What is Heavy Borrowing

In this chapter, a teacher educator and three practicing teachers consider how their experiences in an English education methods course that explicitly used Google Drive to support dialogic writing and learning has informed their teaching practices. The teacher educator frames the use of Google Drive in the methods course within a sociocultural perspective of writing as a distributed, mediated, and dialogic process of invention. Drawing on autoethnography as a method of inquiry, the teacher educator and the three practicing teachers consider the ways they wrote and learned in the methods course with Google Drive and how that experience is shaping the way they are supporting dialogic writing in their own teaching. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the major benefits and drawbacks of teaching writing within a sociocultural framework, including the issue of “heavy borrowing” and other tensions that arise within the institutional constraints of teaching writing within schools.