Chapter 5: Challenges and Transformations: Using Narratives to Forefront Writing Pedagogy

This paper examines challenges and transformations preservice elementary school teachers and I experienced while participating in a Teacher Action Research (TAR) project as part of an elementary (K through eighth grade) Language Arts Writing Methods university course I taught. I looked for factors in the course content that helped or hindered preservice teacher participants to engage in collaborative research forefronting narrative writing as primary writing pedagogy with which to teach poetry, narrative (genre), essay, and expository writing. I also searched the data for places of transformation, places where participants’ teacher discourse about teaching children to write changed or evidenced a transformation-in-process through their participation in the project.