How pre-service teachers' initial responses to high school writers help shape their teaching identities

This qualitative study explores the relationship between six pre-service teachers' attitudes and beliefs about writing, writing instruction, and responding to student writing, and the strategies they chose to employ in providing feedback to high school students as part of a field experience component of an introductory course in secondary writing instruction at a southeastern university. The study was intended to discover if a correspondence obtained between the pre-service teachers' stated attitudes and beliefs and the methods and strategies they utilized in working with their high school writing partners. Additional targets of inquiry include the pre-service teachers' negotiations of their concurrent positions as students and teachers towards the development of their professional identities as well as the perceptions of the high school students of the pre-service teachers' methods of responding. Social Positioning Theory was utilized as an interpretive lens for discovering how pre-service teachers and their high school counterparts were negotiating rights and responsibilities during the revision process.;Three data sources were utilized: (1) a 50-item Likert-style survey/questionnaire with seven open-ended questions, administered pre- and post- semester, (2) copies of essays or creative research pieces (two drafts per participant) written by the high school students and marked and commented upon by the pre-service teachers, and (3) audiotaped interviews of all pre-service teacher and high school student participants, conducted after the field experiences. Methods of analyses included coding the Likert-Style surveys for patterns in dispositions towards writing and instruction, using HyperResearch software to organize and code the interview transcripts, and classifying/interpreting the pre-service teachers' written commentary utilizing two reflective models that represent "teacher/student responsibility for revision" and "degrees of control.";Although there was a correspondence between the stated attitudes and beliefs and response styles in four of the six cases, it was discovered that the pre-service teachers' backgrounds as student writers were more reliable as indicators of their initial response strategies, obtaining a correspondence in all six cases. In two cases, pre-service teachers working with reluctant writers altered their response strategies from their stated attitudes and beliefs between the first and second drafts (and first and second writing conferences). These changes in strategy and methods indicate that instructional circumstances can supersede attitudes and beliefs as markers for instructional practice where novice teachers interpret classroom contexts as being limiting or otherwise uncertain. In only two of the six cases does a correspondence obtain between the pre-service teachers' written commentary on the high school students' assignments and their willingness to position themselves as "teacher" during the writing conferences, indicating that written response is only one of several factors in determining how pre-service teachers' are negotiating their developing identities in the classroom. Implications for writing instruction and teacher education are discussed.