Workshop: inclusive practices for supporting student writing in ITE

ITE courses, particularly the PGDE, draw students from a wide range of disciplinary and educational backgrounds, including mature students and a rising number of multilingual students. PGDE courses are tightly scheduled and relatively brief, which can raise logistical challenges for embedding practices that make content and assessments more inclusive. Amid these logistical challenges, a common source of frustration among ITE students and tutors is navigating assessments that involve writing, yet it is also something Scottish teacher educators are motivated to address (Authors, 2025a; 2025b). Very limited previous research is available specifically on how teacher educators address writing in ITE; that which exists found that teacher educators construct knowledge about academic writing in collegial conversations which tend to be descriptive of experiences, rather than analytical or pedagogy-focused (Ofte, 2024; Ofte & Solli, 2024). Otherwise, scholarship on writing in ITE focuses how to teach primary/secondary writing or leveraging reflective writing to connect classroom experiences to theory (e.g, Fraser et al., 2024; Gardner & Kuzich, 2024; Walters, 2025). Yet, the practical challenges to addressing writing within PGDE programmes are not intractable; there are many modifications that can make writing and assessments more inclusive.

Our workshop drew on our recent Scotland-wide study of academic writing among PGDE students – with a particular focus on mature students – as well as our extensive professional experience creating, implementing, and evaluating academic writing interventions to widen access within ITE courses. The research is the first of its kind in Scotland; thus, this workshop offers new insights to teacher educators.

The purpose of this workshop was to equip university-based teacher educators with the ability to (1) identify the strengths and gaps of their ITE programme’s current provision for supporting academic writing, and (2) evaluate possible forward paths to integrating anticipatory, inclusive practices that support students’ writing development in ITE.

Participants will leave this workshop with a stronger understanding of what writing abilities their ITE programme requires of students, why integrating anticipatory writing support forwards inclusive ITE, a better metalanguage for talking about writing with students, and practical paths forward towards a robust provision for ITE writing.