Kindling the Pedagogic Imagination: Preservice Teachers Writing with Social Media

In this essay, two teacher educators reflect on the experience of four preservice English/language arts teachers who participated in a social media project across seven university campuses. For the #walkmyworld project, the preservice teachers shared pictures and videos, annotated and wrote poetry, and read and responded to each other. The project helped the preservice teachers consider how they could support student writing in relationship to their identities, responsive audiences, and multimodal composition. As what counts as writing and who counts as a writer seems to be narrowing in classrooms, the project served to kindle the pedagogic imagination of the participants.