Innovation and Integrity: Working Through Disruption to Support Teachers in Their Roles as Literacy Educators

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe our experiences creating and providing job-embedded professional development to teachers with an emphasis on creative writing. Our focus is on the intersectionality of communities. We share narratives and scenarios from each of the communities – the participating teachers/administrators and the writing coaches collaborating with them. The program's objective is to empower teachers to see themselves as writers to become more effective teachers of writing. We discovered the unique nature of each campus community of teachers/writers and also found the need to provide a space and intentional structures to enable writing coaches to support each other. To measure our impact on teachers, we describe a qualitative evaluation process. Using the lens of two disruptive forces – a hurricane and a pandemic – we explore the implications for the future of the work. Each disruption brought inequities in education to the forefront of our thinking.

Citation

Angelo, T. and Gremillion, M. (2021), "Innovation and Integrity: Working Through Disruption to Support Teachers in Their Roles as Literacy Educators", Auzenne-Curl, C.T. and Craig, C.J. (Ed.) Developing Knowledge Communities through Partnerships for Literacy (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 37), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 21-40. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720210000037002