Teachers as writers

Introduction Teachers who write have the capacity to 'weave worlds with words and wonder' (ALEA Conference theme, 2016) in ways that are powerful and interconnected. The context for this article is the 21st century, a time when traditional teaching practices are undergoing interrogation. As emerging and constantly changing technologies continually impact on the creation of texts and teaching and learning more generally, we wonder about their potential to change the way that the teaching of writing occurs, in ways that better reflect the new ways that people work, learn and communicate. This article forms part of a broader project entitled Teachers as writers that was designed to identify teachers' engagement in acts of writing inside and outside of schools. The Teachers as writers project was underpinned by the belief that teachers of writing need to develop a culture of risk-taking in writing and that this should be modelled by teachers for the benefit of their students. Sternberg (1997) argues that, for the most part, schools discourage risk-taking. However, we believe that if teachers engage in what Boler (1999) calls a 'pedagogy of discomfort' (p. 175), they may be better placed to help children handle uncertainty, reduce their reliance on formulas or templates for writing, and be more inclined to take the risks that are a necessary part of creating texts (Cremin, 2006). We believe that it is a worthwhile activity to explore teachers' personal engagement in writing in order to understand what, where and when teachers write. The question about what teachers write investigates the types of text that teachers who write create and the formats in which they publish these texts. The where looks at the physical locations in which teachers go about their writing. Finally, the when considers how teachers find time to engage in their writing. Teaching writing is complex work. By exploring what, when and where teachers write, we hope to offer an insight into the kinds of writing in which our teachers engage, while being conscious of the potential influences of teacher behaviours (such as creating text) on the teaching of writing in classrooms in the 21st century. Teachers publishing their writing Teachers, and the rest of society, are now positioned at a unique time in history, at a time when a range of opportunities for writers to publish has emerged. In particular, Web 2.0 and self-publishing have led to a myriad of opportunities to write and publish and to reach audiences previously unimagined. New and innovative text formats are now available, including online publishing with its associated multimedia and hypermodality. Lemke (2002) defined hypermodality as 'the new interactions of word, image, and sound-based meanings' (p. 300). Amber Johnson (2016) explains how in 'the digital world, hypermodality suggests that there are very unique and complex ways in which links, texts, images, and sound talk interact, point, and overlap' (p. 198). These new literary environments provide media rich spaces in which to read, write and communicate (Leu, O'Byrne, Zawilinski, McVerry, & Everett-Cacopardo, 2009). We wanted to understand the motivation of teachers as writers: What is the purpose and which audience do they have in mind when they construct their texts? What opportunities (the where and when) do they take to engage with writing? We also wanted to explore the experiences of individual teachers and then extrapolate these to the collective experience of teachers as writers, borrowing loosely from the traditions of phenomenology (Finlay, 2012). Phenomenology aims to describe (and thus reveal general meanings and structures) and then interpret. Finlay (2012) argues that an interpretation is about taking what has been described and exploring this description through a range of sociocultural lenses to understand the 'phenomena' within the context in which it is being experienced. …