Blog post
Why teachers of writing need multifocal lenses
Learning to write encompasses cognitive processes, technical skills, communicative acts and personal expression. It draws on language and text knowledge, agency and creativity, cultural experiences, communicative competence and mastery of a variety of tools. How should teachers manage this complexity? Every day, interrelations among different aspects and levels of writing shape teachers’ practices and inform how they respond to and support students’ writing.
Drawing on a study that conceptualised ‘pedagogical content knowledge for writing’ through curriculum statements (Solheim et al., 2026), we argue that the teaching of writing requires seeing, as through multifocal lenses, multiple and layered views of writing and texts. Metaphorically, multifocal lenses help teachers to recognise various aspects of writing and shift between different foci and timescales in their teaching.
Pedagogical content knowledge for writing (PCKW)
The concept of ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ (PCK) (Shulman, 1986) was developed to capture the complex amalgam of disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge required for teaching. Based on interviews with professional writers, Myhill et al. (2021) found that writing entails ‘craft knowledge’, described as both text-oriented (drawing on language and text-level choices) and writer-oriented (focusing on the writing process and the writer’s role). Related to the teaching of writing as a cross-curricular competence in school, they encouraged development of a broader conceptual framework, a PCK for writing.
What knowledge of writing does the curricula imply?
Conceptualisations of writing within curricula shape teachers’ interpretation and implementation work. We approach PCKW by examining the role of writing in two national contexts: Norway and Aotearoa New Zealand. These are similar in population and geographic size and have literacy as a shared priority in school. Yet, they are culturally different. Comparative analysis allows us to consider what might be consistent across countries, and where intersections with geographic, historical and political contexts might express differences. We focus on two subject curricula where writing plays a decisive role: language arts and social sciences.
‘Conceptualisations of writing within curricula shape teachers’ interpretation and implementation work.’
The comparison reveals similarities between the countries in how writing is framed as a critical, cross‑curricular and cultural competence. While the two language arts curricula differ in terms of explicitness, both social sciences curricula implicitly require substantial amounts and varied forms of writing.
Three categories of knowledge emerged from the document analysis:
- Language and texts as objects and resources – making it possible to see the linguistic and textual building blocks of writing, such as sounds, words, modes and structures.
- Acting and interacting through writing – focusing on the writing situations, processes and practices where the resources are put to work through skills and cognitive actions, such as planning, revising, analysing sources and communicating ideas.
- Purposes of writing at individual and societal levels – providing a wider perspective on writing as identity, culture, democracy and participation.
These types of knowledge demonstrate that multiple perspectives on writing and learning to write are both evident in, and required by, the curricula. An implicit requirement, however, is that the teachers can flexibly shift their focus between different types and levels of knowledge, thereby adapting to the contextualised needs of their students. Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of writing should therefore enable them to see students’ writing through multifocal lenses.
Synthesis: A multifaceted view of writing
We see PCKW as a multifaceted concept, requiring knowledge of various aspects of writing and texts, as well as multiple planes of focus related to specific contexts and different timescales. Figure 1, derived from the curriculum analysis, illustrates such a multifaceted view of writing, ranging from close and specific aspects to more distal and overarching aspects within the three types of knowledge.
Figure 1: Writing ranges within the three types of knowledge
While the craft of writing forms part of teachers’ expected knowledge of writing (see Myhill et al., 2021), our curriculum analyses add to this understanding by encompassing both more detailed and more expansive views: teachers’ work requires close granularity in terms of knowledge of linguistic units and texts, and wider lenses to support writing through different practices and for individual as well as societal purposes. Further research on teachers’ curriculum interpretation and implementation work could explore how these processes shape their ways of seeing and supporting students’ writing, and how merging of the close and more distal perspectives in authentic contexts – as multifocal lenses do – may contribute to the development of competent writers.
This blog post is based on the article by Randi Solheim, Rebecca Jesson and Judy Parr, published in the Curriculum Journal.
References
Myhill, D., Cremin, T., & Oliver, L. (2021). Writing as a craft: Re-considering teacher subject content knowledge for teaching writing. Research Papers in Education, 38(3), 403–425.
Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14.
Solheim, R., Jesson, R., & Parr, J. (2026). Conceptualising pedagogical content knowledge for writing through the lens of curriculum statements: A comparative case study. Curriculum Journal. Advance online publication.