Losing My Awe … and Getting It Back: Changing Perspectives on Emerging Writers From a Re-Emerging Teacher

After 40-plus years, I retired from my professorship and returned to my first role as a teacher of children (kindergarteners through second graders, now at a neighborhood after-school center). As an academic researcher, an ethnographer, I had spent years with children as a “friend” as they often described me. But at the center, I was a teacher, expected to promote the children’s composing. In this role, I experienced at first a sharp shift in my relationship to children. The question arose: What is the relationship between being a researcher and being a teacher? I compared my responses to and from three selected center children and three research project children; data (field notes, written products) for each center child was compared to that of a research project child with similar composing characteristics. All children were urban and African American. Among my findings were that, first, my observations of center children were not the data-filled field notes of project children, and, second, that the teacher me was more attuned to the writing community in formation. Children expected our routine prac-tices, they were eager to share their work, and, moreover, they were ready responders to each other. By the school year’s end, I knew that all who teach must blend the roles of researcher and teacher: We are curious about those we teach; we work to study them the best we can by observing their responses to our efforts, and what we thereby learn feeds into how we teach and how our students learn.