with the primary grades. There are even fewer studies examining how students develop resilience as they engage in the writing process.
This study took place in a second-grade classroom in an affluent, suburban, Missouri public school. The participants were 18 students between 7 and 8 years old, 9 who identified as male and 9 who identified as female. The racial makeup of the classroom included 15 students who were White, 1 student who was Black, and 2 students who identified with two or more races. Additionally, 1 student ethnically identifies as Hispanic/Latino. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 3 students had participated in completely remote learning for over a year prior. The other 15 students participated in hybrid learning for their first-grade year. The inconsistent learning environment is potentially a factor in 7 students being marked at-risk for literacy in beginning of the year screening assessments. Participants were recruited through a convenience sample; all were members of my second-grade class.
Survey data was collected at the beginning and end of the unit, while student journals and pen pal letters were collected throughout. The journals were used as a tool for students to communicate with me about how their writing was going. Frequent collection allowed the opportunity to observe each stage of the writing process. Students were asked to respond to the following survey questions with drawing and writing:
- What do writers do?
- How do you feel about yourself as a writer?
- How much control or power do you have over your own choices and thoughts in your writing?
- Tell me about a place in your writing where your writing sounds like you.
In this section, I will share the data analysis methods and an overview of emergent themes, followed by an in-depth explanation of each theme. Finally, I will describe how student knowledge changed over the course of this study.
The data were analyzed through qualitative measures by sorting the raw data into categories, consistent with the open-coding method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). As this study focused on participant experiences and voices, in vivo (or indigenous) coding was utilized after identifying categories. For the in vivo approach, I became attuned to the participants’ words regarding their experiences and used their own, unedited terms to label themes (Glesne, 2016). Since the participants were young children, some of the labels were “particularly colorful or metaphoric, or words used differently than they are generally used,” and reflect the true voices of the participants (Glesne 2016, p. 197). This method ensured student voices were as present and important throughout the data analysis process as they were in the writing classroom during the study.
Overall, the data revealed students developed their identities as authors throughout the writing experience, evidenced by an increased understanding of the writing process and demonstration of ownership for their work. Students learned that they have control over their writing and self-identified as authors who persevere and share their voices. Figure 1 reveals the two themes and resulting subthemes, which will be explained in depth below.
.
.
56