Bridging Borders Through Writer’s Workshop

Rachel and Joelle explore strategies to build collaborative interactions between students of different ethnic orientations and enhance a sense of community in the classrooms where they were student teachers. Through their sensitive reflections, these teacher researchers highlight how they deepened and gave new meaning to concepts they had learned in the academic part of their professional preparation, which included valuing each child’s culture, interests, family, and language and building these into daily activities. Their documentation captures the process of the children’s increased interactions across ethnic borders, families becoming engaged in school, and the children’s increased excitement about writing. Most importantly, they recognized the critical nature of the children’s conversations and relationships that developed during the activity, not just the implementation of the curricular activity of Writer’s Workshop. Their study illustrates the powerful role teacher research can have on pre-service teachers. It shows they are not only capable of conducting teacher research, but its long-lasting contributions to their teacher preparation, the school in which they practiced, and their consequent roles as full-time teachers