Liminality and praxis: high school English teachers’ unsettled theories about teaching writing

Purpose This paper aims to discover how teachers develop theories of writing through investigating the views of English teachers about writing instruction at the end of their first-third year of teaching in a high school struggling with teacher attrition, limited resources and periodic low academic accountability ratings. Design/methodology/approach Through qualitative methods of inductive coding and discourse analysis (Gee, 2014), this study queries the ways teachers constructed a theory of writing that leads to an understanding of their role, purpose and identity as writing teachers while facing pressures to increase student scores on state mandated writing exams. Critical sociocultural literacy (Moje and Lewis, 2020), discourses of writing (Ivanič, 2004) and writing as liminality (Cosgrove, 2021) theories were used as a framework to guide the analysis of teacher discourse. Findings Findings revealed teachers had to navigate between multiple tensions in three dimensions undergirding their writing instruction: (1) identity, (2) practice and (3) the professional/instructional environment. These findings point to the importance of teachers interrogating theories of writing pedagogy through moments of uncertainty and potential as they engage in instruction. Additional implications suggest teachers need to develop an understanding of writing pedagogy theory that attends to student skills with writing, curricular mandates and self as writer and writing teacher concomitantly. Teachers need to engage in praxis and explore multifaceted theories about writing pedagogy. Originality/value This research addresses a need in the field to understand why writing reform in secondary settings has not taken hold on a wide scale in schools across the USA (Fields, 2020; Graham and Harris, 2019a, 2019b; Lesley et al., 2023; Read and Landon-Hays, 2013). Findings offer insights into reasons for this trend and ways to combat the effects of standardized assessment on teacher writing praxis.