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Purpose – This chapter outlines a six-week graduate level writing practicum that fosters collaboration among teachers, elementary school writers, and families.

Design – Through the voices of teachers, students, and families, the authors describe a newly developed writing practicum where teachers engage in the writing process to build communities of writers and develop partnerships with families.

Practical implications – Teacher educators can use the practices presented in this chapter as a springboard to create their own school-based writing practicum.

Originality/value – This approach to teacher education values communities of writers and family partnerships to build on student writers’ strengths and interests.

To be a writer, one must write. Research shows when teachers write and identify as writers, they transfer their writing practice into their classroom, positively impacting their students' writing development. Shifting instructional practices or identities requires educators to self-determine a gap in order to take on transformative learning experiences, such as mentoring, professional development, or modeled learning. Often professional development is chosen by administrators for educators to shift their instructional practice, ignoring a teacher's curriculum-maker role, and best-loved self identity. This narrative inquiry analysis details one teacher-writer in a creative writing professional development residency as she supports educators with a goal to transform educators into teacher-writers. This chapter includes the small step successes and systematic struggles the author faced as she modeled the writer's craft and writer's workshop strategies with her teachers. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the important role teachers have to decide, navigate, and discover their own best-loved self-teaching identity.

This research aims to explore how textual literacy and computational literacy can support each other and combine to create literacies with new critical possibilities. It describes the development of a Web application for interactive storytelling and analyzes how its use in a high-school classroom supported new rhetorical techniques and critical analysis of gender and race.

Three iterations of design-based research were used to develop a Web application for interactive storytelling, which combines writing with programming. A two-week study in a high-school sociology class was conducted to analyze how the Web application's textual and computational affordances support rhetorical strategies, which in turn support identity authorship and critical possibilities.

The results include a Web application for interactive storytelling and an analytical framework for analyzing how affordances of digital media can support literacy practices with unique critical possibilities. The final study showed how interactive stories can function as critical discourse models, simulations of social realities which support analysis of phenomena such as social positioning and the use of power.

Previous work has insufficiently spanned the fields of learning sciences and literacies, respectively emphasizing the mechanisms and the content of literacy practices. In focusing a design-based approach on critical awareness of identity, power and privilege, this research develops tools and theory for supporting critical computational literacies. This research envisions a literacy-based approach to K-12 computer science which could contribute to liberatory education.

This chapter revolves around a Zoom conversation between Tim Martindell and Cheryl Craig to which Chestin T. Auzenne-Curl added field-based evidence and reflective comments. The exchange between Martindell and Craig had to do with how Tim facilitated the Writers in the Schools (WITS) writers in conjunction with Tina and Maryann who led the WITS Collaborative. The embedded snapshots and excerpts stemmed from the field notes we accumulated during the life of the project. The conversation discusses some of the fine points of facilitation as well as the boundary areas where what unfolds fringes on the unknown. Near the end, hope for the future is discussed.

Purpose – Teachers should plan instruction that integrates digital tools into instruction in meaningful ways to promote students’ use of multimodalities. Therefore, it is useful for teacher educators to expose pre-service teachers (PSTs) to a systematic approach to integrating a variety of digital tools into their instruction. In this chapter, the authors discuss on the Technology Integration Planning Cycle (TIPC; Hutchison & Woodward, 2014a, 2014b) as one systematic approach for teachers and teacher educators to consider.

Design – This chapter describes the promise of using the TIPC with PSTs to demonstrate and practice how to plan effective literacy instruction to support students’ use of multimodalities. The chapter includes a rich description of how the use of the TIPC might take shape in a literacy methods course based on a composite of courses, students, and activities that the authors have experimented with over time.

Findings – Using the TIPC with PSTs requires a structured approach (Hutchison & Colwell, 2016) that includes modeling and scaffolding of PSTs’ knowledge of technology and pedagogy (Beschorner & Kruse, 2016). Therefore, the Gradual Release of Responsibility (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) might be valuable to consider as a guiding framework for planning course activities and assignments that utilize the TIPC. This chapter provides an example of this type of instruction.

Practical Implications – There is a significant need to prepare twenty-first century learners to read and write multimodal text. Thus, supporting PSTs to increase their self-efficacy in using technology for instruction and providing the conditions necessary to develop pedagogical beliefs that make it likely for them to be able to integrate technology in meaningful ways is vital (Ertmer, 2005). Using the TIPC in a literacy methods course in the ways that model and scaffold its use, might be one approach to creating these conditions.

In this chapter, we describe our experiences creating and providing job-embedded professional development to teachers with an emphasis on creative writing. Our focus is on the intersectionality of communities. We share narratives and scenarios from each of the communities – the participating teachers/administrators and the writing coaches collaborating with them. The program's objective is to empower teachers to see themselves as writers to become more effective teachers of writing. We discovered the unique nature of each campus community of teachers/writers and also found the need to provide a space and intentional structures to enable writing coaches to support each other. To measure our impact on teachers, we describe a qualitative evaluation process. Using the lens of two disruptive forces – a hurricane and a pandemic – we explore the implications for the future of the work. Each disruption brought inequities in education to the forefront of our thinking.

To review and synthesize findings from peer-reviewed research related to students’ sources of ideas for writing, and instructional dimensions that affect students’ development of ideas for composition in grades K-8.

The ideas or content expressed in written composition are considered critical to ratings of writing quality. We utilized a Systematic Mixed Studies Review (SMSR) methodological framework (Heyvaert, Maes, & Onghena, 2011) to explore K-8 students’ ideas and writing from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

Students’ ideas for writing originate from a range of sources, including teachers, peers, literature, content area curriculum, autobiographical/life experiences, popular culture/media, drawing, and play. Intertextuality, copying, social dialogue, and playful peer interactions are productive strategies K-8 writers use to generate ideas for composing, in addition to strategies introduced through planned instruction. Relevant dimensions of instruction include motivation to write, idea planning and organization, as well as specific instructional strategies, techniques, and tools to facilitate idea generation and selection within the composition process.

A permeable curriculum and effective instructional practices are crucial to support students’ access to a full range of ideas and knowledge-based resources, and help them translate these into written composition. Instructional practices for idea development and writing: (a) connect reading and writing for authentic purposes; (b) include explicit modeling of strategies for planning and “online” generation of ideas throughout the writing process across genre; (c) align instructional focus across reading, writing, and other curricular activities; (d) allow for extended time to write; and (e) incorporate varied, flexible participation structures through which students can share ideas and receive teacher/peer feedback on writing.