Research in the Teaching of English Feb 2026

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

Anne Haas Dyson University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

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.

Journal
Research in the Teaching of English
Published
2026-02-01
DOI
10.58680/rte2026603253
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
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