College Writing Teachers as Co-researchers: Promoting Faculty Understanding of Multilingual Writers Through Collaborative Program-Wide Assessment

Many writing teachers face significant challenges in seeking professional development related to TESOL theories and methods and lack opportunities to participate as meaningful collaborators and co-researchers in language teaching research. By taking a bottom-up approach to conduct a program assessment examining multilingual students’ experiences in writing classes, our project brought together faculty members of diverse ranks and backgrounds to collaborate on every phase of the research process. Drawing upon polyvocal reflections from co-researchers in this college writing program assessment project, our chapter draws attention to the importance of localized teacher-researcher collaboration, the value of bringing in TESOL practitioners’ voices, the need to create more opportunities for institutionally marginalized faculty members to access research collaborations as a means of professional development, and to challenge and enhance research approaches to student learning.