Addressing pre-service teachers as digital writers: Conflicts and inconsistencies in practice

Abstract

This article explores challenges faced when curriculum designers address pre-service English teachers as digital writers, in a “teacher as writer” program. The article considers the resilience of print dominance in writing, including in tertiary digital education spaces and how the rhetoric of digital expansion is accompanied by practices of proscription and constraint. While curriculum theory encourages pre-service teachers to think of themselves as agentive digital communicators, designers, and producers, their capacity to actually perform as digital writers during their formal studies may be limited. Teachers, meanwhile, may have ambivalent feelings about broadening definitions of writing. It seems that the entrenched nature of traditional literacies in education, despite rapid social change in broader communication media, results from a complex assemblage of generational and sexual politics, conservative or neoliberal agendas, and teacher workloads, capabilities and identities. The article invites others to consider contradictions in their own contexts.