What's brought along and brought about: Negotiating writing practices in two high school classrooms

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx

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What's brought along and brought about: Negotiating writing practices in two high school classrooms Brenton Goffa, , Ryan Rishb ⁎

a b

Ohio University, 309 McCracken Hall Athens, OH 45701, United States of America University at Buffalo/SUNY, 568 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260, United States of America

ARTICLE INFO

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Writing practices Classroom research Tracing Negotiated practice

This article presents two studies of students and teachers negotiating writing practices in two high school English classrooms in the United States. Both studies draw on a sociocultural framework of understanding writing as a social practice involving distributed, mediated, and dialogic processes of invention. Each study presents a different approach to investigating how writing practices are negotiated and how writing is produced related to that negotiation. Across the two studies, findings illustrate how the written texts students produce are a result of negotiations among historical writing practices students bring along, the sanctioned writing practices the teacher is attempting to bring about, and a myriad of other possible related issues. Considered together, the findings of the two studies have implications for understanding student writing as a negotiated relationship among multiple writing practices, social interactions with peers and teachers, and objects and artifacts at work within the writing events.

1. Introduction Research on writing has sought to understand the complexity of how writing is taught, learned, and produced within and across contexts (Smith, 2018). Prior research has foregrounded the written, cognitive processes, and the social contexts of writing (Beck, 2009; Behizadeh & Engelhard, 2011). This history of writing research has also been shaped by the ethnography of communication (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984), which expanded the unit of analysis to include literacy practices that are situated in particular cultural processes. The two studies in this article extend this history through a consideration of how students' classroom writing is potentially shaped both by their prior experiences with writing and a consideration of how the writing is framed and supported by the classroom teacher. We take this approach in order to understand how and why students produce writing in classrooms and to understand their writing as not simply approximations of teacher expectations but rather as emergent products of negotiation among writing practices that are brought along and brought about. To this end, we present two examples of students producing writing within English language arts classrooms in the U.S.; the first example is an argumentative writing assignment involving poetry, and the second example is a collaborative writing assignment involving fantasy fiction. The writing that the students produced in both examples, at first consideration, appeared to meet the teachers' expectations and exemplify the writing practices that the teacher was attempting to bring about. However, with a close investigation of the events in which the writing was produced, both examples illustrate how the writing the students produced was the result of a negotiation, informed by the writing practices that they brought along to the event, based on past experiences with writing in other contexts. ⁎

Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Goff).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.02.016 Received 21 December 2017; Received in revised form 23 January 2019; Accepted 26 February 2019 2210-6561/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Brenton Goff and Ryan Rish, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.02.016

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In each example, we seek to make visible the students' negotiation among the teachers' attempts to support particular writing practices and thwart others, as well as the students' own considerations of how to accomplish the expected writing informed in part by their prior experiences. We do so in an attempt to consider students as writers who are neither wholly determined by their past experiences with writing, nor wholly contingent on social interactions within writing events. Rather, we consider how students are agents engaging in complex negotiations and how the writing they produce is a result of these negotiations. This approach offers a more complex understanding of student writing than a mere consideration of the extent to which the writing met the teachers' expectations. 2. Theoretical framework Following the New Literacy Studies ideological model of literacy that eschews narrow considerations of literacy as autonomous knowledge and skills (Barton, 1994; Street, 1993; Street, 2000), we conceptualize writing produced by students in classrooms to be shaped by literacy practices situated in a myriad of social contexts, including but not limited to school, home, and community. Because we are primarily concerned with student writing, we further define literacy practices as cultural practices involving the use of written language (hereafter, writing practices) that are enacted and situated within literacy events (hereafter, writing events) (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984). We do so to give analytic primacy in the two examples to literacy practices and events that involve writing; however, we do not circumscribe writing practices and events as unrelated to other literacy practices and events at work, past or present. Further, where early conceptualizations of literacy events were defined by their patterned predictability (e.g., Heath, 1983), here we identify writing events by their “momentary occurrence with multiple, alternative, or virtual possibilities, as always more than can be perceived or conceived, replete with potentialities” (Burnett & Merchant, 2018, p. 8). This conceptualization of writing events is also closely related to Scollon's (2001) construct of sites of engagement used in his articulation of mediated discourse analysis (MDA) to account for how people draw on social interaction, habitus, and the physical environment to take social action. Taking these conceptualizations together, we consider writing events to be informed, but not determined, by students' past experiences with writing that have aggregated in their habitus as durable dispositions (Bourdieu, 1991; Scollon, 2001), as well as by the unpredictable, moment-to-moment social actions they take with writing. This expanded consideration of writing events allows us to identify seemingly unrelated social circumstances and situations that students used to negotiate among the extant writing practices within identified writing events. Negotiation, as defined in this study, involves the ways participants actively mark their uptake or resistance to the introduced writing practice, the ways they tacitly consider the commensurability among writing practices, and the ways they produce writing in the unpredictable and unfolding writing event. In an attempt to differentiate between aspects of student writing that are informed by their habitus and aspects that are informed by the social interaction and available materials within the writing events, we borrow the terms brought along and brought about from Banyhham's (2015) consideration of identity. For Bayhham, brought along identity accounts for the accumulation and sedimentation of identity positions within a person's habitus, and brought about identity accounts for the “performativity by which identity is contingently made and remade in discourse, either with or against the grain of dominant discourses” (p. 73). Writing practices that are brought along account for aspects of students writing that take shape, in part, as a result of past experiences within related and unrelated writing events. Writing practices that are brought about account for aspects of students writing that take shape, in part, as a result of the social interactions, available materials, and negotiation among writing practices within the writing events. These social interactions, materials, and extant practices include, but are not limited to, the writing instruction and materials provided by the teacher, as well as social interaction with peers both physically present and virtually remote. As a result, students' brought about writing practices are enacted in relationship to, but not always in complete accordance with, the writing practices sanctioned by the teacher. The two studies featured in this article foreground students' processes of negotiation among writing practices and offer an unavoidably partial explanation of the writing practices they brought about and the writing they produced. 3. Writing in an International Baccalaureate Context: “How does the poem mean?” The first case came from a year-long study of the teaching and learning of argumentative writing where Brent observed a 12th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) Language and Literature class use argumentation to study literature. IB is a non-profit foundation based in Switzerland which offers internationally recognized diploma programs that prepare students with “intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills needed to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world” (Diploma programme, 2016). The IB course involves a two-year commitment by the students with required internal and external assessments. The assessments influenced the curriculum and practice the students and teacher engaged in. What follows is a close analysis of how the teacher attempted to bring about particular writing practices for the preparation of his students to perform well on one of the internal IB assessments: an oral commentary of a poem. To prepare for the assessment, the teacher, Mr. Michaels,1 created an in-class argumentative writing assignment where the students read the poem Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney (1966) and created an argument about what the poem meant. The writing event was selected because it highlighted the complexity of a teacher attempting to bring about a new writing practice within the context of his students' individual academic writing histories, coupled with the demands of the IB curriculum. What follows is the 1

All student names, teacher names, and school names are pseudonyms. 2

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analysis of one student's negotiation of those writing practices relative to the multiple participant structures and speakers within the unfolding writing event. 3.1. Participants At the time of data collection, Mr. Michaels had been a teacher for 23 years and was the co-department chair of the English faculty. Considered an excellent teacher by his colleagues and the administration, Mr. Michaels identified himself as a “contrarian,” and someone who was not satisfied with simple answers and the shortsightedness of structural writing approaches. As an alternative, he wanted to engage his students in deep thinking about what it meant to be a member of an interpretative community (Fish, 1980) and about how argumentation could help them learn. Key to understanding Mr. Michaels' approach to the teaching of writing and literature was how he positioned his students. Treating students as emergent literary scholars, he asked students to understand the text they were reading but also to engage socially with the local interpretative community and the wider field of literary criticism when they formulated their arguments. He called this writing practice “coming to the table”. Jill was a student in the class, and Brent interviewed her several times over the course of my observations. Jill was selected because she was an outspoken student and considered by Mr. Michaels and her peers as a strong writer. She considered herself a good writer because of her experience working as the editor on the school paper, but when interviewed, she thought that her classmates were better at contributing interpretations during class discussions. Jill's favorite subject was English, and she felt that reading and writing came easy to her. However, she did not always see the value in Mr. Michaels' approach to teaching writing as a social process involving her peers. She instead believed that writing was “more or less what you do by yourself” and what is produced after you have “made an outline with enough ideas.” Jill's case is significant because she was not vocally resistant to Michaels' belief that learning and writing involved social interaction, but she did confide during one-on-one interviews that “IB graders are the ones who grade us. Not Michaels.” Meaning, Jill believed that Michaels' push for students to enrich their understanding based off of their local class was infringing on what external IB assessors wanted. 3.2. Writing practices Mr. Michaels created the argumentative assignment so the students could practice for an upcoming IB assessments. He gave students a chance to learn argumentation as a series of social processes (Newell et al., 2015; Newell et al., 2017; Weyand, Goff, & Newell, 2018). Using Toulmin's (1958) argumentative elements of claim, evidence and warrant, his assignment sought to provide students opportunities to engage with the text and each other through multiple participant structures, which would potentially strengthen the students' individual arguments. Mr. Michael's intention was for those writing practices to transfer and assist the students with the IB assessments. In the activity, students were asked to: 1) read the poem and generate a preliminary argument by identifying three pieces of evidence to support their claim; 2) work in five groups of three members to explore an assigned feature (i.e., structure, alliteration, diction, metaphor, or rhythm) and to make a claim about how their feature contributed to the meaning of the poem; 3) to share with the whole class each group's findings; and finally, 4) work alone to create an outline of an argument synthesizing evidence to support their claims. Mr. Michaels also made it clear that students should “feel free to revise [their] initial claims.” This was meant to push students away from structuralized writing practices and guide students to treat their initial arguments as “working interpretations” until they heard new evidence (Geisler, 1994). This was a new writing practice for Jill and the other students, who were more accustomed to identifying a thesis statement and then supporting it with appropriate evidence. Though students were familiar with the literacy practice of identifying multiple pieces of evidence to support their claims, they were not as comfortable revising their interpretations as they identified more evidence, nor were they comfortable drawing on multiple resources to modify their claims. 3.3. Methodology As a researcher in Mr. Michaels' class studying literary argumentation, my goal was to understand how Jill negotiated among the writing practices she brought along to the classroom and the writing practices Mr. Michaels was attempting to bring about. Drawing on ethnographic methods (Green & Bloome, 1997), Brent (first author) analyzed multiple data sources, including: video recordings of the lessons; audio recordings of the teacher captured by a lavalier microphone worn by the teacher and connected to the camera; separate audio recordings of the five groups of students, as well as collected classroom artifacts and field notes. In the first phases of analysis, Brent organized and transcribed all video and audio recorded talk. Transcripts were then organized by the episodes in the lesson resulting in three categories: whole class instruction, small group discussion, and small group presentations. Second, an intertextual analysis (Prior, 1995) of the outline was conducted following methods derived from Wynhoff Olsen, VanDerHeide, Goff, and Dunn (2018). The outline was examined for traces of content (e.g. literary features), Toulmin (1958), and parallel linguistic structures which also appeared in the transcribed talk. Third, the evidence and linguistic phrases used by Jill in her outline were analytically backward mapped (Dixon & Green, 2005) and cross referenced to the participant structures and classroom events. The writing was coded for the following intertextual origins: speaker, class artifact, classroom episode (whole class, small group, and presentations), poem, and unknown. Finally, a microethnographic approach toward discourse analysis (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris, 2005) was employed to analyze Jill's small group interaction for how the students constructed 3

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meaning. In the small group interactional analysis, Brent paid attention to the turns of talk, initiated evidence, validated responses; Brent also identified warranting statements, which tied evidence to the claim students were attempting to support. 3.4. Findings Following the frame of this article, the findings from this case are organized to highlight Jill's negotiation among writing practices, specifically the relationship between the experiences as a writer that she is bringing along with her to the class and the writing assignment which involved the new writing practices Mr. Michaels was attempting to bring about. The findings presented below focus on Mr. Michaels' directions and expectations, Jill's written product, and her small group's interaction. Also, key in understanding Jill's negotiation is how she perceived the connection between the writing practices Michaels was introducing to the students and the practices she brought along with her to the class, as well as what writing practices she thought aligned with the IB assessment. What follows is an illustration of the tension between Jill's history of writing as an individual task and Michaels' insistence that the social context and multiple voices with the small groups would strengthen the students' interpretations by making them more complex and nuanced. 3.4.1. Brought about and brought along: epistemological and contextual tensions Michaels wanted to prepare the students for the IB Oral Commentary assessment where students would be assessed for their ability to craft arguments about a poem. He believed that students should argue like literary scholars which meant they needed to “come to the table” in order to prepare to join the ongoing discussions surrounding literature. To introduce this writing practice, he asked students to build on their initial interpretations by including other students' interpretations of the poem. He designed an activity to build from an individual reading of the poem to small group discussion to whole class discussion. Finally, he asked students to synthesize across the many interpretations discussed to strengthen their arguments. For example, when he gave directions in class he emphasized the following: What you will also probably realize and we will talk about this is that some of the devices contribute to other devices like rhythm you are probably going to overlap with some of the other groups in terms of the things you talk about, okay. Diction you will probably overlap with some of the other groups with some of the things you talk about. Metaphor probably as well. Structure… so we can talk about how structure contributes to metaphor as well. Mr. Michaels wanted his students to make rich arguments, which he defined as drawing upon multiple literary devices and others' interpretations to buttress their claims. For Michaels, the writing practice he was attempting to bring about through multiple participant structures was for the students to synthesis across the texts the students produced to “enter the conversation” and develop a stronger argument than they could individually. Fig. 1 is Jill's annotations of the poem and an illustration of the type of texts Mr. Michaels wanted his students to produce. The annotated poem produced by Jill shows that she was following along with the directions outlined by Michaels as she used color to annotate each use of figurative language during the small group presentations. A cursory analysis of Jill's annotated poem suggested that she was engaged in the writing practice Michaels was attempting to bring about, but when her annotated poem is compared to her final writing product, the outline of her argument, she does not take up the writing practice of using others' ideas and interpretations to support her argument. Based on interviews with Jill, writing was something someone does individually. In fact, for Jill, the IB assessments supported her belief that writing was not context dependent as the students in IB programs were assessed by external evaluators. The disconnect between the classroom context and the writing practices that Michaels intended to be brought about to produce the writing were at odds with how Jill thought about writing. Jill, drawing on her experiences as the school newspaper editor and previously successful writing student, saw writing as a process of “supporting your claim with evidence and then interpreting (the poem).” Jill also added during the interview that she “didn't agree with Michaels” because she saw a disconnect between how he taught and how, in her estimation, “was not helping us do well for the IB paper.” What is at stake is a tension between how Michaels wanted to bring about a new writing practice to his students for new ways of developing literary interpretations through multiple participant structures where students synthesis across multiple interpretations of the poem to support their claims. However, for Jill, her brought along practices informed how she negotiated among these writing practices. A close examination of Jill's writing product, her outline of an argument, reveled its intertextual traces for their origins in content (e.g. literary features), Toulmin (1958), and parallel linguistic structures, which also appeared in the transcribed talk). The examination of both the written product and the instructional context revealed how Jill was agentive in her negotiation among the writing practices Michaels was attempting to bring about. 3.4.2. Tracing Jill's negotiation At first glance, Jill navigated the writing event in the manner Michaels wanted. She read the poem and developed the initial claim, “Too much of a good thing is bad: acceptance of inevitability.” She then contributed to her small group's task of reinterpreting the poem by focusing on the use of diction. In the third step of the event, the students presented to the whole class each groups' new interpretations as each student annotated their poems individually. Finally, students were asked to return to their claims now they had new evidence and revise their arguments. What follows is a close examination of Jill's writing product as it relates to the writing event and the practice Michaels was attempting to bring about. Tracing Jill's final written product (Fig. 2) by intertextually analyzing the content or figurative language, her use of Toulmin (1958) argumentation, and parallel linguistic structures (Wynhoff Olsen et al., 2018) in transcribed talk make visible her negotiation 4

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Fig. 1. Jill's annotated poem.

among the writing practices across the different participant structures. Jill's writing indexes her participation and resistance to the parts of the writing event and the writing practice Michaels was attempting to bring about. In this sense, Jill's negotiation is traced to her interaction with the other participants and materials. 3.4.3. Intertextual analysis All but one piece of Jill's outline can be intertextually traced to either her small group or the whole class discussion. Jill's main claim about the poem is “No matter how much we work for a good thing, it may still end up poorly.” To support this claim about what the poem meant she identified 31 aspects of the poem as evidence. Jill was assigned to the small group focused on diction. Of the five literary devices that the students attended to in their small groups (i.e., structure, alliteration, diction, metaphor, and rhythm), Jill only relied on diction, diction/metaphor, and finally structure. Of the 31 pieces of evidence Jill uses, she cites 16 pieces that were first brought up by Katy from her small group on diction. Eleven were from Jill's own words from the small group; two from Anthony, a student from a separate small group focused on structure; two from Andrea, who was a member of the small group focused on alliteration; one from Mr. Michaels; and finally, one that did not have an identified origin. Jill's reliance on others' words and ideas is reminiscent of Voloshinov's (1929) notion that “the word is a two-sided act” (p. 86), displaying how Jill's writing is directly traceable to others' utterances and her own.Jill pulls most of 5

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Fig. 2. Jill's outline.

her evidence from her small group conversations about diction, 26 in fact. When considering all of the students' writing in the class, each of the students' outlines contained more than half of the evidence from their assigned small groups and the remaining evidence came from the whole class or an unknown origin. The fact that Jill pulled more than 80% of her evidence from her small group means that she did not directly follow Mr. Michaels' push for students to revise their initial claims based on new evidence and interpretations that other groups presented. 3.4.4. Small group interaction Jill's small group focused on diction consisted of Katy and Calvin. Katy was perceived by Mr. Michaels and Jill as the strongest student in class. Both mentioned during several interviews that she was a strong writer and often gave the best interpretations during class discussions. Calvin was considered by the teacher as a strong writer, but he did not think he was a “writer-writer” but more of a “math guy.” Calvin wanted to study computer science in college and believed that his writing was just “okay.” Jill felt comfortable 6

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discussing literature but often was not the first to offer interpretations. Jill was friends with Calvin, but she mentioned that he was not an “English” person. This meant that she was friendly with Calvin but was reticent to use his input in her writing. In the small group, students were tasked with reinterpreting the poem based off of their literary device: diction. The point of this assignment and its structure as it related to the teaching of argumentation as a social practice was, according to Mr. Michaels, “to help students see the connection between evidence and their claims” and “[to] get students to visualize the ways in which some evidence may be more important than others.” Michaels also wanted the students to have a visual that would represent a “roadmap” of how students moved across the text of the poem to construct their arguments. The visual the students produced over the two-day lesson was an annotated poem marked with color. The fact that Katy's ideas make up more than half of Jill's support reveals how significantly the small group's participant structure impacted Jill's writing. Analysis of the social interactions during the small group's conversations revealed that Katy spoke most often with 47 of 82 turns of talk, initiated the most pieces of evidence (16 of 27), did the most validating (14 of 20), and was central in framing the group's main argument, which was reported to the class. The transcript below is representative of how Katy led the discussion and framed the group's main argument: 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Katy xxx Can that count? Jill Yeah Katy Because I marked that as my big… Calvin …Yeah Katy …literary thing I was like I want to talk about opposites Jill Okay Calvin Then let's talk about opposites

In the first minutes of the small group work time, Katy set the tone of the group's argument by introducing the idea of opposites (79). The idea of opposites, specifically the opposites of good/bad, set the tone for the small groups' later discussion, as well as the evidence Jill selects to support her claim. Calvin was not central in determining the focus of the small groups' interpretation but often validated decisions made by Katy and Jill (line 81). 3.5. Discussion: Negotiating writing practices Michaels wanted the students to learn to argue and strengthen their initial claims, but ultimately most students subtly resisted and stayed close to their original claim. The complexity of how Jill negotiated among the resources to construct her argument points to how she made sense of the assignment and the structure of the activity. The writing practice Michaels is attempting to bring about is oriented toward students revising their claims based on new evidence, or in other words, the voices of other students in the class. This demonstrates a view of learning to write and argue which pushes back against writing as an individual cognitive task and one that aligns with Mr. Michaels' belief that writing is a social act. However, this writing practice does not align well with the IB Diploma Programme's belief about assessment, which is done, for the most part, individually. Jill and her classmates are more familiar with their brought along writing practices which align with the IB curriculum and their assessment practices. Michaels' attempts to stay within the boundaries of the IB curriculum by having the students make individual claims; however, he wants the students to draw from each other to get to their final claim/interpretation. Jill's writing practices that were brought about within the writing event are largely informed by her history with writing and the writing practices she brought along that were most familiar to her. Jill made an initial claim and stayed close to her original reading even when she was asked to reinterpret the poem based off of new evidence provided by other students. Her negotiation among writing practices is made visible in her interaction with the parts of the unfolding activity, informed greatly by brought along writing practices. 4. Writing in an elective english class: “what do you want added on here?” For this article, Ryan highlighted two high school students who were part of a larger study of 22 students enrolled in a science fiction and fantasy elective English class within a rural, Midwestern US high school. In the class, students read, watched, and played a range of science fiction and fantasy novels, movies, and videogames in order to learn how novel writers, comic book authors and illustrators, movie directors, and video game designers (hereafter referred to as media creators) coordinate to render fictional, transmedia worlds. The class involved groups of students working together to create a fictional world through writing, digital cartography, and video game design. Ryan had previously conducted a pilot study of the first iteration of this elective class due to an interest in the students' collaborative writing practices (Rish & Caton, 2011). Subsequently, Ryan worked with the teacher, Mr. Caton, over the summer to plan a semester-long investigation into how students were writing together within two of the four groups across an academic semester. Collected data included field notes and video recordings of 85 class sessions, multiple individual and group interviews with the students in the two focal groups, and a cataloged archive of time-stamped revision histories on the online wiki that the students were using to compose writing, post maps and images, and link to video games. 7

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4.1. Participants James (11th grade) and Beau (12th grade) were members of a group of eight students named Tine agus Oighear (translated as “fire and ice” from Gaelic). The group name describes two factions in the fictional world that divided the members along lines of friendship. James and Beau were members of the fire faction. James and Beau were selected for this article because of the unpredictability and variation of their writing events across time which helps to make visible how they were negotiating among multiple writing practices. Here, Ryan focuses on how and why the two of them wrote together in relationship to what was being asked of them by the teacher, Mr. Caton, during a specific writing event in order to understand their processes of negotiation. James and Beau were active gamers who played fantasy-related video games. The two of them regularly shared experiences about their video game play and made regular references during class to the video games they had played across time. However, the two students had no prior experience with creative or fantasy fiction writing. They each reported that the writing they did was limited to school-based writing tasks defined by their teachers. The writing practices they brought along with them to the elective class were largely informed by these school-based writing experiences. Despite their lack of experience with writing fiction, they engaged enthusiastically in the project and completed project-related tasks with bursts of unpredictable activity amidst the time they spent in class talking about video games and teasing each other as close friends. Mr. Caton, the teacher and designer of the elective English course, is an avid fan of fantasy and science fiction. His goal for the elective class was to have students consider the choices writers, directors, and video game designers make when creating a fictional world. He wanted the students to make comparable choices and considerations when creating their own fictional world in their groups. Mr. Caton was attempting to support and bring about writing and design practices similar to the ones teams of media creators engage in when working collectively on a fantasy or science fiction franchise. Mr. Caton was aware that this way of writing would be unfamiliar to the students enrolled in the course, and in response, he designed assignments for the project that encouraged students to write collaboratively. 4.2. Writing practices Based on the pilot study, Mr. Caton and Ryan identified three writing practices that the class was designed to support and bring about (Rish & Caton, 2011). The first writing practice was maintaining storyline continuity. This writing practice was derivative of transmedia franchises, in which editors work to maintain storyline continuity and avoid conflicts in the way characters are represented and the overall arc of the storyline. This writing practice involved reading each other's writing in order to establish relationships between characters and storylines and to resolve any continuity conflicts that may arise. Mr. Caton considered continuity conflicts not as problems to avoid but rather as opportunities to engage in the decision-making processes that media creators make when creating a fictional world in collaboration with other people. The second writing practice that Mr. Caton wanted to bring about was sharing story elements (e.g., characters, events, artifacts). This writing practice involved borrowing story elements from each other and using those borrowed story elements in one's own writing. Borrowing story elements involved negotiation among group members, as some of the story elements were considered to be freely available for group members to adopt and adapt, but other story elements were considered to be proprietary and required negotiation, consent, and oversight of their use. The third writing practice Mr. Caton supported was negotiating authorship. From the pilot study, Mr. Caton and Ryan learned that students took on different roles when negotiating authorship. The characteristics of these roles were conceptualized in the study using a heuristic provided by Goffman (1981) to decompose the typical notion of a speaker. Applied to writing, the heuristic includes the roles of animator, the person who inscribes the word on page or screen; author, the person who selects the sentiments and the words; and the principal, the person who is committed to what the words mean and whose interests and perspectives are being represented. Mr. Caton wanted his students to understand that all of these roles were involved in the authorship of the fictional world and that authorship need not be defined in typical school-based terms wherein the three roles are collapsed within a single, individual notion of an author. Mr. Caton hoped that the role of principal would be shared within the group, and the roles of author and animator would be distributed among the students when writing with and for each other. To demonstrate how James and Beau negotiated among the school-based writing practices they brought along with them and these three writing practices Mr. Caton was attempting to bring about, Ryan focuses on the fourth assignment of the elective class project. During the project development, Mr. Caton discovered that students were not engaging in the writing practice of sharing story elements in ways that he had hoped. Mr. Caton designed the fourth assignment of the project to require students to contribute writing to a story element that another group member considered to be proprietary. When implementing the assignment, Mr. Caton was aware that this requirement would potentially make some of the students uncomfortable and put some of them in a position of negotiating a writing practice that some students may not have previously enacted. 4.3. Methodology The study of how James and Beau negotiated among the writing practices they brought along and the ones that Mr. Caton was attempting to bring about through the project was guided by a two-part methodology of mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001) and nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). These two interrelated analytic processes inform one another. On the macro level, Ryan used nexus analysis to examine the relationships among social practices across time in order to explain how “historical trajectories of people, places, discourses, ideas, and objects come together to enable some action” (Scollon & Scollon, 2004, p. viii). The central construct of nexus analysis is a nexus of practice that allows for a consideration of how practices are related to one another within and across different contexts, affiliations, and social relationships (Norris & Jones, 2005). In this study, nexus analysis enabled a 8

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consideration of how the students were negotiating among the writing practices at play, as well as how the relationships among the writing practices were made up of a constellation of linkages, or a nexus of practice, that was unique to the elective English class. On the micro level, Ryan used mediated discourse analysis to examine writing events in order to understand how and why people were taking the actions that are observed and captured by the revision histories on the project wiki. Mediated discourse analysis is a microethnographic method that gives analytic primacy to mediated action (Wertsch, 1991) and allows for a consideration of how that action is accomplished and constructs and reconstructs social practices over time (Rish, 2015). 4.4. Findings Ryan focuses on the following writing event to demonstrate how James and Beau negotiated among writing practices during the fourth assignment. Mr. Caton designed this assignment to support the writing practice of sharing story elements by asking students to contribute writing to a part of the project that another group member considered proprietary. Across multiple individual and group interviews, Ryan determined that James and Beau had no reported history of engaging in this writing practice of sharing story elements or any other related literacy practice across the other types of media in which they engaged outside of school. Both of their histories with writing practices primarily involved school sanctioned writing tasks in which a single author produced proprietary writing and was required to provide attribution for any elements that were not original to the author. The writing practice of sharing story elements supported by the project presented a contrast to their history with school sanctioned writing tasks in that Mr. Caton was emphasizing the collaborative development of stories without concern for attribution. This writing practice is inextricably related to the other two writing practices supported by the project, as sharing story elements involves both maintaining storyline continuity and negotiating authorship. To meet the requirements for the fourth assignment, James and Beau agreed to add story elements to each other's wiki pages that they considered to contain proprietary story elements. They were each seated at computers in a computer lab next to each other. Prior to this writing event, James told Beau he was going to write a backstory for Beau's characters. Beau then began to outline some possible storylines James could write. However, James made his own suggestions, which Beau approved, stating, “Yeah, that sounds cool. I never really thought about that.” James proceeded to make further suggestions, seeking Beau's approval for each. In turn, Beau asks James what he should write on James' wiki page; at one point Beau explicitly asks James, “What do you want added on here?” The transcript scheme2 is designed to give analytic primacy to mediated action (Ochs, 1999). The first column of the transcript marks the time for coordination with time-stamped updates to the project wiki. The second column includes an analysis of the mediated actions taken; mediated discourse analysis first considers the actions taken and secondly considers how discourse is a mediational means within that action (Scollon, 2001). The third column provides a transcription of the talk during the mediation action, which is considered to be one among many discursive and non-discursive mediational means. The fourth column includes an analysis of the relational and reflexive social positioning within the mediated action in order to consider what positioning are offered, imposed, taken up, and rejected (Harré & van Langenhove, 1991) to better understand how social practices are negotiated within the nexus of practice. Rows of the transcript are delineated by shifts in mediated actions taken by the participants. Time

Mediated action

8:51 a.m. Beau turns to look at James. James turns to look at Beau.

2

Talk

Social positioning

Beau: What do you want added down here? What do you want added on here? I can [inaudible] geography, geographic description [inaudible]. James: Yeah, kind of try to explain like the geography. Beau: What do you want it to look like? I was thinking like, I know it's like a floating city in the sky. James: It's supposed to be like, it's only supposed to be a temple, like a dojo, like with many dojos around it. These are like traditional samurais. Like, they won't have a city. It's kind of like a temple… Beau: Do they eat or anything? James: No. No, they don't has to eat. Beau: So, they're like almost beings. James: No, they don't do nothing. They don't even look. They don't have eyes. They don't have arms or legs or penises. Beau: They're just like blobs that sit there, like peacekeepers. James: Yeah, pretty much. Oh! [laughs] That's perfect. Beau: So it's dojos? James: Kind of, like a temple with dojos. Beau: So they got one giant temple? Like the island itself is a temple? James: It's like this, the island is a temple and then, and yeah, the towns around it are like dojos. That's where [inaudible]. Straight? Beau: Yeah.

Beau positions James as principal and owner of the story elements within James' wiki page. James accepts this positioning and positions Beau as an animator of the story elements that they negotiate as authors. However, James' role as principal determines which story elements are approved for Beau to write as animator.

Excerpt from writing event; the entire writing event transcript is available at: https://goo.gl/TRMj84. 9

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Fig. 3. Screen shot of Beau's writing post to Nolahon.

In this transcript excerpt, Beau is asking James for details on what he should write to describe the geography of James' region of the fictional world. Beau and James are engaged in the writing practice of negotiating authorship with James maintaining his role as principal of his story elements and Beau taking on the role of animator. However, James and Beau are not enacting the writing practice of sharing story elements as Mr. Caton had hoped. The goal of bringing about this writing practice is for students to borrow a story element and share in the role of principal and be equally committed to what the writing means for the development of the fictional world. Here, James and Beau dialogically share the role of author, but James maintains this role of principal by providing oversight and guidance for the use of the negotiated story elements as a condition for accepting Beau's role as animator. When only considering the text that Beau wrote on James' wiki page (see Fig. 3) without considering the social interaction that contributed to the writing, it appears as if Beau enacted the writing practice of sharing story elements by working with characteristics of the region of Nolahon and contributing his own ideas. From the social interaction between James and Beau, Ryan learned that the writing practice of negotiating authorship resulted in James maintaining the role of principal, leading Mr. Caton and Ryan to question whether or not the story element was actually shared because the role of principal was not distributed between James and Beau. However, James and Beau do engage in the writing practices of negotiating authorship and maintaining storyline continuity through James maintaining the role of principal and determining how his story elements are represented by Beau. 4.5. Negotiating writing practices This writing event involved some unpredicted whimsy and playfulness, including teasing and mock fighting (see full transcript); this is characteristic of how James and Beau negotiated these particular writing practices across the project. Neither one of them were willing to share the role of principal over the story elements for which they gave other group members permission to use in their own writing for the project. Beau often policed the use of story elements he considered proprietary stating, “I want it to be epic, dude.” In conversations and interviews across the project, both James and Beau attributed this ownership of story elements to their history with writing in school that involves considering writing as proprietary and attributed to a single author, unless otherwise indicated through in-text citations. This history of writing practices aggregated in their habitus informed what practices they brought along to the 10

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writing event and how they negotiated Mr. Caton's invitation to share ownership of story elements. The relationship between the three writing practices of maintaining storyline continuity, sharing story elements, and negotiating authorship form an idealized nexus of practice that Mr. Caton was attempting to bring about with the project. This idealized nexus of practice was based on an idealized perception of how people who work on fantasy and science fiction franchises work together to create a fictional world. For Mr. Caton, the distribution of the role of principal was a significant factor within this nexus of practice, as he had hoped that students would negotiate continuity conflicts through a collaborative exchange of ideas that were not considered to be proprietary to any one student. However, James and Beau brought along a history of completing school-based writing tasks that involved writing practices in which the roles of authorship are consolidated within a single writer. The negotiation among the writing practices James and Beau brought along and the ones Mr. Caton was attempting to bring about, resulted in an unanticipated nexus of practice, in which James and Beau retained the role of principal of their storyline elements while meeting the requirements for the fourth assignment. 5. Discussion Our purpose in bringing these two studies together was to provide examples of students negotiating among writing practices when presented with a teacher-supported writing task. Both Mr. Michaels and Mr. Caton were making attempts to bring about particular writing practices that involved distributed forms of authorship among their students. Jill, James, and Beau each negotiated among these writing practices in ways that were largely informed by their histories with writing and the writing practices that they brought along to the writing events. Interestingly, the writing practices that Jill, James, and Beau brought along were heavily influenced by school sanctioned writing tasks and assignments, which caused tension within the negotiation related to the more social and distributed writing practices supported by Mr. Michaels and Mr. Caton. For Mr. Michaels, the writing practices he was attempting to bring about involved a linear progression of reading, writing, and discussion opportunities that were intended to support the development of a claim about a poem. This linear progression was a process that Mr. Michaels believed would prepare students to develop claims about poetry in preparation for the IB examination. Ideally, the written text that the students would produce was to have claims, evidence, and warrants synthesized and then advanced from a broad range of offerings by students in the classroom. However, the written text that Jill produced as a result of participating in the linear series of reading, writing, and discussion opportunities drew heavily on her small group discussion, specifically Katy's contributions, rather than adopting the writing practice of drawing on the whole class discussion to develop the argument that Mr. Michaels was attempting to bring about. Rather, the development of Jill's written product was primarily a result of her brought along practice in which she considered writing as more or less autonomous; her participation in the structured writing event highlighted her negotiation. For Mr. Caton, the writing practice of sharing story elements hinged on the distribution of the role of principal within the negotiation of authorship, in which students worked toward maintaining storyline continuity. Mr. Caton hoped that the students would contribute story elements to other students writing and borrow story elements from their group members to use in their own writing. He also hoped that the students contributing and borrowing the story elements would have flexibility in their use so long as they did not introduce a continuity conflict with what had already been written. For Mr. Caton, this sharing in the role of principal reflected the idealized ways writers, directors, and video game designers worked together on fantasy and science fiction franchises. Though the written text that Beau produced appeared to be representative of the writing practices that Mr. Caton was attempting to bring about, the mediated discourse analysis of the social action involved with Beau writing on James' wiki page reveals that James retained the role of principal with the story elements James was contributing. Both James and Beau attributed this role, or what they both referred to as ownership of ideas in interviews, to the ways that they had written in the past for school-related writing tasks. James and Beau considered ideas and the writing that resulted from it to be proprietary. The writing practices that Mr. Caton was attempting to bring about presented a challenge to this notion of ownership, and in response, James and Beau negotiated a way to adapt these writing practices in order to produce the written text they thought Mr. Caton was looking for. Considered together, these two studies demonstrate how the written texts that students produce are a result of a negotiating among writing practices within writing events, and how the writing practices that the students enact may not be representative of the ones the teacher is attempting to bring about. The ways Jill, James, and Beau negotiated their writing tasks and the writing practices their teachers were attempting to bring about highlight several key issues that are significant for both literacy researcher who are attempting to understand how students negotiated among writing practices to produce writing and for teachers who are attempting to organize writing events and to understand student writing as approximations of their expectations. First, texts are integral in uncovering how these students negotiated among the writing practices that their teachers were attempting to bring about, but the texts in each study do not tell the entire story. For Jill, James, and Beau, the texts they produced are artifacts that only reveal a partial understanding of their negotiation among writing practices. Taken alone the texts appear to exemplify the teachers' intended writing practices, but our fine-grained analyses reveal how the students agentively drew on their histories with writing aggregated in their habitus to inform how they produced writing within the writing events. Second, the negotiation among writing practices captured in part by the two studies should be seen as part of larger, longitudinal processes. Mr. Michaels and Mr. Caton attempted to bring about particular writing practices within the writing events described herein, but the writing practices that the students enacted are the result of negotiations in the moment that may or may not be indicative of future negotiations among writing practices. This is to say, that the students' negotiation is likely neither completely idiosyncratic and wholly contingent on the characteristics of the writing event, nor is there negotiation necessarily indicative of the ontogenesis of a new hybridized writing practice that they will bring along with them to future writing events. Rather, these two 11

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studies mark moments in time within the lives of these students and call for a broader consideration of the significance of these moments for the development of their writing practices across time and events. Third, both teachers had specific writing practices in mind when designing their assignments and when supporting the writing events in the ways that they did. Both Mr. Michaels and Mr. Caton had very specific notions of what writing practices they were attempting to bring about. The writing that Jill, James, and Beau produced appeared to exemplify these intended writing practices to a greater or lesser extent. That is to say, the students writing could be considered as approximations of what the teachers were expecting them to produce. However, a consideration of how the students were drawing on their history with writing to negotiate these intended writing practice reveals a much more complex and developmental story that merely a consideration of approximation. Had Mr. Michaels and Mr. Caton more time to focus on these intended writing practices, they could consider students' shifts in negotiation across multiple writing events to determine what, if any, of the intended writing practices were beginning to aggregate in the students' habitus. In sum, across the two studies we call attention to the students' negotiation in order to consider how the writing they produced was an agentive process, neither wholly determined by their histories with writing nor by the social contexts in which they were writing. Negotiation for Jill, James, and Beau took shape in different ways given their histories with writing, social contexts in which they were writing, structure of the writing task, and the available resources within the writing events, including social interaction with their peers. Through her negotiation, Jill actively marked her resistance to Mr. Michaels' attempts to structure an activity which provided students opportunities to reconsider their original claims. During interviews and within the writing Jill produced it was evident that she was only willing to consider the contributions of Katy, due to Katy's status in the class, and not the other students in the class. For Jill, the writing practices that Mr. Michaels was attempting to bring about were not only incommensurate with her history with writing but also the writing practices expected by the IB assessments. However, given Jill's history with writing and her resistance to Mr. Michaels' intended writing practices, Brent may have expected that Jill would not draw on any other students' contributions. This expectation speaks to the often unpredictable aspects of negotiation within writing events, as Jill did draw heavily on Katy's contribution within their small group together. For James and Beau, they enthusiastically engaged with the intended writing practices that Mr. Caton was attempting to bring about. Their negotiation on first consideration appeared to be commensurate with what Mr. Caton intended. They were both very invested in maintaining storyline continuity, and appeared to be ready and willing to begin sharing story elements, but the sticking point came when they began to negotiate the practice of negotiating authorship. Though they never explicitly expressed concern with this intended practice, they tacitly worked around it by both of them maintaining the role of principal in determining how their proprietary story elements were adopted and adapted. Not distributing the role of principal marked resistance to the intended writing practice of sharing story elements. Additionally, although the writing events that James and Beau shared were whimsical and unpredictable, often including episodes of teasing and play fighting, their writing events were patterned in the sense that they maintained their resistance to the intended practice of sharing story elements with distributed roles of principal throughout the project. In other words, their negotiation among the writing practices had consistency across writing events, even if other characteristics marked the events as unpredictable and often not all that productive in terms of producing writing. 6. Implications The resulting negotiation may be more appropriately illustrated within a spectrum where practices are “tried out”, ephemeral, and fleeting, and representative of how “events” offer a window for making visible how teachers and students work in concert to enact writing practices. Many current approaches to researching writing, especially those in classroom contexts, are not equipped to account for the complexity and inherent messiness of becoming, as students negotiate among writing practices that may be unfamiliar. The approach used in these studies foregrounded talk and social interaction which only reveals a partial picture of the literacy-as-event (Burnett & Merchant, 2018) framing, but the findings shed light on the ways in which the participants' histories and unfolding interactions shaped the potentialities of the practices they were engaged in. Acknowledging that these studies are not necessarily representative of English classrooms familiar to readers of this special issue, we argue that they help to reveal layers of complexity that help us understand how young people adopt, adapt, resist, and/or change the literacy practices they encounter in classrooms. One of the goals of this special issue is to showcase attempts at breaking away from understanding writing development as linear and anchored in monolithic contexts and to move toward research that is dynamic, fluid and nimble enough to recognize the many social consequences of a myriad of contextual elements. By attending carefully to the many circumstances at play within our respective studies, we have aimed to demonstrate how our participants were agentive in negotiating their respective acts of writing and producing written texts. We discovered that for students in our studies negotiating among writing practices as acts of becoming was not a linear developmental process but rather better described as a complex nexus of practice that is not necessarily bound by particular contexts, affiliations, or social relationships. Acknowledgements The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant No. 305A100786 to The Ohio State University (Dr. George E. Newell, Principal Investigator). 12

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Adaptive expertise in the teaching and learning of literary argumentation high school english language arts classrooms. In R. Durst, G. Newell, & J. Marshall (Eds.). English language arts research and teaching: Revisiting and extending Arthur Applebee's contributions (pp. 157–171). . Norris, S., & Jones, R. H. (Eds.). (2005). Discourse in action: Introducing mediated discourse analysis. London: Routledge. Ochs, E. (1999). Transcription as theory. In A. Jaworski, & N. Coupland (Eds.). The discourse reader (pp. 166–178). London: Routledge. Prior, P. (1995). Tracing authoritative and internally persuasive discourses: A case study of response, revision, and disciplinary enculturation. Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 288–325. Rish, R. M. (2015). Researching writing events: Using mediated discourse analysis to explore how students write together. Literacy, 49(1), 12–19. Rish, R. M., & Caton, J. (2011). 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Multilingual literacies: Comparative perspectives on research and practice (pp. 17–29). Amsterdam: John Benjamin. Toulmin, S. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Volosinov, V. (1973/1929). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. Weyand, L., Goff, B., & Newell, G. E. (2018). The social construction of warranting evidence in two classrooms. Journal of Literacy Research, 50(1), 97–122. Wynhoff Olsen, A., VanDerHeide, J., Goff, B., & Dunn, M. (2018). Examining intertextual connections in written arguments: A study of student writing as social participation and response. Written Communication, 35(1), 58–88. Brenton Goff. Ohio University, [email protected]. Brenton is a Lecturer in the Department of Teacher Education at Ohio University. His research focuses on the teaching and learning of writing about literature in secondary English Language Arts classrooms. Recent articles have been published in Written Communication, The Journal of Literacy Research, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal and English in Education. His scholarship is informed by his experiences as a teacher educator and English Language Arts teacher. Ryan Rish. University of Buffalo, [email protected]. Ryan is an Assistant Professor of New Literacies in the department of Learning and Instruction at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). His research interests involve the literacy practices of adolescents, especially in regard to how those practices relate to the institutions, social spaces, and geographic places in which they are enacted. This research involves investigations within and across classrooms, online spaces, and communities guided by concerns for learning with participants how to make learning opportunities more equitable for marginalized youth and how to engage students with critical considerations of their social worlds and local communities. Recent articles have been published in English Journal, Literacy, and The ALAN Review. His past experiences as a secondary English teacher and English teacher educator inform his current work with doctoral students in UB's Curriculum, Instruction, and Science of Learning (CISL) PhD program.

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