Teaching writing through co-design with rural teachers: An arts-based collaborative autoethnographic reflection

Teaching writing through co-design with rural teachers: An arts-based collaborative autoethnographic reflection

This chapter presents a collaborative autoethnography from two writing professional learning projects conducted in rural schools in Queensland, Australia, and Wyoming, USA. Both professional learning projects used co-design alongside teachers to teach writing to children in primary classrooms. The Australian case shares data about how arts-based approaches to multimodal writing or composing were encouraged, in line with the Australian Curriculum and Common Core standards. Wyoming teachers sought to improve students’ writing using mentor writing texts, promoting informal daily writing, and drawing on Harris et al.’s (2008) approach to self-regulated strategy development. Using collaborative autoethnography, we share reflections from those involved in the professional learning at both schools using arts-based approaches such as photo elicitation and poetry. Teachers’ voices revealed that co-design can be a powerful way to support teachers’ classroom writing instruction. Teachers found working alongside outside professional learning colleagues in the classroom helped them to reclaim their professional agency and see improved writing engagement from students. They also found that both targeted and arts-based approaches supported their work in teaching writing. Teachers expressed the need for more co-designed professional learning opportunities. Implications from these cases show that professional learning collaborations, aligned with ALEA’s Declaration, can promote educational change and simultaneously improves student writing.

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