Teaching College Writing in a High School Setting: The Impact of Concurrent Enrollment on Teacher Learning and Practice

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

In today’s educational climate, in which preparing all K-12 students to succeed in college and career is paramount, a prominent concern is to ensure that students leave high school with “college level” writing skills (Acker & Halasek, 2008; Crank, 2012; Moss & Bordelon, 2010). Notably, these discussions revolve around ensuring students are ready to cross the threshold between high school and college writing, and around giving them the tools they need to bridge the gap. With few avenues for conversation or collaboration with university faculty, high school teachers aiming to prepare students for college writing sometimes feel as though they are “in the dark” (Davies, 2006). This perennial separation means that secondary teachers, who are charged with preparing their students for college with little current knowledge about expectations in college courses, end up reifying “divides” and “gaps” separating high school and college. My study considered Concurrent Enrollment (CE) composition programs as one model for attempting to facilitate communication and collaboration between high school and college stakeholders. To investigate the potential CE programs have to serve as learning opportunities for CE teachers, this dissertation was guided by the question: “How do teachers’ Discourses, material and relational resources, and identities interact to mediate their learning in practice?” Conceptually, this paper begins with King Beach’s “consequential transitions” framework (1999, 2003). Beach’s developmental view of knowledge propagation provides a framework for understanding learning as “the construction of new knowledge, ways of knowing, and new positionings of oneself in the world” (Beach, 2003, p. 42). Consequential transitions help not only to conceptualize the “trajectory” of an individual’s development, but they also help to situate an individual’s development within the context of settings, practices, and identities. CE teachers’ work is impacted by multiple settings (classroom/school/district/community and the university setting), making attending to settings critical for this research. Thus, as a complement to Beach’s framework, this research takes up the situative perspective of learning (Gee, 2008; Greeno, 2005; Putnam & Borko, 2000; Sawyer & Greeno, 2009). The situative perspective views learning as emerging from “interactions between people and resources in the setting” (Sawyer & Greeno, 2009, p. 348). Within settings, focal teachers engaged in the practices of planning and teaching the CE course and, in so doing, they were becoming socialized into a new secondary Discourse for writing instruction. In this process, their established Discourses for teaching and teaching writing (rooted in their prior work and existing settings) interacted with their attempts to become fluent in the Discourse(s) of writing pedagogy of the CHS course (Gee, 2008; 2015). Furthermore, to support an analysis of teacher learning with consequential transitions as a frame, teacher identity was a significant consideration because it mediated how teachers negotiated their roles within contexts, thereby directly impacting their teaching practice and the transformation of that practice over time (Enyedy et al., 2005). Thus, this dissertation employed the construct of identities in practice (Holland et al., 1998; Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Lave, 1996; Wenger, 1998; Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, & Johnson, 2005), which posits that there is a “mutually constitutive relationship between identity and practice” (Kanno & Stuart, 2011, p. 240). To investigate both the experience of individuals and the settings in which they work and develop, my study employed a qualitative case study design to bring together these multiple, complex strands of inquiry (Merriam, 2009). I used purposeful sampling (Patton, 2003) to select three novice CE teachers in a College in the High School (CHS) program operated by a large, public four-year university in the Western United States. Three main sources of data inform the present analysis: (1) Interview data collected from the three focal teachers and key individuals in the contexts of their work, (2) field note data from classroom observations and observations of CHS program meetings held at the university, and (3) documents and artifacts collected from the high school contexts of the focal teachers and the university context. Questions on the semistructured interview protocols (Merriam, 2009) aimed to understand teachers’ experiences, their understandings of their work, the nature and influence of their settings, and their navigation of roles in teaching the CE course. Interview data were triangulated with analysis of field notes and collected documents and artifacts (Merriam, 2009). Structured within- and cross-case analysis of data from the three sources was employed to understand the complexities of CE teachers’ practice and development (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). I used a number of tools to analyze my data, including: coding using qualitative analysis software; writing within and cross case analytic memos; and creating data displays. This multi-tiered approach allowed analysis to be at once informed by literature and “capture novel findings [in] the data” (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 541). The analysis of qualitative data yielded a number of compelling findings. Firstly, while the three focal teachers taught in very different environments with different established Discourses, for teaching, writing, and teaching writing, there were trends among how their uptake of CHS frameworks and practices interacted with their situated sense-making processes. Firstly, areas of alignment and affiliation acted as entry points that allowed teachers to take up CHS practices and then encouraged them to continue taking up unfamiliar or uncomfortable practices and ideas. Secondly, when moments of disjuncture among frameworks and cultures were approached as opportunities to investigate questions or problems, seek resources or guidance, or engage in reflective practice, they resulted in productive friction that furthered focal teachers’ sense-making processes. Ultimately, each teacher’s established Discourses provided the “basis on which” the CHS Discourse(s) were learned (Gee, 2008; 2015). More than this, each teacher’s response to these dynamics shaped the nature, the efficiency, and the depth of his or her sense-making and appropriation of CHS course concepts, practices, cultures, and frameworks. This sense-making played out while teachers engaged in their day-to-day teaching practice. As focal teachers responded to uncertainty in their ability to plan instruction by reaching out and collaborating, by engaging in cycles of instruction and reflection, and by responding to the needs of their students, they “constructed and reconstructed” the knowledge they needed to teach the CHS course successfully in their contexts. Moreover, as teachers interacted with CHS resources in planning and instructional practice, they refined the resources to their purposes and they developed their understanding of both the resources and the concepts represented by them such that they were able to use them in increasingly sophisticated ways. In these ways, teachers' ability to practice and to learn was impacted by features of their settings. They were, simultaneously, engaged as active agents in the cultivation of their knowledge of new concepts and practices that impacted their settings. Through engagement in daily practice, focal teachers also experienced becoming a “new kind” of high school teacher via complex processes of identity craftwork (Beach, 2003). Findings suggest, in line with Holland and colleagues (1998) that, “The degree to which an individual forms an identity relevant to a figured world … depends upon his relative level of engagement and identification with that world” (p. 189). Across cases, findings suggested that teachers’ engagement in the practice of CHS composition teaching and their development of new practice-linked identities had a mutually constitutive relationship during this critical first year teaching the course. There are a number of implications for this study. Firstly, findings of this study serve to flesh out the complexity of CE teachers’ situated sense-making processes and so open the door to understanding when and how support systems could buoy teachers’ learning and development. Productive avenues for future research would include investigations of how alignment among Discourses could be leveraged in designing teacher enrichment experiences and how productive responses to disjuncture could be encouraged among new and continuing CE teachers. Findings also indicate that, within the complexity of teachers’ learning processes, when teachers share common elements such as course outcomes and a course structure, there will likely be some patterns across time to their opportunities to learn and their need for support. Future research would do well to further investigate such patterns within and across different CE programs with an eye toward what factors across settings best support teachers at such times. Teachers’ experiences with relational resources also suggest that if a vision of CE programs as a medium for meaningful professional learning for CE teachers is to be realized, much can be learned from existing work on teacher networks as learning communities (Adams, 2000; Lieberman, 2000; Lieberman & Wood, 2002). Where the program under study aimed to position teachers as agents and knowers, teachers did not always have the capacity to take up this agency. Thus, a contribution of this study was to hold up the intentions of those who crafted the CHS program alongside the felt needs and effectivities of focal teachers as they navigated planning and classroom implementation. This juxtaposition contributes to understanding the dynamics of that intersection and what those dynamics mean for teacher learning. This study also afforded new theoretical territory with regard to how CE teachers’ professional identities developed as they engaged with CHS Discourses and practices. This enriched understanding can inform how schools and programs seek to foster CE teacher growth. Chiefly, findings indicate that teachers’ experience of their dual positioning as both high school teachers and college instructors resisted binary constructions and, rather, that teachers felt themselves becoming changed high school teachers. These findings suggest that if this positioning and development were addressed explicitly and interrogated reflectively, teachers could develop clearer understandings of themselves in relation to the work and, consequently, each could develop more robust and enduring motivations to imbue their CE teaching with purpose. Findings also suggest that focal teachers’ sense of themselves in relation to the practice developed via their engagement with material, relational, and ideational resources (cf. Nasir & Cooks, 2009). Moreover, a strong sense of self was leveraged as a source of agency for teachers in implementing their visions of the practice in their high school settings. Finally, I propose six Design Principles to support the development of CE programs that engage teachers in meaningful professional development that, “extend the networks of school” (Beach, 1999, p. 132) and afford CE teachers opportunities to learn that involve, “the construction of new knowledge, ways of knowing, and new positionings of oneself in the world” (Beach, 2003, p. 42). The principles were: • Principle One: Focus on the development of the “whole teacher” over time. • Principle Two: Engage teachers’ established frameworks for writing instruction • Principle Three: Help teachers negotiate particulars of implementing in settings • Principle Four: Facilitate teachers’ engagement with relational networks • Principle Five: Provide targeted support at key times • Principle Six: Foster teachers’ agency and ability to take up agency