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Pedagogy 5.2 (2005) 339-344



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Finding Connections, Seeking Reciprocity:

Toward an Inclusive Community of Writing Teachers—Kindergarten to College and Beyond

[Works Cited for Roundtable]
The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (and They're All Hard Parts). By Katie Wood Ray (with Lester Laminack). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001.
My hope is that The Writing Workshop is a book that offers teachers of writing things to think about with the work they are already trying in their classrooms or getting ready to try. These reflections are meant to help teachers both to confirm the work they are doing and to problematize it.
(Ray 2001: xiii)

Katie Wood Ray's The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (and They're All Hard Parts) is an important book that has affected my work both as a teacher educator and as a teacher of composition. It has helped innumerable current and future elementary teachers learn, develop, and revise their craft as teachers of writing. But I have to confess that this roundtable isn't as much about Katie Wood Ray's text as it is about the disciplinary [End Page 339] issues that surround it. The roundtable is a call for teachers of composition at all developmental levels to recognize the value of their peers at other levels, both above and below them in the hierarchy of education. Specifically, the writers of this roundtable focus on the issues that control who has access to this text, who finds it valuable, and how that text is used, seen, or left unread by various members of the community of teachers of writing. This roundtable is a small exercise in developing a community of teachers, both in college English and elsewhere, composed of those who value the teaching of writing as a global proposition—one that doesn't make distinctions between the values that guide the teaching of writing in the elementary school and those that guide teaching in colleges and universities.

Two schools of exclusive scholarship about the teaching of writing currently exist, comprising those within the realm of composition studies and those who are lumped into the category of English education. These two worlds of teaching writing exist with similar goals, common cores of theory, and parallel pedagogies. Yet, with a few notable local exceptions, these worlds have minimal interaction, both physically and theoretically. As a result, there is minimal cross-curricular interaction across developmental levels.

Scholars and practitioners in each realm are not as different as they are first led to believe by their varying contexts and day-to-day responsibilities. We can and should develop cross-developmental conversations about teaching writing. Elementary teachers have much to teach college composition scholars about the ways to build a classroom of shared learning. Likewise, college composition specialists can enrich the teaching of elementary, middle, and high school teachers via their active knowledge of theory and other elements of composition studies. It is the role of English educators with backgrounds in both composition and education to serve as a conduit for all fields to find a border zone where teaching writing is discussed and valued, regardless of developmental level.

In my professional life, I walk the border in the professional world of composition studies. I am all at once an English educator, a composition scholar, a writing project director, a writing program administrator, a rhetorician, and, occasionally, a middle school teacher and literacy specialist. Once in a while, I even find myself falling back on my preparation and graduate course work in professional and technical writing. I tend to be summed up as a "writing teacher educator," a term describing those whose primary work lies in translating the disciplinary knowledge of composition studies for an audience of teachers and future teachers at all levels. Although this is a convenient title, it still leaves significant gaps. [End Page 340]

I began graduate school as a composition scholar. I soon found myself in a foreign land. It quickly became clear that my professional...

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