Chapter 5: Ideas Unscrapped: Repurposing Metal to Support Identity Building in Writing

In the language arts methods courses that I teach, I regularly ask my preservice teachers to think about what it means to write to help them name their beliefs about writing. Often, these discussions are challenging and semester-long because they reveal a strong verbocentric ideology (Eco, 1976), the belief that language should be privileged over other ways of knowing, fertilized over the years by a steady diet of worksheets and fill-in-the-blank writing exercises. The overall effect of such writing practices can be seen in rather dismal past and current reports from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2012) where many children are below grade-level proficiency (Salahu-Din, Persky, & Miller, 2008), where writing has been deemed a neglected skill by the National Commission on Writing (NCOW, 2003) that continues to be a challenging subject area for teachers of writing (Graham & Harris, 2016).