Developing Urgent Writing Pedagogies in Teacher Education: Portraits of Practice From an Inquiry Into Water Justice

Introduction

As part of Muhammad’s (2020) Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, she recommends that teachers consider texts to use in our classrooms by asking ourselves, “What is worthwhile for learning in my content area?” (p. 145). As elementary education literacy teacher educators (and former elementary and middle school teachers), we’ve been reflecting on what constitutes “urgent” and “worthwhile learning” in relation to writing pedagogy, which is often separated from content area learning in elementary classrooms.

Recent public rhetoric about urgency in schools tends to emphasize a focus on addressing “learning loss” in order to prepare youth to be college and career ready and regain globally competitive statuses. This deficit rhetoric-particularly in relation to children’s writing skills-is not new. Williams (2007) refers to “the perpetual literacy crisis” (p. 177) to describe how popular media and policy have expressed concerns about children’s abilities to read and write for at least the last 150 years-both within and beyond the United States.

While we agree that writing instruction is sorely lacking in elementary classrooms, and that there is an urgent imperative for a “writing revolution” in schools to better prepare children to write well and confidently (National Commission on Writing, 2003), we believe that one reason most writing pedagogies do not yield results is because they do not foster meaningful learning (see Woodard & Schutz, 2021). In the elementary grades, many children continue to be taught to write using skills-based writing pedagogies, or instruction emphasizes learning writing processes and qualities of particular types of writing (e.g., narrative, argument, information). Despite living in an increasingly digital world, multimodal composing is not a meaningful focus in many elementary classrooms. Furthermore, these pedagogies do not necessarily position writing as social action or orient writing towards audiences beyond the teacher (Applebee & Langer, 2011; Purcell-Gates, Duke, & Martineau, 2007). They are often oblivious to or disconnected from children’s goals and desires for their writing, and rarely emphasize critical goals like recognizing and addressing injustices (McCarthey, Woodard, & Kang, 2014). Furthermore, a primary focus on evaluating children's writing often usurps the kind of meaningful conversations and feedback that is the hallmark of strong writing instruction. To put it plainly, writing in school-for many children-is often decontextualized and boring. It doesn’t help them to see themselves as writers, or to recognize the power of their words.

We offer urgent writing pedagogies as a potential antidote to these traditional writing pedagogies in elementary schools. Urgent writing pedagogies support youth to read, write, inquire into, and collaborate about meaningful topics that are “responsive to the social times” (Muhammad, 2020, p.54). Today, that may include a range of contemporary topics such as racial injustice, climate change, mental health, gender equality, and gun control. Meaningful multidisciplinary inquiries into these kinds of topics not only feel consequential to youth, but also enable young people to learn to effectively communicate through a variety of modes and in a variety of spaces (e.g., online platforms, public forums). As children engage in urgent and meaningful learning-which we also think should seek to disrupt injustices and foster humanity (Schutz, Woodard, Diaz, & Peek, 2019)-teachers can support them to develop the strategies, skills, and processes necessary to write in clear and compelling ways. This should be at the heart of writing instruction in schools.

In teacher education, this is not the kind of writing that the majority of teacher candidates (TCs) have experienced in K-12 schooling, which brings about another kind of urgency-to help TCs reimagine writing and writing instruction and feel prepared to design and implement more meaningful writing pedagogies. This chapter presents “portraits of practice” (Slekar, 2005)—rich descriptions and reflections by practitioner-researchers on theoretically-driven course design and instruction—from one of our ELA methods courses for elementary TCs. We share three ways our work in literacy teacher education courses on the topic of water justice demonstrates an urgent writing pedagogy, by: (1) situating the teaching of writing inside inquiry into meaningful/consequential topics; (2) knowledge-building through text-rich inquiry; and (3) immersing teacher candidates as collaborative, multimodal, informational writers. Together, these portraits of practice demonstrate multiple ways of thinking about urgency as part of teaching and learning writing in schools.