Essay: Revisiting Rationales for Conceptualizing (and Teaching) the Teacher-Writer

In literacy teacher education, questions about what it means to be a teacher-writer and why it matters have been enduring ones. In this article, we propose that while current rationales for teachers-as-writers are valuable, they may also contribute to wider dehumanizing discourses that privilege effectiveness, accountability, and future-oriented outcomes. Contributing to these discourses, even unwillingly, undermines our ethical commitments to the agency of teachers and to creating spaces for joy and wide awakening. We first retrace the history of this phenomenon before arguing that it is time to add another “phase in the development of the teacher-writer” (Whitney et al., 2014), one that explicitly highlights the creative and humanizing dimensions of teachers writing. We then share some approaches we have been trying in our work as teachers and writers, and we invite others in the field to continue thinking alongside us about new possibilities for teacher-writers.