ty is built and strategies for encouraging individuals to participate in community. Each of these theories proposes that when individuals psychologically experience states like connectedness (RCT) or thriving (Positive Psychology), they feel better, and their improved feelings contribute to their own development as well as the development of the community. However, in education- al contexts, teachers do not build community solely for the sake of positive feelings.
The goal of any classroom is to achieve some specific knowledge and skill-based objec- tives that will allow the learners to join a CoP beyond the classroom. In the case of this study, learners need to learn how to produce written texts that are deemed not only appropriate in their immediate classroom CoP but that would presumably be deemed appropriate and legitimate as a starting point in their future CoP of Anglo-American university writers. Thus, building commu- nity and positive feelings in this study is a goal, but it is not the only goal. In fact, from an edu- cation-as-information/skill-exchange perspective, building community and positive feelings is not that important unless it is linked to improving learners’ ability to achieve the objectives of the course, which in this case is to produce academic written texts that display qualities deemed important in Anglo-American academic writing. Therefore, the question that needs to be ad- dressed is as follows: Do feelings affect learners’ abilities to learn about writing, specifically ac- ademic writing, in classroom CoPs?
Researchers like Leki (2007) have done important and helpful research on ESL under- graduates’ transition to matriculated courses from a writing perspective, and part of that research has revealed that feelings and emotions are an important factor in the transition process. For ex- ample, Leki (2007) includes a description of the role that socio-academic relationships play in her description of each of her four participants’ academic journeys. She found that their relation-
ships with peers and faculty played an important role in both their academic development and their feelings about their academic development.
Likewise, researchers like Casanave (2003) and Li (2006) have shared ideas and case studies on ESL graduate and post-graduates’ bids for legitimacy in their CoPs through writing- related interactions. These researchers focused on the socio-political forces that influenced ESL writers’ written texts and writing processes. In particular, they focus on the impact that power relations have on ESL writers, and they allude to the feelings that these power relations provoke in writers as potentially influential in their written texts and their writing processes. However, Casanave (2003) also suggests that future research should ask, “How do particular actors, their relationships, and their culturally infused expectations about writing influence the ways that writ- ing gets done?” (p. 93).
Some research, particularly in the area of graduate writing, has addressed the question of the influence that relationships and feelings could have on written texts and writing processes. For example, Cameron, Nairn, and Higgins (2009) found that emotions play a disabling role with regard to the academic writing of graduate students. When graduate students in their writing workshops were asked to brainstorm challenges to their academic writing, a large number of those challenges were feelings or emotions like self-doubt, anxiety, and fear. They also found that graduate students felt “surprised and relieved” to know that others felt the same way about academic writing. Hearing other students’ feelings diminished their sense of isolation and ena- bled them to approach the writing task from a more realistic and empowered point of view.
Likewise, Wellington (2010) found that the graduate students in his focus groups also felt better when they discussed their feelings about academic writing because they realized that they were not alone in their feelings. He found that the affective domain of writing held great im-
portance for students. They reported positive feelings like excitement and catharsis, but they al- so reported negative feelings like stress, fear, isolation, and anxiety.
Research on undergraduate writing may also include some references to the role of emo- tions. For example, Curtis and Herrington (2003) look at the longitudinal writing development of four undergraduates to explore the relationship between writing development and personal development. They find that one writer, Lawrence, attributes his improvement in writing to an increase in confidence and self-esteem.
Longfellow, May, Burke, and Marks-Maran (2008) investigated Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) for writing and found that emotional benefits were among two of the primary benefits re- ported by participants. In general, participants felt decreased feelings of intimidation and in- creased feelings of safety. Participants indicated that these emotional benefits positively affected their willingness to ask questions and to request clarification.
Of course, emotions can play a negative role in academic writing performance. Wood- row (2011) in a large study of college English students in China found that feelings of self- efficacy and anxiety were important variables in writing performance. Feelings of low self- efficacy resulted in lower level of writing performance. Anxiety affected writing performance indirectly by affecting feelings of self-efficacy.
In sum, research seems to suggest that feelings and emotions do play an important role in learners’ perceptions of writing, attitudes about writing, and perhaps even their performance of writing. However, despite any writer’s or writing teacher’s intuitive understanding that emotions are important in writing and the quality of one’s writing, there appears to be very little research in this area. There is even less research on the role that teachers play or might play in creating classrooms that produce emotions favorable to writing or improving writing. Cameron, Nairn,
and Higgins (2009) allude to the idea that researchers (i.e., graduate professors) are generally accustomed through training to ignore emotions in research, so in their discussions of writing with students, they also ignore emotions. Perhaps, teachers and researchers are not ignoring emotions but cloaking them within their discussions of academic jargon like socio-academic re- lations or socio-political orientations so that they will appear more authoritative and less emo- tional. Certainly, feminist critiques have commented for years on how achieving authoritative academic status at the university level requires a certain relinquishment of all things emotional.
3 METHOD
The primary purpose of this study was to investigate my own ability to enact critical and feminist pedagogy using RCT and Positive Psychology in an 8-week ESL academic writing course. In addition, I wanted to investigate the potential impact that my enactment might have on all participants. Although investigations of one’s self could include other external research- ers, in this study, I elected to investigate this experience as a participant-researcher.
The primary reason for this choice is purely pragmatic. The IEP course in this study met five days per week for eight weeks. All of my colleagues, like me, teach at least four classes per day five days per week. Thus, their opportunities to assist me by observing the course I taught in this study are quite limited.
In addition to the practical difficulties of including an external researcher, I believe that classroom CoPs are mini-cultures. They develop histories, practices, and ways of communi- cating that are understood to the members who participate in them. Outsiders can provide a win- dow on those cultures, but outsiders who only occasionally drop in are truly outsiders. The sense that outsiders make of a culture is based on their own points of reference rather than the points used by the members of the culture. To be sure, outsiders’ observations can bring to light as- pects of the culture that are unconscious for members, so I am not saying they are not valuable. However, in this study, I was most interested in the insiders’ perspectives and points of view about our common classroom culture.
In order to investigate insiders’ perspectives and points of view, I selected autoethnogra- phy as my method. In the following pages, I will describe autoethnography and its relationship to critical and feminist pedagogy. I will describe the conceptual framework including the re-
search questions that guided the design of this study. I will identify and discuss the assumptions and biases that I brought to this study as a participant-researcher. I will describe the context of this study, the participants, the data collection process, and the data analysis process. I will con- clude with a description of the steps that I took to ensure the trustworthiness of my findings.