“Starting with What Is”: Exploring Response and Responsibility to Student Writing through Collaborative Inquiry

Abstract

This article examines student teachers’ investigations of issues related to writing pedagogy, response, and evaluation in an English methods course, including their use of descriptive review of student writing (Carini, 2001) to analyze adolescents’ work collaboratively. Beginning with an examination of prevailing understandings of writing assessment and common instructional models in schools, the article explores critical inquiry–based approaches. This research documents how collaborative investigations encouraged student teachers to explore meaning and intentionality in student writing and to regard students as authors with intentionality and purpose. Findings substantiate adolescents’ and student teachers’ intellectual and experiential resources, suggesting how these can be a foundation for expanding conceptions and practices related to writing pedagogy, assessment, inquiry-based teaching, and teacher education.