Creating Civically Engaged Writing in a Cross-Cultural Teacher Education Class: Challenges and Possibilities

Abstract

This is an account of using blogging in a teacher education fieldwork seminar as an avenue for student entry into the public discourse about schooling, teaching, and learning. Students drew on their lived experiences and time spent in field placements in urban public schools in order to select an educational issue of interest to research and create a post about for a class blog. The assignment aimed to send the message that students' personal funds of knowledge were a valuable source for entering into the public conversation about education, while also serving as an engaging opportunity to learn about and apply some academic conventions for argumentative and expository writing. The students' responses to the assignment revealed how meaning-making about academic discourses is shaped by individual's social, cultural, and economic positionality and by the messages that positionality has generated about one's power and possibilities in society. Implications focus on the extent to which community college educators looking to make civically engaged writing an integral part of their coursework need to be very self-aware about their personally held notions about the purposes of academic discourse, what the cultural origins of those notions are, and what different notions students might hold, rooted in their own cultural experiences. Discussion addresses the need to create an open, inclusive classroom environment, in which diverse, divergent ideas flow freely, if students are to be encouraged to add their writerly voices to the civic conversation on an ongoing basis.