This qualitative study draws on the traditions of narrative inquiry and arts-based research to explore the intricate puzzle of the experience of writing in a grade nine English Language Arts classroom, with a particular group of participants engaged in a creative autobiographical writing project. This case study of a small rural classroom, where 10 of 12 students participated as writers in the research, explores both the teachers and the students experiences. As a participant-researcher, I designed a three-cycle writing project spanning nine weeks, where all participants engaged in conversations about writing. One specific feature of the classroom setting was that both the teacher and the researcher were themselves active writers and deliberately and systematically offered stories of their own writing practice as part of the teaching about writing process, while undertaking the same writing tasks as the students.
The data collected and analyzed in this dissertation includes students group conversations in class time, participants drafts and final writing, entry and exit drawings of how students saw themselves as writers, and individual reflective private conversations. From this data, I created portraits of the participants as writers and of the instructional moments.
The drawings which were shaped by a participants historical relationship with writing, their broader personal, social and educational context, and the study provided insight into the individuals relationship to and with writing, providing access to a participants knowledge and experience at times unavailable through more traditional forms of data. Two main themes that emerged were resistance to writing and students complex relationship with revision. Their resistance manifested itself in a variety of forms, including one instance of plagiarism and a total absence of writing with another. An exploration of revision practices revealed a tangled process that often failed to improve the quality of students writing, where revision became, for example, a matter of excision with the delete key or serial first drafting. This study complicates the common school use of autobiographical writing prompts, by documenting the many forms of participant resistance and task subversion. Further, the interpretation of autobiographical as necessarily entailing only the true proved an area of tension.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:AEU.10048/1077 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Bowsfield, Susan |
| Contributors | Margaret Iveson (Secondary Education), David Pimm (Secondary Education), Jill McClay (Elementary Education), Ingrid Johnston (Secondary Education), Margaret Iveson (Secondary Education), Leah Fowler (Education) (University of Lethbridge) |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 12481206 bytes, application/pdf |
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