Our forthcoming paper is the third in a longitudinal examination of student teachers’ writing.  All these three papers are produced within the project The Struggle for the Text financed by the Swedish Council for Educational Research. Drawing on the findings from two papers in progress; paper 1 What will student teachers become as writers? and paper 2 Writing in and out of control, we have identified different struggles in student teachers’ development of writing in preschool teacher education (PTE).

A core research interest in all the three papers is to capture the student teachers’ individual struggles with academic writing and what this writing mean to them (Lea & Street 1998,Lillis 2001, Macken-Horaik, Devereux, Trimingham-Jack & Wilson (2006). The data stems from the students’ written self-presentation, interviews in focus groups and individual interviews, text samples and observations of group work and examination seminars. An underlying interest is to problematize the frequent everyday conception of looking at student teachers as lacking the needed competence for academic writing (Ask 2005, Bertilsson 2014, Gallavan, Bowles & Young 2007).

In the first paper we analyze different genre struggles across different disciplines in teacher education in the light of general academic rules for writing etc. (cf. Blåsjö 2004). In the second paper we concentrate on analyzing preschool student teachers’ struggles with writing in and out of control (different forms of control and lack of control over identity formation processes) and we successively concentrate our analysis to three preschool student teachers representing groups of students with different attitudes and ways of dealing with academic writing. By combining a before, within and an after perspective we relate their struggle with writing texts in higher education to the questions of present and future processes of life (Ivanic 1998, 2004, Lillis 2001). The results from the first two papers show that the students experience different kinds of struggles in academic writing, depending on earlier and current experiences within and outside of Pre-school Teacher Education (PTE). We can also see how the same norms and rules of academic writing are supportive to some of the students, but obstacles for others.

The third paper to be presented at ECER 2015 is an important follow up paper supplementing and making possible a more thoroughly analysis of the role of academic writing for the preschool teachers in professional practice. This paper starts out from the results from the two earlier papers to help us move the analysis further and incorporate the transition from education to work life. In the paper we relate their experiences with writing in pre-service education with their experiences with writing after 5 months at work as preschool teachers. This approach allows us to consider how they evaluate the academic writing they worked with during their education course with experiences from writing as professionals. In our approach we will offer the informants opportunities to reflect on how the academic writing in education relate to their work as professional preschool teachers. We will develop a battery of questions seeking responses and answers on:    

1. Is there an obvious progression of the texts they produce during their education?

2. How do they look on their own development as writers?

3. How do they evaluate the academic writing they have experienced in IPTE and how do they use that kind of writing as professionals`

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