Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
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Teaching and Teacher Education
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate
Teachers’ talk on students’ writing: Negotiating students’ texts in interdisciplinary
teacher teams
Kristin Helstad*, Andreas Lund 1
Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1099, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 7 April 2011
Received in revised form
6 January 2012
Accepted 9 January 2012
This paper examines how a team of teachers in a Norwegian upper secondary school responds to,
negotiates, and evaluates students’ writing in and across different disciplines. The purpose is to identify
discourse strategies and professional development as the teachers discuss students’ texts, and to explore
how the teachers develop a shared understanding of how writing relates to students’ learning. The
findings show how the teachers’ discourse reflects an emerging understanding of how writing is both
a subject-specific and interdisciplinary skill conducive to learning, but also how institutional traditions
and discipline-specific concerns together allow for and constrain teachers’ learning.
Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Teachers’ learning
Students’ writing
Intersubjectivity
Interaction analysis
1. Introduction
The study presented in this paper examines how a team of
experienced Norwegian teachers in an upper secondary school
responds to, negotiates, and evaluates students’ texts in and across
different school subjects. The interdisciplinary team of teachers
was established in order to develop professional knowledge about
writing practices. The project, which is both a school development
project and a research project, ran for two years (2007e2009) in
close collaboration between the teachers, an expert on writing, and
the principal of the school. The rationale for the school project is
found in an increasing international interest in writing research
across subjects (Bazerman, Little, Bethel, Chavkin, Fouquette, &
Garufis, 2005) and how such research can benefit teacher development (Troia, Shankland, & Heintz, 2010). One local example is the
Norwegian Knowledge Promotion Curriculum from 2006 (K06) in
which writing is defined as one of five basic skills to be integrated in
all disciplines. This curriculum reflects an international trend
where writing is regarded as a strategy for domain-specific learning
and communication (Newell, 2006).
Developing professional learning about writing across the
disciplines is a complex endeavor because it involves teachers
traversing the boundaries between the specific school subjects they
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ47 22 85 40 66.
E-mail addresses: [email protected]
intermedia.no (A. Lund).
1
Tel.: þ47 22 85 50 68.
(K.
Helstad),
andreas.lund@
0742-051X/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tate.2012.01.004
teach. This represent a challenge because, as one language teacher
in the Norwegian project put it in a response to a March 2009
questionnaire, “we found that teachers placed emphasis on very
different things when they taught writing, and the students
thought this was confusing.”2 In order to help develop a shared
understanding of writing in and across disciplines, an expert on
writing was invited to engage with and assist the team. Thus, the
initiative came from the teachers, who recognized an opportunity
for engaging an expert to take part in and assist them in their
professional development. In this way, the project also gained
a research dimension, as the expert brought research colleagues
into the project to study how teachers advanced their learning
while working with students’ texts.
The purpose of the research project that forms the basis of this
study was to identify teachers’ emerging knowledge of writing and
their discourse strategies when negotiating their perceptions of
students’ texts, and to explore the ways teachers cooperated as they
developed a shared understanding of writing across school
subjects. Teachers’ learning was assumed, in turn, to increase their
repertoire of instructional skills. The present paper examines how
the practitioners, with the support from the expert, explored and
developed their knowledge through talk in regular meetings where
students’ texts were discussed. In addition, we draw on interviews
2
Translated from Norwegian by the authors.
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K. Helstad, A. Lund / Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
and teachers’ reflection logs3 in order to contextualize the
moment-to-moment interactions.
In Section 1.1, we present our research questions before
describing the context of the study. In Sections 2 and 3 we review
relevant research literature before turning to the conceptual
framework in Section 4. Next, we move on to the research design in
Section 5 and the findings in Section 6. Finally, we discuss and
conclude in Sections 7 and 8, where we address implications of the
study.
1.1. Rationale and research questions
Support for teachers’ professional development has been
undergoing change from a typical short-course approach to a more
longitudinal and collaborative approach related to workplace
learning (Eraut, 2007; Schecter, 2010). However, much of the
literature on this matter is still prescriptive or normative (Little,
Gearhart, Curry, & Kafka, 2003). In particular, there is a lack of
research that investigates what is going on ‘inside’ teacher
communities and the interactions and dynamics through which
professional communities constitute conditions for learning (Little,
2003; Meirink, Meijer, & Verloop, 2007; Nelson, Slavit, Perkins, &
Hathorn, 2008; Scribner, Sawyer, Watson, & Myers, 2007). Thus,
the community might be overlooked as a dialogic resource for
professional development. In addition, while many studies are
based on teachers’ self-reporting on what they say about their
work, few studies focus closely on what teachers say in their work
settings (Havnes, 2009; Little et al., 2003). In the present study, we
focus on teachers’ talk and analyze teachers’ experiences as
constituting professional learning. Hence, we address both what
teachers say in and about their work.
In the context of professional development, the work of the
teachers in this study may be seen as an example of what is referred
to as a teacher learning community, a concept which rests on the
premise that students’ learning can be improved through the
development of teachers’ deeper insights about their own practices
(McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008).
Lieberman and Pointer Mace (2009) emphasized the role of
accomplished, experienced teachers in teacher learning communities and claimed that lasting professional development must
begin with what teachers already know and do, as is the case in our
study. In this paper, we draw on data from the project period
(2007e2009) in order to capture development, while the empirical
focus is on selected episodes from one of a total of 13 team
meetings during the project period in order to capture and
analyze seminal moments of discourse and interactions among
the participants.
Together, the longitudinal nature of the writing project and the
specific episodes we captured with more interactional detail
allowed us to pursue the following research questions:
In what ways are subject-specific student texts perceived,
negotiated, and evaluated by an interdisciplinary team of
teachers?
What are the implications for teachers’ professional
development?
In order to respond to these questions, we examine negotiations
that emerge in a learning community where the teachers hold
different subject-specific perspectives. We do this by analyzing the
dynamics of the talk and how artifacts such as students’ texts open
3
Teachers’ reflection logs refer to teachers’ responses to questions raised by the
researcher via e-mail after meetings in the interdisciplinary group.
new horizons for observations and actions (Edwards, 2005; Little,
2003). While the focus of the analysis is on micro-level interactions, we seek to understand these in their context in order to
visualize the institutional aspects of talk (Mäkitalo & Säljö, 2002).
1.2. Context of the study
Fagerbakken is a Norwegian upper secondary school with 60
teachers and approximately 600 students. The school enjoys a good
reputation, the teachers are highly qualified, and the student
results are above national average. Previously, there have been only
a few attempts at collaboration across disciplines; generally,
teachers have been organized in subject-centered units. However,
some of the teachers wanted their work to be more studentcentered and interdisciplinary. With support from the principal,
they took the initiative to cooperate with a university expert. This
resulted in establishing a writing team consisting of 11 experienced
teachers and the expert. The writing team met regularly, at least
once a month, to discuss students’ texts and issues of writing across
the disciplines. The subject domains of Norwegian as a first
language, foreign languages, history, and natural sciences were
represented in the teacher team.
2. Teachers’ work in upper secondary schools
Secondary schools are organizations where teachers generally
are subject specialists organized in subject-centered departments.
Recently, many upper secondary schools have introduced interdisciplinary teams alongside subject-centered teams (Crow &
Pounder, 2000; Havnes, 2009; Svedberg, 2009). The Norwegian
project on writing across the curriculum is one example of such
a trend. However, adopting such an approach challenges some of
the traditional, subject-specific aspects of schooling.
On an institutional level, the teachers’ work is related to local
rules and regulations, as well as to national education acts. In a less
formal but nevertheless institutional way, teachers’ daily work is
also closely related to that of their colleagues, even though the
traditions for collaborating on learning issues in upper secondary
schools are weak (Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006; McLaughlin &
Talbert, 2006). Thus while doing similar work, upper secondary
teachers belong to distinctive subject cultures characterized by
different norms and practices. Grossman and Stodolsky (1995)
emphasized that an understanding of subject-matter differences
is crucial in the analysis and reform of secondary schools, since
subject-matter shapes professional identity, and the distinctive
features of each school subject create a conceptual context within
which teachers work. The present study shares this position.
Despite the fact that the Norwegian K06 curriculum makes all
teachers responsible for improving students’ writing, the teachers
do not necessarily regard themselves as writing teachers. Although
the teachers in the present study are experts on their own subjects,
they are unfamiliar with subject content and writing traditions in
other fields, which offer different empirical as well as conceptual
contexts. While cooperation across disciplines is rare in upper
secondary schools, it is often met with skepticism (McLaughlin &
Talbert, 2006; Øgreid & Hertzberg, 2009).
3. Interdisciplinary teacher teams
Teacher teams in and across subject departments are examples
of teacher collaboration forms established with the intention of
transforming the traditional, individualized structure of teaching in
which teachers are accustomed to teaching each a school subject as
an isolated field (Shulman & Sherin, 2004). Hence in many countries, teacher team structures have been implemented as part of
K. Helstad, A. Lund / Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
school improvements to promote a more collaborative mode of
teaching and a more comprehensive education for students.
McLaughlin and Talbert (2006) demonstrated that fomenting
collegiality is challenging, and they claimed that strong learning
communities are not common in US high schools. Still, as recent
literature shows, departments remain important organizational
units as long as they function effectively (Lomos, Hofman, & Bosker,
2011).
The typical interdisciplinary teacher team is composed of core
subject academic teachers (e.g., foreign languages and social
studies) communicating across subject-specific boundaries (Little,
2002). Because they involve most school faculty, such teams may
hold great promise for significant school reform because they may
bring about the development of an interdisciplinary approach to
the curriculum and provide coordinated communication in the
entire school (Crow & Pounder, 2000). Thus, an interdisciplinary
teacher team functions as a community where subject teachers
collaborate to develop teaching that incorporates the team’s
collective disciplinary knowledge. For instance, the interaction
between a science teacher and a teacher of history is grounded in
their complementary expertise. Consequently, the teachers’ interactions might be analyzed in terms of the teachers’ diversity of
expertise, i.e., interdisciplinarity is socially distributed in the team
(Havnes, 2009; Scribner et al., 2007).
While several studies express the concern that departmental
structures in upper secondary schools might fragment teachers’
work (Hargreaves & Goodson, 2006; Visscher & Witziers, 2004),
there are fewer studies that explicitly address interdisciplinary
teams in upper secondary schools. One example is Grossman,
Wineburg, and Woolworth (2001) who described a project that
brought together 22 English and Social Studies teachers from an
urban high school over a period of two and a half years, in which
the teachers met regularly to create an interdisciplinary curriculum.
The researchers found that the challenges involved in community
formation amounted to a need to negotiate tensions between the
two groups of teachers. In another study, Little et al. (2003) found
that interdisciplinary teams in U.S. high schools who explored
student work as an object for learning was conducive to professional development.
Research findings related to teacher teams in general reveal
a multifaceted picture. For instance, Pounder (1999) found that
teachers working in teams reported more professional commitment and higher levels in a range of skills, whereas Meirink et al.
(2007) found that teachers collaborating in teams reported on
changes in teaching methods. Also, the findings showed that
teachers who experimented with new teaching methods felt
insecure about newly acquired methods and, therefore, sought
confirmation from their colleagues. Furthermore, although the
concept of community often invokes images of consensus,
Achinstein (2002) showed that when teachers seek to enact
collaborative improvement, what emerges is often conflict. How
teachers manage conflicts and negotiate different positions,
whether they suppress or embrace their differences, defines the
community borders and the potential for learning. The difficulty of
establishing strong teacher learning communities is a general
concern across national boundaries, school systems and cultures, as
well as between subject-specific and interdisciplinary teams
(Havnes, 2009; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006). As Little (2002)
pointed out, we have yet to uncover an instance of a comprehensive high school in which professionals have sought to strengthen
their professional community both within and across subject
departments. In addition, Jackson and Temperly (2008) claimed
that professional learning communities within schools have limitations, depending on the participants and the kinds of resources
they have access to.
601
Recent studies of teachers’ learning in collaborative settings
have emphasized the importance of facilitators or experts that
help the teachers to maintain the focus on the goal of improving
practice (Åberg & Kroksmark, 2007; Hollins, McIntyre, DeBose,
Hollins, & Towner, 2004). In a study that analyzed teachers’
representations of classroom practices, Little (2003) cautioned
against the limited nature of teacher-led collaborative teams. After
analyzing the language of teachers in high school Math and
English departments, she warned that teacher learning communities could be limited by their own “horizons of observation” (p.
917), and made a strong argument for taking steps to ensure that
professional learning communities broaden the scope of their
inquiries. This view is supported by Edwards (2005), who called
for a capacity for teachers to collaborate and draw on resources
that may be distributed across systems and across professional
boundaries.
In the current study, the teachers are exposed to outside
perspectives as they collaborate with an expert on writing who is
a professor in Norwegian language education. In addition to conducting her own research related to the writing project, the expert’s
role is to support and facilitate the work and contribute her
knowledge whenever requested or she identifies a need for it.
4. Theoretical framework
Mediated activity (the use of artifacts and engaging in talk) is
central to a sociocultural perspective on learning and meaningmaking (Vygotsky, 1986; Wertsch, 1998). As this study aims to
investigate how teachers advance their professional knowledge by
engaging in talk related to learners’ written texts, such a perspective offers a conceptual framework with explanatory power. More
specifically, this study draws on a dialogical perspective in which
human beings are considered interdependent and where such
interdependence is reflected in shared experiences, actions, and
utterances and where interactions, activities, and contexts are key
concepts (Linell, 2009). The teachers’ micro-level talk in their situated interactions is also examined in light of the more longitudinal project and institutional factors, such as school subject
traditions and the teachers’ historical position as subject specialists
in schools.
4.1. Meaning-making as intersubjectivity
The construction of meaning in interaction evolves through the
use of language; language is the most important mediational
means available (Wertsch, 1998). The words we speak have
meaning potential, and the language we use shapes and constitutes
an intersubjective world through dialogic, situated practice.
Koschmann (1999, p. 103) linked meaning-making to the term
‘intersubjectivity’, and referred specifically to Matusov (1996)
regarding its use. Matusov claimed that in the traditional definition of intersubjectivity, agreement among participants is overemphasized, while disagreement is de-emphasized. In Matusov’s
view, the question is not so much how understanding between
people becomes possible, but rather what forms dynamic understanding can take and how these processes are embedded in larger
practices (1996). Intersubjectivity not only involves commonality,
but also the coordination of participants’ contributions with an
emphasis on human agency. Thus, intersubjectivity evokes
disagreement as well as agreement; monolithic agreement or
‘groupthink’ is not considered to be a productive force when
making meaning of a less familiar phenomenon or developing new
knowledge. In the present study, disagreement about how to
perceive texts from diverse subject domains might be understood
as a part of the teachers’ professional work and ongoing discourse,
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and, as such, as part of their agency in meaning-making efforts.
Such agency is also closely connected to the coordination of diverse
contributions from interlocutors.
As intersubjectivity also involves disagreement, negotiation
becomes essential in order to achieve some common understanding across different positions. In this sense, negotiations are
significant resources for exploring and deepening interlocutors’
collective and professional knowledge. In activity-theoretical
terms, such knowledge can be seen as the object of the negotiation activity. This object is what gives direction to the negotiation,
while at the same time it is shaped by the activities participants
engage in. In particular, negotiation is required when the object of
the activity is unstable and resists attempts at control and standardization. Consequently, the object is always emerging but
manifests itself in different instantiations as the activity unfolds
(Kaptelinin, 2005).
However, intersubjectivity does not only emerge through
micro-level interaction. When teachers talk, they enter the flow
of communication in a stream that connects both history and the
future (Mäkitalo & Säljö, 2002). From a sociocultural view, what
teachers say and how they say it is not just an in situ concern,
but this also connects to traditions and norms in the professional
cultures teachers share. Hence, how teachers act and speak
in a particular context is understood in the light of institutional
and subject-oriented traditions (Grossman & Stodolsky, 1995;
Neumann, Parry, & Becher, 2002). Stable communicative practices
versus in situ talk are interpreted as a matter of trying to connect
‘macro’ (social structures) with ‘micro’ (talk) or, alternatively, the
‘historical’ with the ‘present’. For example, as the teachers in our
study engaged in interaction, they invoked aspects of the institutional context by referring to long-established practices of
what writing involved in the different disciplines they taught.
5. Research design
The research design of the present study rests partly on
ethnographic fieldwork from 13 meetings in the interdisciplinary
team over a two year period (2007e2009) and partly on interaction
analyses of specific episodes in these meetings. The corpus data
consists of observations in the form of field notes and audiorecorded data from meetings, as well as six interviews with
participants, logs written by four of the teachers during spring
2009, responses to questionnaires, and document analyses (syllabi
and policy documents). In this paper, the empirical analyses focus
primarily on moment-to-moment discourse in three selected
excerpts from discussions in the teacher team. These excerpts
are then examined in light of participants’ reflections in interviews
and logs.
In our analysis of the audio-recorded data and interviews, we
draw on interaction analysis (IA) (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). In IA,
a fundamental assumption is that knowledge emerges in interactions among members of a particular community, mediated by talk
but also mediated by the artifacts they use. In this study, the
students’ written texts are such artifacts. However, as Mäkitalo and
Säljö (2002) pointed out, analysis of talk and use of artifacts must
also include what participants invest in the activity, what they
assume, and what might be at stake. IA represents a multi-level
approach to capturing learning and development. Although originally developed with video recordings in mind, we have found IA
useful for audio-taped recordings as well, especially since IA allows
researchers to capture the complexity and dynamics of human
interaction.
The selections from the corpus data analyzed in this paper
qualify as dialogic episodes (Lund, 2004; Nystrand, 1997). Such
episodes constitute the unit of analysis, i.e., the analytic focus that
serves to capture seminal moments as well as the temporality of
talk. The choice of a suitable unit of analysis always implies
a balance between high detail and comprehensiveness, of being too
narrow to capture the whole corpus and too broad to capture
important micro events. At both extremes, unit choice involves
reductionism. We seek a compromise on such concerns by choosing
the dialogic episode as our unit of analysis, because dialog literally
means ‘through words’, and the dialogic episodes in this study are
understood as a specific type of situated and relational social
practice.
Furthermore, what delimits the dialogic episode used in the
present study is, on the one hand, dialogic features that signal
negotiation and emerging intersubjectivity, and, on the other hand,
features that make the relationships between meaning-making on
the micro-level and institutional awareness and concerns visible.
These two sets of features define and delimit this unit of analysis. At
the same time, these features form the criteria for our selection of
episodes. They have been selected as different instantiations of the
object under construction e understanding writing as learning
(Kaptelinin, 2005). Consequently, such episodes are not merely
illustrations or examples of a phenomenon, but should be seen as
empirical carriers of the analysis. They are not statistically generalizable, but they are arguably analytically generalizable. This is
because the results generated from one episode, grounded in
analysis of similarities and differences, could guide or give input for
another situation.
The selected episodes are collected from one meeting during the
second year of the project in order to unpack in some detail what
went on at a specific time. The episodes reflect participants’ various
degrees of familiarity with different school subjects, institutional
aspects, approaches to resources (e.g., concepts and learners’ texts),
and how such issues shape the perceptions and negotiations among
the team members.
While the dialogic episodes were selected in order to visualize
negotiations and emerging intersubjectivity, we also sought to
document the possible transformation of teachers’ professional
knowledge over time through selected excerpts from interviews
and teachers’ written reflections. These selections were made and
categorized based on their summarizing characteristics, i.e., when
participants take stock of the process, point to what they have
learned, persistent problems, or the influence of the expert over
time. Together, these excerpts are intended to illuminate the
teachers’ subjective learning experiences. The situational documentation is juxtaposed with the more longitudinal documentation in order to capture the object as instantiations (episodes) and
how participants reflect upon it. These two documentation types
are mutually constitutive of the object, which is to understand
writing in and across disciplines as a specific type of student
learning and to develop teachers’ professionalism through this
understanding.
6. Episodes from a meeting in the writing team
The meetings in the writing team usually consisted of
a discussion of students’ texts and a discussion of specific issues
related to writing in general, e.g., how to treat references and
sources in texts, argumentation strategies, text structures, and
different types of genres in the subjects. One or two of the teachers
always brought students’ texts from their own classes to the
meetings. In the following episodes, Cecilie (teacher) presents
chemistry reports from her class. The students’ reports appear in
two versions: a draft that Cecilie has commented on and the final,
revised versions from the students. The reports have been assessed
by Cecilie and handed back to the students with grades and
comments.
K. Helstad, A. Lund / Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
In the three episodes that follow in Sections 6.1e6.3, we meet
five of the 11 teachers in the writing team and the expert, Frida,4
a professor and an acknowledged authority on writing. Cecilie
and Ragnhild are teachers of natural sciences, Tora is a teacher of
English and the local project coordinator, Edith is a teacher of
history, and Liv is a teacher of Norwegian as a first language. The
team has gathered in a classroom at Fagerbakken upper secondary
school one early morning in October 2008. They sit in a circle
behind desks. Tora, the chairperson, welcomes and introduces the
day’s agenda: a discussion of chemistry reports from Cecilia’s class,
followed by participants’ reflections on a specific genre, and
students’ reflection logs from their writing processes.
6.1. Episode 1: negotiating collaboration and plagiarism
1. Cecilie: If we look at text B, written by a minority-language
student, I have commented a lot on the first draft, and she
has written a much better report following my comments. In
the reflection, she comments on why the report is better. It
might be OK to examine this text. Maybe you need to read it?
2. (All readd4 minutes silence)
3. Cecilie: As I said, all the students have improved a great deal
from their first draft.
4. Liv: Do you know her?
5. Cecilie: I have spoken a lot with this student.
6. Liv: She has been good at using your comments.
7. Cecilie: She has been given such comments on many reports, so
it would be a mistake to believe that she has made corrections
based only on this report. She probably has learned something
from the other reports she has submitted as well.
8. Frida: What is her language background?
9. Cecilie: She is from the Philippines.
10. Edith: But Cecilie, I’m looking at the language in this theory
section, this must be something she has copied from someone,
the language in the first part e she can’t possibly have written
this herself, this must be copied?
11. Cecilie: Norwegian students probably do the same; it’s just not
that obvious.
12. Edith: That’s possible, but I was thinking more in relation to the
references and such.
13. Cecilie: I would think she has cooperated with Michelle, who
has the same language background, and that Michelle has
helped her with this text. But receiving help and collaborating
is allowed, isn’t it?
14. Edith (and others): Yes.
15. Cecilie: (laughs)
16. Tora: I’ll take control now. (Frida shows signs of wanting to say
something) Yes, Frida?
17. Frida: I find this change in language interesting, because it
reminds me of an English researcher who has worked a lot on
plagiarism in students’ texts. She has published a book and
knows a lot about it, and she says if we apply our own judgment as teachers to say, “she has probably taken this from
somewhere else, it differs too much from the rest of the text,” it
always affects people with native languages other than English
or those who have severe reading and writing difficulties,
because those who know the language well enough that they
also write the rest correctly, they may do this without anybody
noticing. Cecilie, you say that there are probably others who
have copied too?
18. Cecilie: This is a huge problem in this type of writing, but I
think we avoid some of it when we work in this way. It becomes
4
All the names are pseudonyms.
603
a process, when they have to work on the text again and revise
it, it becomes more difficult to simply copy and paste, since
there are traces of the first text in text two. This isn’t something
she has simply downloaded, but I haven’t spent a lot of time on
sources with these students. Wasn’t today’s theme reflection
logs?
The team articulates concerns related to characteristics of texts
written by non-native students, possible plagiarism, and collaboration with peers. These issues are mediated by the artifact, i.e., the
chemistry report (Text B). For example, when Edith, in turn 10,
invokes the issue of plagiarism, it is triggered by the concrete text:
“I’m looking at the language in this theory section.” Also, in turn 17,
the expert (Frida) uses the elements of the artifact (“.this change
in language.”) to move from a specific example to more general
issues of equity and fairness, namely when minority students
struggle to achieve the accepted genre requirements in a chemistry
report. Such artifact (text)-mediated discourse permeates the
episode. Cecilie wants the team to focus on Text B, mainly to show
how the student from the Philippines has made use of her
comments on the previous draft and improved it “a great deal” (3)
in this final version of the text. Liv supports Cecilie in this by
acknowledging the use student B has made of Cecilie’s comments.
As an experienced teacher in Norwegian, Liv is used to giving her
students comments on drafts. Moreover, Cecilie continues to
demonstrate that she is familiar with writing as a process: “She has
been given such comments on many reports” (7). Thus, both Cecilie
and Liv emerge as ‘writing teachers’.
However, when history teacher Edith gets involved, we see how
intersubjectivity involves different positions. Edith reads the
student’s text as a historian who is concerned with the use of
sources and the issue of plagiarism (10). Because of what Edith
perceives as a shift in the learner’s language, she questions whether
the student has written all of the text herself. When challenged on
issues of plagiarism, Cecilie first defends the learner by generalizing
plagiarism to include Norwegian students (11) before raising the
question of whether collaboration and receiving help are allowed
(13). The response to this challenge consists of an appreciative
murmur in the team (14). By seeking the others’ approval, Cecilie
defends both her own methods and the student’s ways of accomplishing her work. Edith, on the other hand, by raising the issue of
plagiarism and the use of sources, reveals her own norms and
practices. As a teacher of history, it would seem that Edith draws on
traditions in history as an academic discipline as well as a school
subject in which the use of sources and questions related to references in texts are vital for the written paper’s accountability.
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, Frida (the expert)
introduces the team to research in this field: “It reminds me of an
English researcher...” (17). By introducing research-based knowledge into the conversation, the horizon for the talk is expanded
(Little, 2003); new possibilities of insight emerge and with them an
extended repertoire of negotiations. According to Frida, evaluating
a non-native student’s texts also introduces additional ways to
identify text qualities. As such, Frida seeks to move from the
particular (Cecilie’s student) to the general (principles). By using
her position as an authority on writing and referencing scholars in
the field, Frida is in a position to elaborate on these issues. Consequently, we see a case of social mediation. Thus, the episode can be
understood as a case of material (text) as well as social (expert)
mediation of professional development in the team. However, as
we will see in Episode 2, Edith’s concerns persist.
Cecilie acknowledges Edith’s concerns with two utterances
addressed directly to her: “This is a huge problem in this type of
writing” and “... but I haven’t spent time on sources with these
students” (18). These utterances also connect with Edith’s. In the
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K. Helstad, A. Lund / Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
same sequence, Cecilie uses this opportunity to strengthen her
argument concerning process-oriented ways of working: “I think
we avoid some of it by working this way.” Then, she closes the
episode with a question, addressed to Tora, the chairperson:
“Wasn’t today’s theme reflection logs?” (18). Cecilie seems impatient to present more of the students’ texts and their reflections on
their writings, thus invoking her own expertise and applied
knowledge as a teacher of natural sciences and writing. Through
the presentation of the students’ texts, she has gone ‘public’
(Lieberman & Pointer Mace, 2009) by making transparent the
factual content she has taught, the writing processes she has
arranged, and the learning conditions she has established in the
classroom.
When Cecilie requires a shift of topic in her last utterance, this
indicates that issues of copying and collaboration have not been
resolved, merely postponed. Her choice of words when referring to
copying as a “huge problem” (18) indicates that this issue will
persist. Episode 1 testifies to how difficult intersubjectivity is when
the teachers are confronted with disputed practices, when the
stakes are high, and their accountability is questioned. Through
these team negotiations, tensions have become apparent. However,
these are not necessarily detrimental to professional development,
but, as Matusov (1996) reminded us, part of emerging intersubjectivity and meaning-making. In Episode 2 (Section 6.2), intersubjectivity emerges as more consensus-driven as the teacher team
moves from a discussion of plagiarism to examining how students
use multimodal elements.
6.2. Episode 2: negotiating semiotic resources and digital issues
Episode 2 is an immediate continuation of Episode 1, set off by
a shift in topic as Ragnhild asks a question about semiotic
resources:
19. Ragnhild: May I ask a question? In this case perhaps I missed
an illustration. I’m thinking of the students who would have
problems writing this, they may also have problems reading;
an illustration might perhaps help and be easier to deal with.
20. Tora: But you have actually said this in one of your comments,
Cecilie?
21. Cecilie: When students submit texts digitally, I see that they
struggle with handing in compound texts. It becomes difficult
for them to produce them, because they are simply not able to
do it. They ask whether they can hand them in on single sheets
in addition, so that they can draw or scan.
22. Edith: Scan, yes?
23. Kirsten: Do they draw on the PC?
24. Cecilie: They can use ‘Paint’, but it is terribly difficult and the
illustrations are not good. The best solution for these students
would be to have a digital camera at school, simply take photos.
25. Edith: But we don’t . Student A has made good illustrations,
hasn’t he?
26. Cecilie: Student A is completely different from Student B.
27. Edith: This text, that illustration, it looks as though it has been
taken from somewhere.
28. Cecilie: Which text do you mean?
29. Edith: Student A.
30. Cecilie: That illustration, yes, it has been taken from the
Internet, you see the sources have been included, because this
is difficult to achieve in any other way.
31. Tora: Are you saying he has scanned them?
32. Cecilie: No, I logged on and checked these sites and I would
have found them had I continued.
33. Tora: But it is important that we actually learn how to do these
things; we are not able to use all of this, are we?
34. Cecilie: Machines know how to make such structured forms.
They are good at it.
35. Edith: What about this student, A? What has he done?
36. Cecilie: He has visited a site and copied and pasted.
37. Edith: Oh yes, that is very obvious...
38. Cecilie: He has also stated where he has picked it up.
39. Edith: And that’s very good.
40. Cecilie: But perhaps a reference is missing?
In this episode, the teachers’ talk focuses on the use of illustrations in texts, i.e., semiotic resources, digital artifacts and
sources, and the teachers’ assessment of such use. In Norway,
digital literacy has recently become integrated into all the subjects
in the K06 curriculum, and Tora signals that she wants to know
more about this (33). Ragnhild and Cecilie are close colleagues
who have worked as natural science teachers for many years at this
particular school. Despite this fact, they are not used to commenting on each other’s assessments of students’ texts. In interviews, both teachers confirm that, while collaboration between
teachers traditionally focuses on sharing academic experiences
and information more generally, assessing written texts is basically an individual practice.
When Ragnhild comments on the lack of an illustration in the
student’s text, she does so carefully, in a questioning manner, and
justifies her argument: “I’m thinking of the students who would
have problems writing this, they may also have problems reading”
(19). Cecilie takes a different angle by arguing that it is difficult for
the students to submit compound texts digitally. She points out
that it is possible to use a digital program (‘Paint’), but that the best
solution would be to have “a digital camera at school” (24). The
latter is an issue Edith responds to quickly: “But we don’t” (25). This
utterance can be understood as an institutional policy: schools do
not give priority to such purchases. In the ensuing conversation, the
call for digital competence and how to cope with new challenges
represented by digital, compound texts is on the agenda. The rest of
the talk in this episode e between Cecilie, Tora, and Edith e sums
up the significant aspects of the use of sources in a digital context.
Tora states that it is important that “we [the teachers] actually learn
these things” (33). As the local project leader and a former head of
the department of foreign languages, she seems to be concerned
about how teachers’ digital competence might strengthen their
future professionalism. Also, her use of the pronoun we indicates
that this is a collective concern for the teacher community. Thus,
the issue also becomes an institutional concern.
Throughout Episode 2, we can see how the participants respond
to and reciprocally build on each other’s utterances (Bakhtin, 1986),
including those articulated in the previous episode, while they
develop insights into the production of digital, compound texts. The
texts (from students A and B) serve as mediating artifacts in this
process. They are clearly at the center of the conversation. But while
Episode 1 was driven by tension, Episode 2 shows how contributions from the participants are complementary; different conditions for continued cooperation between the stakeholders are
established. The question that now emerges is how to assess the
learners’ texts that have been brought into the team discourse.
6.3. Episode 3: negotiating teacher comments
In the third episode, the team is concerned about the assessment of the texts and the relevance of teachers’ comments on
students’ drafts. The selected episode mainly consists of a dialog
between the expert, Frida, and the teacher, Cecilie, about one of
Cecilie’s comments which requires that the student justify her/his
approach in a chemistry report. The exchange starts with a direct
challenge from Frida and focuses on the rationale for Cecilie’s
K. Helstad, A. Lund / Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
comment and genre- and norm-related questions on subjectspecific writing.
41. Frida: Cecilie, if we take a look at your comments, isn’t it quite
a difficult question when you ask why this was “very interesting to investigate”? (Pointing to Cecilie’s comment on the
draft: The introduction should introduce the reader to the
theme. What makes this very interesting to investigate?)
42. Cecilie: That is a general comment I often use.
43. Frida: But do you require that your students justify their
investigations?
44. Cecilie: Well, I require that they frame it [the investigation] in
the introduction, but this is a difficult part of the report both for
me and the students.
45. Frida: But none of these reports has a reason beyond the
subject itself, besides that it is an important process in
chemistry?
46. Cecilie: It is not placed in a larger context, no. In this type of
student exercise, I may not expect them to do so, but I have
another big project where the students have to frame their
reports differently.
47. Frida: But then it is strange that you ask this question in your
comment here, isn’t it?
48. Ragnhild: I think that the student responds to it here (reads
aloud from the theory section of the text). Don’t you think so?
49. Liv: She could have put it in the introduction.
50. Ragnhild: But the theory section belongs to the introduction to
the report, I think.
51. Liv: Is introduction and theory really the same, as a unit, in
a chemistry report?
52. Ragnhild: Yes, in a way it is.
53. Cecilie: But I agree, it’s very ambitious, the question in my
comment.
54. Frida: But it gave us an opportunity for clarification here. I
didn’t know the importance of a justification in a report, did
you?
55. Cecilie: And I didn’t know either!
56. Ragnhild: No, did we really know?
57. (laughter)
58. Cecilie: But it is important that we know now.
Like Episodes 1 and 2, Episode 3 also focuses on what can be
expected from students and how this places demands on the
teachers. In this case, Frida is concerned about an ambitious
requirement that the students justify their investigations in
chemistry. She asks several questions about one specific comment
from Cecilie. Cecilie justifies her work, arguing that this is
a “general comment” (42), and, furthermore, that this is a “difficult
part of the report” (44). When Ragnhild points to a relevant passage
in the learner’s text followed by an invitation to share her observation (48), the character of the talk changes. Frida has provoked
the teachers to reflect on the structure and nature of a chemistry
report. The focus on the particular student text is expanded to
a more general discussion of the report as a genre in chemistry.
Ragnhild, who is familiar with the genre in biology and chemistry,
assists Liv as well as Frida in their confusion regarding what is
expected from a report in chemistry. Shortly before this, Cecilie
reconsiders her level of ambition: “It’s very ambitious, the question
in my comment” (53). Frida sums up, stating that the negotiations
“gave us an opportunity for clarification”, thus pointing to how the
team has expanded their intersubjective understanding: “I didn’t
know the importance of a justification in a report, did you?” (54).
The responses that follow (55e58), as well as the laughter at the
end of this episode, suggest that the questions raised by Frida and
the subject teachers have been resolved. The use of first-person
605
plural underlines this process of intersubjectivity and transformed knowledge in the team: “But it is important that we know
now” (58).
6.4. Episodes in context
Episode 3 shows how a moment-to-moment micro-analysis
gives an indication of how knowledge advancement emerges in the
teacher team. As the episode took place, in October 2008, it was
about midway through the project. Numerous analyses of similar
episodes from earlier and later meetings would make it possible to
trace the professional development over the entire two years.
However, in order to avoid expanding this paper unreasonably, we
resort to teacher interviews and logs in order to achieve a more
condensed narrative of longitudinal development. As pointed out
in Section 5, the guiding principle has been that of identifying
statements that summarize various aspects of the participants’
learning experiences. In the following, we seek to demonstrate how
professional development emerged and was perceived by team
participants by concentrating on their encounters with different
types of texts and the role of the expert.
6.4.1. Insight into different writing cultures
In an interview in October 2008, science teacher Cecilie reflects
on her experience so far. Right from the start, she addresses the fact
that she has been exposed to writing in several subjects, with the
result that she acknowledges that writing differs from discipline to
discipline. Through the entire interview, expressions such as “new
input,” “opportunities to do things in new ways,” and “professional
development” are contrasted with expressions such as “be stuck”
and “a field where I remained at level zero.” In a somewhat elaborated passage, Cecilie states:
I guess I have become more aware of something more than just
facts in the texts. and I have seen how they [students] write in
other disciplines, and that is quite an awakening!. I have
learned a lot, especially from colleagues in related disciplines.
It’s interesting to see students’ texts that you basically have no
relationship with, but that can teach you more about writing in
your own subjects. It is instructive to hear other teachers’
comments about ‘your’ texts.
These sentiments reverberate in the reflections of Kirsten, one of
the language teachers, in a log file from March, 2009:
The writing project provides me with the opportunity to stop
and think about what I should be doing when my teaching is
focused on writing and why I do it. In addition, I think it’s
interesting to have contact with professionals who work with
writing in various ways outside our school, in the university
context. It gives me new ideas for my teaching. I like discussing
texts with my colleagues, especially with teachers who teach
other subjects. It’s good to be able to reflect on my understanding of practice, and talk about academic issues that are not
only related to a specific syllabus.
Similar reflections from the other team teachers indicate that it
is the interdisciplinary nature of the team and the juxtaposition of
various perspectives that bring about new insights. For example,
Liv, the teacher of Norwegian, concludes that, “I believe that the
different nature of the disciplines forces one to argue in different
ways from discipline to discipline. I experienced some kind of
revelation when we discussed this in the team.” Taken together, the
above and similar passages in the data indicate that intersubjectivity as well as new insights has emerged in the interdisciplinary
team.
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K. Helstad, A. Lund / Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
6.4.2. The role of the expert
In Episode 3, we saw how the university expert on writing, Frida,
mediated the team’s understanding of justification in a chemistry
report, resulting in a collective acknowledgment of this insight. In
an interview in March 2009, the project coordinator, Tora, elaborates on the role and influence of the expert:
. She [Frida] points her finger to “what do we basically need?
Why is this better?”. She asks the right questions and opens
our eyes. She emphasizes that the students need prototypes.
They need some kind of model. Sometimes we ask her to give
a lecture, to wind us up a bit, not just be pragmatic. And she
has shown us research from diverse fields; we think that is very
exciting.
Frida was interviewed in March 2009, and she also
described her contributions to the process. She especially pointed
to writing strategies, the value of constructive feedback, the
potential of peer assessment among students, and a research
perspective as important elements conducive to the team’s
increased professionalism.
Regarding the expert as more knowledgeable about writing
issues than the teachers, Frida states that she herself “has learnt
a lot” from the practitioners through their shared insights over
time. Hence, it seems that mutual learning emerges from interaction between agents with diverse levels of expertise as they
elaborate reciprocally on issues of writing. In a study of a group of
university professors and secondary school teachers discussing
development in research and their impact on school curriculum
(Brandes & Seixas, 1998), the professors brought their expertise to
their meetings, while the teachers brought their varied disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge. Even though there were
bridges to cross within their conversations, the participants
perceived their goal as making ‘translations’ and ‘transformations’
between university and school. However, the study demonstrated
the importance of exposing the key structures and arguments of
the disciplines as a first step in building bridges across the
communities. As is the case in the present study, diverse expertise
adds up to the participants’ shared experiences in the community
of learners.
7. Discussion
In our research questions, we asked how students’ texts were
perceived, negotiated, and evaluated by an interdisciplinary team
of teachers and what the implications for teachers’ professional
development were. Our analysis of moment-to-moment
discourse in three episodes from one meeting has shown that
the teachers perceive student text qualities as well as possible
text problems in different ways, and that this may relate to
subject-specific genres and traditions. In these episodes, we saw
how the participants drew on the examined texts, the local
practices, and larger institutional contexts and subject cultures
(Lund, 2008; Grossman & Stodolsky, 1995; Neumann et al., 2002),
and how the expert sought to link the particular to the general.
The three episodes reveal different types of negotiations e
sometimes fueled by contrary positions, sometimes by complementary contributions, and sometimes by the need for clarification.
The analysis shows that different types of negotiation exist in the
interactions, but that all types are conducive to developing intersubjectivity regarding challenges posed by writing in and across
subjects: the role of peer collaboration, the use of digital technologies and potential plagiarism, multimodal representations, and
subject-specific genre conventions.
In Vescio et al.’s (2008) review on the advantages of teacher
learning communities, one of the key findings was connected to
the importance of teachers’ collaboration on student work and
student learning. Likewise, Little et al. (2003) showed that bringing
teachers together to focus on student work affords learning
opportunities. In our case, we saw that when teachers discuss
student texts, these discussions have the potential to enrich
teachers’ opportunity to learn. In an interview with the principal
(spring 2009) she links such discussions to a dialogic view of
learning and professional development:
Because learning, I believe, happens between people and it
happens between teacher and student and it happens between
myself and my colleagues and you and me. So, obviously, if I did
not learn more this way I would not be able to contribute. So, if I
learn more, so do the ones around me.
In interviews with Cecilie and Ragnhild, similar views are
voiced, while they also point to the importance of integrating their
increased insights into their own practices. This will happen, they
say, because they also see the beneficial consequences for subjectspecific learning and instruction.
However, what happens in a project may not necessarily turn
into sustainable practices. While the episodes and the interviews
reveal the importance of intersubjectivity and turning new
insights into educational practices, this is no guarantee for
transformation and development on an institutional level. As
Cecilie bluntly puts it: “We will never be able to involve all the
teachers in developmental work”. According to Cecilie, some
teachers will always remain unwilling to engage in the extra
effort that is needed. The principal also acknowledges this view
but also points to sustained impact in certain departments such as
the one for science teachers. The key to sustainability, she says, is
found in a combination of good leadership, structured approaches
and strategies, and cultivating productive relationships with the
staff.
Little (2003) claims that if we are to understand more deeply
what distinguishes particularly robust professional communities,
we have to understand the interplay of the conventional and the
creative in teachers’ work. The conventional can be found in the
institutional aspects of education, its dependence on stability and
predictability, while creativity is increasingly needed as practices
change more rapidly. Thus, teacher interactions may both allow
for and constrain opportunities for learning: “Even within groups
that would reasonably be considered collaborative and innovative
and committed to improving practice, teacher learning seems
both enabled and constrained by the ways that the teachers go
about their work” (Little, 2003, p. 939).
Teachers can become carriers of these conflicting approaches,
an issue we can trace in the discussions and tensions demonstrated in Episode 1. Traditionally, student writing in school is an
individual endeavor. Consequently, we see how issues such as peer
collaboration and possible plagiarism emerge as touchy and
potentially conflictive for the teachers.
A radical and possibly creative approach to such issues would
be to re-think tasks and assignments so that they might integrate
copying for specific and productive purposes (Lund & Rasmussen,
2008). In Episode 1, Edith’s concern about plagiarism and missing
references in a student’s text comes across as tensions between
cultural reproduction and radical practices that challenge persistent writing conventions. Whether such tensions enable or
constrain opportunities for expanding knowledge is not evident
from the data. Still, the data reveal that the team represents
a dialogic resource for professional development and that subject
cultures as well as institutional aspects impact interdisciplinarity
and emergent intersubjectivity. We would argue that these are
important concerns when engaging teachers in heterogeneous
groups for professional development.
K. Helstad, A. Lund / Teaching and Teacher Education 28 (2012) 599e608
8. Conclusion
This paper has shown how teachers of different subjects in an
upper secondary school address the special disciplinary demands
of writing in and across different subject areas, and how the larger
context of their profession influences the way they go about their
local meaning-making efforts, such as in Episode 3.
Furthermore, we have explored teachers’ talk as they respond to
some important issues raised by students’ writing in and across
school subjects. Their professional practice was analyzed as it
developed within a specific work setting and was linked to specific
subject cultures and institutional traditions.
The episodes examined in the teacher community reveal diverse
types of negotiation, and these types seem to promote intersubjectivity and a deeper understanding of what writing entails.
However, we need to burrow deeper into the teachers’ work and
examine the traditions, norms, and beliefs that exist inside the
different subject cultures in order to better understand how
teachers cope with interdisciplinary challenges. Further diachronic
analysis is required to reveal more of the knowledge teachers draw
upon, including expert knowledge offered from outside the
teachers’ learning community.
There are implications for practice in the sense that, in order to
support teachers’ professional development, we need to acknowledge contextual resources (human, conceptual, and material) and
institutional traditions when we design support for teacher
learning and development. In our study, we saw how the collaborative team processes of negotiations and emerging intersubjectivity proved to be conducive to teachers’ meaning-making. As
Engestrøm (2008, p. 230) argued, “Successful negotiations tend to
transform the dispute, not just reach an instrumental end”. We have
sought to demonstrate that such transformation involves the
cultivation of teachers’ professional learning through the design of
opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange as well as through the
engagement of experts who can mediate and support such
processes.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor
for valuable comments and suggestions to prior versions of this
paper. We would also like to thank our colleagues Eli Ottesen,
Anniken Furberg and Sten Ludvigsen for their productive input
during the writing of this paper.
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