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Abstract

Many writing initiatives have been advocated as ways to improve student writing. However, in order for teachers to successfully teach writing, they must be exposed to a variety of classroom-tested approaches (National Writing Project, 2003).With this in mind, a summer teaching writing course that met at a local high school combined the study of several approaches to teaching writing and field-based teaching and then employed one classroom-tested approach. Using Wenger’s (1998, 2010) communities of practice model, the teaching and learning about writing instruction centered on “practice” within the community and emphasized that preservice teachers act as social participants--that is, meaning-making entities for whom social worlds were a resource for constituting their identities as practitioners. The guiding questions for this research were: (1) How does a community of practice model contribute to preservice writing teacher development? and (2) How does the community of practice model support preservice teachers’ understanding of teaching writing? An analysis of preservice teachers’ reflections, interviews, course artifacts and observations illustrate the process of the community of practice and reveal that their participation in the community of practice invited them to learn through collaboration and reflection, reified their participation and accountability to the field, and developed their teaching repertoires through identity development focused on realignment.

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