“I Don't Need Your Help!” Peer Status, Race, and Gender during Peer Writing Interactions

Abstract

This article relies on year-long ethnographic data to examine how the intersection of peer status, gender, and race influenced the role stances children took in one urban fifth grade classroom while participating in three different writing pedagogies: peer tutoring, cooperative peer editing, and collaborative writing. Informed by the sociocultural theories of writing development and literature on peer pedagogies, the study explores the following research questions: (a) How do children enact peer status, gender, and race as they negotiate with one another during peer editing? (b) How do peer editing pedagogies shape opportunities for negotiation? (c) What are the consequences of these peer negotiations? Findings show how peer statuses related to perceptions of achievement, friendships, race, and gender complicate peer writing events. By focusing on how peer status, gender, and race intersected during various peer editing pedagogies, the present study contributes to understandings of how peer social worlds shape the classroom writing experiences of diverse students.