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Abstract
In this study, the author examines how teachers at a public middle school and high school in the Southeastern United States learn to incorporate digital tools and writing process pedagogy through a year-long professional development program. The study is organized into a manuscript style format. In the first manuscript, the author provides a review of the literature to make an argument for using Design Based Research (DBR) to help support teachers learning. The author argues that a DBR approach to professional development helps to extend and enrich the five principles of professional development because of the focus on situating the professional development within teachers classrooms. A number of key design features are identified that can best support teacher learning: teachers and researchers co-teaching and co-planning; negotiating a shared agenda with teachers and other stakeholders; and working prospectively rather than retrospectively. In the second manuscript, the author examines how a group of secondary English teachers conceptualized writing process pedagogy and digital tool use after a week-long summer professional development program. Teachers used the Prezi software to create concept maps that showed their understanding of writing with digital tools. In their concept maps the teachers used an apocalyptic narrative as a way to process their understanding of writing with digital tools. The teachers emerging narrative was not conceptually unified; specifically, there were contradictions in the images and words teachers used to represent what it means to write in authentic ways. In the third manuscript, the author uses Grossman, Smagorinsky, and Valencias (1999) activity framework for studying teacher learning to examine how three high school English teachers who participated in a professional development program incorporated digital tools and writing process pedagogy into their classrooms. Drawing upon the concept of appropriation, the author uses a case study approach to analyze each of the three teachers goals for participating in the Summer Institute, the tools they appropriated, the extent to which they appropriated those tools, and the benefits and challenges experienced by the teacher as a result of appropriating said tools.