The teaching of writing in theory and practice at teacher education programs in Finland and Sweden

Description

In school, pupils need to enhance writing proficiency in different school subjects as writing is not a generic competence but disciplinary specific. An important challenge is to prepare student teachers for their future teaching of writing. This paper presents insights from a pilot study in primary teacher education programs at two universities, in Finland and in Sweden. In the pilot study a model for Reflective Observation of School writing (ROS model; Sturk, 2022) has been used with the aim to prepare student teachers for the teaching of writing across disciplines. Theories of discourses of writing (Ivanič, 2004, 2017) and multimodal theories (Kress, 2010) were used and understood in practice through observations. Originally, Ivanic’s framework did not include a multimodal perspective on writing; the ROS model with a multimodal perspective was implemented in the fall of 2022 and included lectures, seminars, and classroom observations in school practice. The data used in this presentation are student teachers’ examinations and observations protocols, and three university lecturers research notes.

Preliminary results suggests that there are benefits and challenges with the model. The ROS model has potential to provide the student teachers with tools to analyze and reflect over the teaching of writing,
and the reflective seminar seemingly provides the student teachers a scaffolded opportunity to develop a common terminology to talk about the teaching of writing across disciplines. We are interested in
discussing the challenge of framing multimodal perspectives on writing. This will help us to develop the research project.

Period	8 Jun 2023
Event title	LITUM-symposium
Event type	Seminar
Location	Umeå, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International