Abstract
Writing groups in teacher education typically focus on providing faculty, usually junior faculty, with a supportive environment to share their work and to help one another create publishable manuscripts and/or improve teaching practices. Writing groups, however, are also about engaging in the act of writing in both personal and professional ways alongside others. In this collaborative autoethnography, we explored how we, three ELA teacher educators, made sense of ourselves the world around us through a writing group focused on writing as self-service and witness. We portray this exploration in the form of a collage that pieces together our writing, transcripts from the group conversations, and discussion notes. Across those collages, we found value in the opportunity to write in ways that served us at the time, even if that meant the writing was not in service to our students or institution. We also found value in having others witness our writing because it provided support, validation, and motivation. Implications provide permission and guidance for creating faculty writing groups focused on self-service and witness and recommendations for engaging in collaborative autoethnographic research within these groups to better understand how and why they work.
Recommended Citation
Donovan, Sarah; Vetter, Amy; and Shanahan, Eileen PhD
(2024)
"Writing as (Self) Service and Witness: Exploring the Experience of a Teacher Educator Writing Group,"
Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education: Vol. 12:
Iss.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/wte/vol12/iss1/5
Included in
Higher Education and Teaching Commons, Other Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons