Reading and writing in graduate teacher education. Learning processes reported in portfolios in a master's thesis proposal writing seminar

CARLINO, PAULA; RONI, CAROLINA

Chicago

Congreso; College Composition and Communication Conference; 2023

National Council of Teachers of English

Our study aims todescribe and characterize the process that students go through in the ThesisProposal Writing Seminar of a Master´s Degree in Teacher Education. Themaster´s students are teachers with years of professional practice, althoughwith no or little experience in research. The master´s degree requires them toengage in the research on professional educational practices through a finalthesis with specific theoretical and methodological characteristics. They haveto observe and analyze the professional activity (challenges and learning) ofan educator (teacher, school principal, librarian, advisor, etc.) in aworkplace situation.In the thesisproposal writing seminar, which lasts for a year and a half, participants aretherefore confronted with new social practices, typical of communities thatproduce knowledge in education. They begin to explore these practicesespecially when they face the written elaboration of a thesis proposal in thewriting seminar. The seminar accompanies the process through multiple ways, inparticular collective oral discussions of their successive drafts. Joining thisnew community of practice, with their typical ways of doing,reasoning, writing and valuing their tasks, entails a great deal of dedicationfrom all participants, with attempts and reattempts, full of tensions. Theseminar guides and supports them so that they begin to participate in thesepractices through the elaboration of their thesis proposals and the reflectionon the tasks involved.Our research aimsto characterize this process. To do so, we will start with the content analysisof the portfolios submitted by the master´s students at the end of the seminar.These portfolios include a selection of written drafts and accounts of situationsexperienced in the seminar that they consider particularly significant for theadvancement of their thesis proposals, as well as a reflective justification ofwhy they have selected them. Based on their points of view, we will study thesituations they have chosen, for which we will examine the correspondingdocumentary and observational material: video recording of sessions, drafts ofthe proposal, written participation in the virtual platform, etc. The analysiswill relate a) the selection of significant moments made by the students intheir portfolios, together with their reflection on these moments, and b) thesituations pertaining to the seminar to which they refer in the portfolios.The results ofthis study will thus contribute to understanding the processes of teacherprofessional development (the constructive activity) involved in theelaboration of a research proposal (the productive activity). This genre istypical of research domains and unused in the teaching profession. We aim toidentify the challenges and tensions that students experience, and thefacilitating resources that help them in their way.          ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////            Access Full text at: https://wac.colostate.edu/community/international-writing-studies/2023-cccc-workshop/Paper presented at the International Researchers Consortium Workshop (2023 CCCC Workshop on International Research: Texts, Institutional Contexts, Framing Theories) as a pre-conference workshop at the College Composition and Communication Conference Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, 2023.Trabajo presentado en el taller del Consorcio Internacional de Investigadores (Taller sobre investigación internacional: "Textos, Contextos institucionales y Marcos teóricos"), como actividad pre-congreso, dentro del College Composition and Communication Conference Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, 2023.          ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////            https://www.aacademica.org/paula.carlino/310