reviewers. Drawing on our experiences as English teacher educators and as researchers of digital literacies and online affinity spaces, this chapter offers examples from three English teacher education programs in the United States and Australia to demonstrate how we link our research in out-of-school spaces to literacy practices in school contexts for our pre-service teachers. To do so, we share an illustrative example from each program and consider how in-class activities and assessment tasks can encourage pre-service teachers to learn about: the importance of clear goals and real-world audiences for writers; the value of self-sponsored, interest-driven writing in the English curriculum; and the role of authentic conversations between readers and writers as part of the writing, revising, and publishing process. The chapter concludes with recommendations for class activities and assessments that could be used within English education programs.

Multiliteracies in Practice: Integrating Multimodal Production across the Curriculum.

Supported by ever-evolving digital tools and online spaces, we argue that multiliteracies can be used to close the gap between teacher-directed, individual, and assessment-driven learning, and authentic, shared, and purpose-driven learning. This is particularly evident through multimodal composition and collaboration in primary classrooms. Over two decades ago, the New London Group argued that all meaning-making is multimodal. By representing their knowledge through multiple modes and for local and global audiences, students can express their identity, exercise agency, and foster a sense of authoring through multimodal production.