The Lifespan Development of Writing

Arthur N. Applebee, Charles Bazerman

Description

The Lifespan Development of Writing presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development at different ages from multiple, cross-disciplinary perspectives, including psychological, linguistic, sociocultural, and curricular.

Although writing begins early in life and can develop well into adulthood, we know too little about how writing develops before, during, and after schooling, as well as too little about how an individual’s writing experiences relate to one another developmentally across the lifespan. There is currently no adequate accepted theory of writing development that can inform the design of school curricula and motivate appropriate assessment practices across the years of formal education. 

The Lifespan Development of Writing is a first step toward understanding how people develop as writers over their lifetimes and presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development. First collectively offering the joint statement “Toward an Understanding of Writing Development across the Lifespan,” the authors then focus individually on specific periods of writing development, including early childhood, adolescence, and working adulthood, looked at from different angles.
They conclude with a summative understanding of trajectories of writing development and implications for further research, teaching, and policy, including the assertion that writing research “can raise our curricular vision beyond the easily measurable to recognize that writing development is far more than the accretion of easy testable skills, and that successful writing development cannot be defined as movement toward a standard.”

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts

Informations

• Publié par: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780814100578
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

T he L ifespan D evelopment of W riting
NCTE E DITORIAL B OARD : Steven Bickmore, Catherine Compton- Lilly, Deborah Dean, Bruce McComiskey, Jennifer Ochoa, Duane Roen, Anne Elrod Whitney, Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, Kurt Austin, Chair, ex officio, Emily Kirkpatrick, ex officio

Staff Editor: Bonny Graham Interior Design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf Cover Design: Pat Mayer Cover Images: monkeybusinessimages/iStock/Thinkstock, Liderina/iStock/Thinkstock, and sv_sunny/iStock/Thinkstock
NCTE Stock Number: 28169; eStock Number: 28176 ISBN 978-0-8141-2816-9; eISBN 978-0-8141-2817-6
©2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holder. Printed in the United States of America.
It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
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Every effort has been made to provide current URLs and email addresses, but because of the rapidly changing nature of the Web, some sites and addresses may no longer be accessible.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record of this book has been requested.
To the memory of Arthur N. Applebee
Contents

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I The Project
1 Introduction
2 Toward an Understanding of Writing Development across the Lifespan
II Perspectives on Lifespan Writing Development
3 Writing Development in Early Childhood
4 Linguistic Features of Writing Development: A Functional Perspective
5 Multiple Perspectives on the Nature of Writing: Typically Developing Writers in Grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 and Students with Writing Disabilities in Grades 4 to 9
6 Adolescent Writing Development and Authorial Agency
7 “The Faraway Stick Cannot Kill the Nearby Snake”
8 Writing Development and Life-Course Development: The Case of Working Adults
9 A Writer(s)-within-Community Model of Writing
10 Lifespan Longitudinal Studies of Writing Development: A Heuristic for an Impossible Dream
III Final Thoughts
11 The Challenges of Understanding Developmental Trajectories and of Designing Developmentally Appropriate Policy, Curricula, Instruction, and Assessments
I NDEX
A UTHORS
C ONTRIBUTORS
A cknowledgments
I t is far too rare for scholars from different disciplines and methodological camps to have a chance to talk and write together in search of common ground. Specialization, departmentalization, professional demands—all make such experiences impractical and unlikely. Yet the authors of this volume were given such an opportunity. For this opportunity, we must thank Charles Bazerman. In a series of in-person retreats and virtual conferences over the course of four years, we were able to pursue our joint interest in lifespan writing development. Chuck brought this group together, kept us together, challenged us, encouraged us, and in his gentle way never for a minute let us off the hook. We worked hard because we saw him working even harder—making sure everyone had a say, keeping us on task, articulating our commonalities, respecting our differences, and insisting on productive understandings. He also made sure that after each long, intense day of work at the University of California, Santa Barbara campus, we would be refreshed by visits to the beach, tours of the mountains, and convivial and healthful meals. We are grateful to Chuck for his vision, leadership, and selflessness.
The Spencer Foundation provided a conference grant that paid for logistics and staff support for our meetings over several years. We are grateful to Spencer for the trust they put in our interdisciplinary effort and their commitment to improving research and teaching in writing across the lifespan. Thanks also to the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara for providing meeting space and additional support.
Our work was made easier, livelier, and better organized by the contributions of Ryan Dippre and Erika I-Tremblay, who served at different times as assistants to this project. They each did a remarkably patient job of transcribing hours of recorded discussion and offered timely observations and aid.
Thanks to Kurt Austin, publications director at the National Council of Teachers of English, for his encouragement and attention during the review and production process. We are especially grateful to Kurt for his willingness to work with so many coauthors. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who helped us in our final push to completion.
During the course of our work, our incomparable colleague Arthur Applebee fell ill, and he died before this volume was completed. When he was with us, we could count on Arthur to bring the discussions back from the brink of confusion or triviality. He kept our sights on the big picture, and he had a remarkable ability to synthesize and restate our disparate thoughts in a way that would end an impasse and take our work to higher ground. Those familiar with Arthur's scholarship are likely to hear his voice most directly in the second chapter, but his voice continues to resonate in all of us who had the privilege and luck to be in his sphere of influence. Thanks to Arthur's colleagues, Kristen Wilcox and Jill Jeffery, for joining the research team and helping to bring the book to fruition. Thanks also to Judith Langer for her assistance. The Lifespan Development of Writing is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Applebee.
T HE P ROJECT
C hapter O ne

Introduction
E very school year teachers greet new classes of learners assigned by age or stage or special need. We become experienced with the populations we teach and may learn to imagine the world through their eyes. The kindergartner, the English language learner, the prepubescent, the first-year college student, the adult basic learner: students we come to know well but whose pasts we have had no hand in and whose futures are as yet unmade. Educational researchers too tend to set up their inquiries around particular, recurring populations who drive the questions that the researchers ask and the understandings that they reach. We may readily grant that learning and development are lifelong, yet we stay focused—as we must—on the immediacies of our academic locations.
But the cyclical demands and institutional segmentations that mark the professional work of educators bring drawbacks. For one thing, they may lead to uncertainty as we try to mediate standards, curricula, or assessments that typically carry more abstract or less coherent assumptions about our students than those we bring from experience. Segmentation also may lead to unwarranted certainties about the decisions we do make—certainties that may inadvertently underestimate students’ capabilities or misidentify their accomplishments. Likewise, we may be de-prived of a full appreciation of our own teaching efforts as those efforts come to fruition—or sputter out—beyond the confines of a semester or an academic year. We also risk forgetting that learners experience their lives as a whole, in and out of school, with a past, a present, and an aspirational future. They take the long view even when we don't. Finally, segmented conditions lead to a professional knowledge base that is fragmented and pocked with unknowns.
Nowhere are these drawbacks more visible than in the realm of writing. Writing emerges early in life but can develop well into adulthood. Writing is a productive and performative capacity, akin to craft. It requires an integration of muscle, mind, knowledge, language(s), tools, and social worlds that are themselves in dynamic change across time. Writing is effortful and remains effortful at all ages. It takes time to learn and time to do. Learners may need to backtrack before moving on. Yet there is currently no adequate accepted theory of writing development that might inform the design of the school curriculum or motivate appropriate assessment practices across the years of formal education. We know too little about how writing develops before, during, and after schooling; too little about how a person's writing experiences relate to each other developmentally across the lifespan. Lifespan perspectives could go a long way in helping teachers and researchers across locations better pull together on behalf of writing literacy. The challenges are acute. Writing is at least as difficult to teach as to do. Yet, compared to reading, writing has been given short shrift in the professional preparation of most teachers, and writing instruction struggles for time in a crowded pedagogical agenda. It does not help that research on writing remains scattered across disciplines and that longitudinal writing studies in any discipline are rare. Still we know that students face a world where writing grows ever more integral to collective practices of learning, working, participating, and interacting with others—as well as to the systems of access and reward associated with each. T