Using Mentor Texts to Develop Disciplinary Literacy of Scholarly Practitioners Through Dissertations in Practice

In this essay, we described how we use mentor texts (MTs) to foster students’ disciplinary literacy—reading, writing, thinking, and performing abilities in an area related to their problem of practice. We did this by carefully creating scaffolded learning experiences affording them with multiple, situated learning opportunities over time that allow students to move to central roles as scholarly practitioners where they now contribute in meaningful ways to disciplinary-based literacy. In this process, students were transformed from being readers of MTs where they were consuming the MTs for content to being producers, writers, of MTs that influenced others. This transformation was couched in Wenger’s Community of Practice framework. We provided a detailed presentation of how we implement the MT process throughout the EdD program. We discussed challenges and next steps and concluded with questions readers might consider as they contemplate whether using MTs might be beneficial to students in their programs.

In a relatively short amount of time, Education Doctorate (EdD) students must learn the disciplinary knowledge and literacies of the field to become scholarly practitioners. EdD students must learn what to include and how to design and implement a dissertation in practice (DiP), while at the same time learning the literacies of their field so that they can create disciplinary text to inform their own practices and the efforts of others. In reflecting on our program and our work as faculty members in the program, one of the challenges we found was limited opportunities to develop EdD students as dissertation writers. Although much attention was devoted to 'the what and the how' of designing research studies, less time was allotted to developing students' abilities to create disciplinary texts. Nevertheless, all students must create a disciplinary text, a DiP, but their abilities to do so and the quality of texts they create vary. With limited space in the program of study, the challenge became how to develop students' disciplinary literacy through existing program structures.
In this essay, we have described how we employ Mentor Texts (MTs), previously completed program DIPs, to support our students' efforts as they develop their DiP across the course of our EdD program in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. In particular, we have discussed how we use a disciplinary literacy approach, through MTs, to develop students' reading, writing, thinking, and performing abilities as scholarly practitioners. We organized this essay around four important topics including (a) describing disciplinary literacy and the MT strategy, (b) discussing a theoretical framework in which the MT strategy was situated, (c) illustrating how we implement a MT strategy to support students' scholarly practitioner DiP efforts in our EdD program, and (d) offering challenges and next steps for using MTs to foster EdD students' disciplinary literacy.

DISCIPLINARY LITERACY VIA MENTOR TEXTS
Disciplinary literacy has been defined as "the specialized knowledge and abilities possessed by those who create, communicate, and use knowledge" within a specific field (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012, p. 7). Students in our EdD program must learn and master areas of disciplinary literacy (e.g., problem of practice, action research, theoretical perspectives, educational intervention/innovation, etc.) to become scholarly practitioners. Although scholarly practitioner dissertations like the DiP have shared some attributes with other dissertation styles, it incorporated its own unique literacy aspects, it had its "own purposes, its own kinds of evidence, and its own style of critique" (Shanahan, 2017). Using a disciplinary literacy approach has helped students examine and develop the specific literacy practices needed (ways of reading, writing, thinking, and performing) in the field of scholarly practitioner work so that ultimately, they became "core members" who were able to approach DiP tasks with agency and shared practices that were appropriate to the specialized purposes, values, and demands of this discipline (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). We assert that developing EdD students' disciplinary literacy requires different strategies. One such strategy used in our program was MTs.
MTs have been high quality texts that students and teachers returned to again and again. They were examples that writers learned from and emulated. MTs have helped students "take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today" (Dorfman, 2013). MTs have come in a variety of forms, such as picture books, essays, lab reports, journal articles, and have been chosen to match the genre or text type on which a writer was working. Research results showed the use of mentor (or model) texts helped high school students learn disciplinary literacy and helped them improve as writers (Graham & Perin, 2007;Pytash & Morgan, 2014). Although limited studies have been conducted in post-secondary contexts, Rodriguez et al. (2017) found using MTs helped doctoral candidates understand the dissertation genre and improved content learning.
The MTs we used were DiP completed by graduates of our program. These MTs offered relevant, specific illustrations of the disciplinary content and literacies appropriate for the development of scholarly practitioners through the DiP process. As educators and mentors in an EdD program, the use of MTs allowed us to simultaneously teach disciplinary knowledge and teach how knowledge has been produced in our discipline, aka disciplinary literacy. Wenger's (1998;Wenger et al., 2002) Communities of Practice (CoP) framework was valuable as we considered our approach for using MTs to aid students in developing disciplinary literacies appropriate for doctoral work and completion of the scholarly practitioner DiP proposal and final document. Wenger et al. (2002) suggested CoP were defined by three elements: "a domain of knowledge, which defines a set of issues; a community of people who care about this domain; and the shared practice that they are developing to be effective in the domain" (p. 27, italics in original). Wenger et al. (2002) maintained the CoP domain established common ground for participants to do their work and a "sense of common identity …. The domain inspires members to contribute and participate, guides their learning, and gives meaning to their actions" (p. 27-28). In the current context, the domain included carrying out tasks related to navigating aspects of the program; connecting with other students and faculty members; and engaging with coursework. Notably, it involved developing students' literacies as scholarly practitioners such as thinking, reading, discussing, and writing about their research work including developing, drafting, sharing, and revising initial DiP drafts in courses, and later the DiP proposal, and the final DiP.

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
With respect to community, Wenger et al. (2002) claimed the community forms "the social fabric of learning. A strong community fosters interactions and relationships based on mutual respect and trust" (p. 28). Thus, in the community, students readily interacted with one another developing relationships, learning from and supporting each other throughout the EdD program including the various aspects of the DiP process. Notably, faculty members were also part of the community sharing their expertise with students and supporting them in the multitude of tasks relevant to the doctoral program. This support from faculty members and peers extended to the development and writing of parts of the DiP across the course of the program.
Finally, Wenger et al. (2002) suggested the practice included frameworks, tools, ideas, and information shared among community members. In particular, "the practice is the specific knowledge the community develops, shares, and maintains" (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 29). Further, as Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015, para. 8) noted CoP participants "develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problemsin short a shared practice," which foster and support students' development as scholarly practitioners. With respect to our focus on writing and the DiP process, two noteworthy features of practice were (a) mentored aspects of developing students' disciplinary literacies and (b) the resulting development of identity as influential and scholarly practitioners, while moving from a peripheral role to a central role as scholarly practitioners.
First, with respect to the cooperative, mentored aspects of the writing process, students were engaged in writing activities early in the program with the strong support of faculty members across the course of the program. Specifically, students engaged in carefully scaffolded reading and writing efforts, which were conscientiously overseen by faculty members. As part of these experiences, students engaged with MTs to facilitate the learning process, initially to develop their content understanding of the discipline, and later, to support them in creating disciplinary texts.
Second, the concept of practice was crucial in our work because it helped us to characterize students' movement from peripheral participation to full participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as a scholarly practitioner. Lave and Wenger suggested limited peripheral participation was the means by which those new to a discipline were partial, peripheral, participants who learned about the discipline from experts, full participants, in a CoP by interacting with those more knowledgeable participants; in the same way, for example, that apprentices learn from their mentors. Thus, in the current situation, those new to being scholarly practitioners and being able to write as scholarly practitioners would be 'partially' involved and learn from mentors, and mentor texts, about disciplinary literacy and its role in becoming and subsequently being a scholarly practitioner.
Notably, participation in a CoP influenced identity (Lave & Wenger, 1991;Wenger, 1998). Thus, as students participated in these new practices and in the CoP, they developed new identities and enhanced ones they held previously. For example, in the current situation, students moved from being peripherally involved to being more fully involved as scholarly practitioners. In doing so, they developed new identities as researching professionals, those who function as consumers and producers of research appropriate to their workplace settings (Buss, 2019;Buss & Avery, 2017). In our program, a fundamental component of the work of becoming a researching professional has been developing the disciplinary literacies of a scholarly practitioner. Thus, the reading, thinking, writing, and performance skills associated with the discipline played a critical role in shaping EdD students' identities in becoming scholarly practitioners.

ILLUSTRATING OUR USE OF MENTOR TEXTS
In our efforts to support students' disciplinary literacy, we have carefully crafted situated learning experiences to foster the process. As shown in Figure 1, situated learning experiences have been scaffolded and allowed students to move from limited involvement on the periphery (Lave & Wenger, 1991) toward the center of the scholarly practitioner community.

Figure 1 Moving from Peripheral Participation to Being a Core Member as a Scholarly Practitioner
Progression across experiences did not have to be linear and allowed for movement towards and away from the center, as EdD students navigated and developed the disciplinary content and disciplinary literacies of scholarly practitioners. In Table 1, we summarized how we have used MTs across the program to create situated learning experiences for students. Early experiences helped students learn disciplinary content and later experiences developed EdD students' disciplinary literacies.

Reading to Learn Disciplinary Content
During the second term, near the beginning of the program, students have taken courses including Innovations in Teaching and Learning and Strategies for Inquiry. In these courses, students have been provided with opportunities to engage with MTs to learn about the content of scholarly practitioner DiPs in our program. Additionally, they were afforded opportunities to begin to write about content in drafts of required parts of a DiP. These initial opportunities constituted Steps A and B outlined in Table 1, which we have presented in finer grained detail in this section of the paper and the next.
In reading to learn content, the initial step in the process, students engaged with MTs, previous DiPs, to learn about the content of a scholarly practitioner DiP. In this situated learning experience, we provided students with a group of MTs and an Initial Mentor Text Guiding Framework, a limited set of questions they were asked to use as they read and reviewed sections of the MTs. We use the Initial Mentor Text Guiding Framework, to guide students as they read and engaged in conversations about the MTs. Presented in a matrix format, the Guiding Framework included questions and opportunities for students to identify examples from the MTs and engage in discussions about the content of the DiPs. See Table 2 for an example of a matrix we shared with students. The questions were purposefully limited in terms of scope to encourage students to focus on content, organization, and cues for each section of the DiP. This supported the engagement with the MTs and was a good beginning point for peripheral participation. To contextualize this effort, consider the typical content of our scholarly practitioner DiP initial chapter. In this chapter, students described the leadership context and purpose of their study. As students engaged with the MTs, they were asked to consider the context for the study that was composed of elements such as the larger, national or international context and how the context and problem of practice were situated in that larger context. Then, as they read, they were asked to consider the local, situational context including the problem of practice; the purpose of the study; and the research questions guiding the study (Buss & Zambo, 2014). Of course, these elements became more transparent as students engaged with several MTs. Following their review of these MTs, discussions about them consolidated students' learning and undergirded their efforts as they initiated construction of their own application of these concepts related to their personal contexts.

Table 2. Initial Mentor Text Guiding Framework for the Leadership Context and Purpose of the Study, Chapter 1 of Our Dissertation in Practice
Moreover, other Initial Mentor Text Guiding Frameworks have been used to aid students as they continued to examine the MTs for additional sections/content of the DiP. Guiding Framework Questions were written to draw attention to the concepts and key vocabulary of the various sections of the DiP. For example, Chapter 2 of the DiP in our program addresses theoretical perspectives and research guiding the study, along with previous cycles of students' action research. Notably, as they engaged with the MTs, students came to see this chapter included a selective, focused discussion of theoretical frameworks relevant to the student's Problem of Practice (PoP) and its potential resolution, related research, and research conducted by the student in earlier cycles of action research prior to the DiP proposal. Thus, the chapter has been different from more traditional dissertations because of its narrower focus on theoretical frameworks and its incorporation of earlier action research that informed the DiP. Again, by using the guiding framework with specific questions related to this chapter, we have asked students to focus on the content and organization of these MTs as they built their understanding of disciplinary concepts. Moreover, we have continued to use MTs and guiding questions with each section of the DiP to build students' content knowledge of the discipline. This provided the necessary foundation for their future work as writers and performers, and their movement from the periphery and towards the center of the CoP of scholarly practitioners.

Writing to Learn Disciplinary Content
The early experiences of engaging with MTs to learn the content of the discipline provided students with the foundation necessary to begin writing to learn. Along with reading MTs to learn about the content included in a scholarly practitioner DiP, students also used MTs as they engage with early writing in the program. As students developed an understanding of the key vocabulary and concepts specific to the discipline of a scholarly practitioner DiP, they reviewed MTs as guides for crafting writing assignments in coursework. These writing assignments allowed students to write to further their understandings about the concepts and vocabulary associated with the discipline of a scholarly practitioner DiP.
In these situated learning experiences early in the EdD program, students revisited the MTs as they applied what they were learning in coursework. Although they were not yet designing or writing their DiP study per se, students practiced with concepts from the program, such as defining a PoP, defining a theoretical perspective, and applying data collection and analysis tools. In these experiences, students used MTs as they wrote to express their understanding of concepts and skills needed to develop as a scholarly practitioner.
Engaging students with MTs during these early coursework writing opportunities allowed us to review the vocabulary and content in the discipline and evaluate students' emerging understandings of disciplinary concepts. Using the questions/answers from an earlier situated learning experience (see Table 2), we have revisited disciplinary content in a section of the DiP, but this time, we asked students to apply the content to their personal context, problem of practice, and intervention ideas. In this engagement with the MT, students reviewed how others have presented content such that they could begin to apply concepts to their scholarly practitioner situation.
The goal of these early writing experiences in coursework has been for students to demonstrate an understanding of concepts and begin to apply them. Thus, early in the program students were writing to show they understood, the audience was their instructor. While they were gathering some early experiences with authoring text in this discipline, their development with disciplinary literacy was still somewhat on the periphery, as they were not yet writing a DiP for others in the field. Nevertheless, these peripheral learning experiences were necessary because it was through them that instructors and students determined whether students were progressing in their content understandings and were ready to start the process of writing their DiP proposal.

Reading to Create Disciplinary Texts
Near the end of coursework, students have been assigned to Leader Scholar Communities (LSCs) and provided with a faculty member who served as the students' dissertation chair and who led the LSC (Buss & Allen, 2020). The students who have engaged with each other from the beginning of coursework were now separated into more intimate, smaller communities, narrowing the size of the group from 20-25 students, down to 5-7. The act of establishing LSCs has been somewhat symbolic because it served as the time marker for when students moved from the periphery towards the center in the scholarly practitioner community. No longer were students just learning and practicing with concepts and ideas (i.e., disciplinary content), rather, in the LSC students and faculty members turned their attention to situated learning experiences aimed at creating disciplinary texts. In these LSCs, students worked in a small community for the remainder of their time in the program, four semesters, as they designed, proposed, conducted, and wrote their final scholarly practitioner DiP.
During their first semester in an LSC, students and faculty members got to know one another and themselves as a community. Although the students have interacted with each other since the beginning of the program, the move to the LSC afforded opportunities to get to know each other more closely so that they and their chair could support one another through the DiP. Part of the 'getting to know you' process included students sharing with their LSC their DiP ideas. Another part of the 'getting to know you' process has been learning about themselves and others as writers. In this first semester as an LSC, we explored questions like, With attention to getting to know each other as people, as action researchers, and as writers, we have established community experiences that went beyond disciplinary content and laid a foundation for working together to create disciplinary texts.
Along with getting to know each other, during these situated learning experiences, the LSC chair took students back to MTs they had seen previously in their earlier coursework. Revisiting familiar MTs saved time (students did not have to read for comprehension, they already knew the texts) and allowed us to place our attention on two areas: developing a shared understanding/language/expectation of the concepts and purposes for each section of the DiP, and for beginning to read for an awareness of the author. See Table 3 for the guiding questions we have used as we investigate the MTs during the LSC. The questions have been purposefully centered on author awareness, giving students a new lens through which to further develop the content and vocabulary of the discipline. This revisiting of MTs through an author awareness lens also allowed students to start imagining themselves as authors of this discipline. 2. What is the purpose of (section of DiP) and how does the author make that clear?
3. What stands out to you about how the author (introduces the problem of practice)? 4. What thumb holds does the author provide for the reader (headings, subheadings, images, tables, definitions, etc.)? 5. How does the author use structure/organization to support the purpose of this section? 6. Does the author write in first, second, or third person? What tense (past, present, present perfect, etc.)? Passive or active voice?
As an LSC, we explored MTs together as a teaching strategy, but the MT strategy was not just a teaching strategy used during their work to design their DiP. Students individually sought out other MTs to guide them in their specific author moves, in this way, the MT strategy became a learner strategy as well. Students sought out MTs from the DiP database of all previously completed program DiP that they wanted to review for specific author needs, e.g. Who has written about conducting research with their own students and how did they write about their simultaneous role as a practitioner and researcher? Who has used a critical theory lens for their study and how did they strike a balance between critique and hope? In these situated learning experiences, building on what they already knew about the content expectations of the DiP, the EdD students used their needs as writers to chart their own course for MT selection and investigation. As they progressed towards the center of the CoP as scholarly practitioners, EdD students looked for and investigated MTs and shared what they found with others in the LSC.

Writing to Create Disciplinary Texts
Up to this point, students have been using MTs as they explored the content and literacies of scholarly practitioner dissertations. MT exploration has allowed students to understand what was expected in a scholarly practitioner dissertation (concepts, processes, key terms, etc.) and how to create this style of text (author awareness). In this last situated learning experience example, students moved even further towards the center, and authored their own disciplinary text, sections of the DiP. Unlike the earlier experiences with writing to learn, in these experiences students were writing to create.
In these experiences, students approached thinking, reading, writing, and performing aspects of the DiP through the lens of a more knowledgeable peer, being very close to the center of the CoP, and taking on more and more traits of a core member. They were no longer navigating understanding about the disciplinary concepts, but instead, they were polishing the ways they performed the acts of a scholarly practitioner. As they did so, they shared their writing and performing, their literacies, with their peers in the LSC, with their chair, and with their committee.
In these situated experiences, students were writing to create their own texts in this discipline and at the same time, creating mentor texts for others. Across the LSC, students shared sections of the DiP as peers needed support in creating similar sections of their text. The situated learning experiences that supported students writing to create extend from the creation of their DiP proposal to the creation of their final DiP and core member position in the scholarly practitioner CoP.

CHALLENGES AND NEXT STEPS FOR USING MENTOR TEXTS
In the concluding section, we discuss the challenges we have encountered in using MTs. Additionally, we have described next steps in using MTs in an EdD program and offered some questions for those considering whether and how they might use MTs in their EdD programs.

Challenges
In our own efforts using MTs with our students, we found there were three major challenges. First, during the reading to learn process, getting students to attain the appropriate level of abstraction has been difficult for some students who tended to get bogged down in the detail of the content rather than seeing the content as existing within a larger thinking/writing framework. Nevertheless, having them synthesize the material across MTs has been helpful in moving them forward in the reading to learn MT process.
Second, presenting the completed dissertation as a mentor text has provided a soundly developed text, but with the limitation that students have not been able to see how the finished document has emerged over time through various drafts. Thus, students have gathered the impression that writing of their own DiP did not require multiple revisions of their work. Notably, students were reluctant to make substantial revisions in their texts because they too highly valued their current writing due to their previous, large investment of time and labor. This illustrated an example of what Norton et al. (2012) have dubbed the IKEA effect, when individuals were unwilling to change something because they have invested so much time and effort into a project. To address this challenge, we have decided to cultivate and use early drafts of the DiPs we employ with students, to show them the revisions and drafts that lead to the final DiP. Specifically, we have determined that providing students with paired versions of the MTs, the Proposal DiP and the final DiP, so that students can see how literacies develop over time, and that which constitutes performance at the proposal stage looks different than what constitutes performance of a scholarly practitioner in the final DiP.
Third, some students have had difficulty dealing with the very dynamic nature of using MTs and the resulting movement of the individuals from the periphery to the center of being a scholarly practitioner. For some students who have been disposed toward 'linear, forward movement and this way of thinking,' revisiting MTs has made it seem like they were moving 'backward' to a less sophisticated level of performance. For example, when reading to create disciplinary texts, we have had to be certain to demonstrate that students need to 'learn how to write the content,' not merely review the content as they did in their initial work with the MTs. We have decided to work on this by making our intentions clear across the MT strategy. While using MTs with students through the CoP theory in practice, we needed to do a better job of explicitly talking with students about the why's and how's, building their understanding of the process and its goals.

Next Steps
As we have implemented the use of MTs, we have not systematically employed peer-to-peer feedback. Although we have incorporated this process, we have not done so in a systematic way, nor have we provided adequate preparation for students to engage in this process. As a next step, we will provide more attention to developing students' expectations and skills for peer editing to support our students in carrying out this effort. Although we often have asked students to review one another's work we realized that more scaffolding and support will be necessary to provide more worthwhile and higher quality experiences for our students.
We have also thought about how we have been currently using MTs and how we might extend the use of 'mentor text like' situated learning experiences in our EdD program to further support students' disciplinary literacy, beyond just writing text, to the other "specialized abilities possessed by those who create, communicate, and use knowledge within each of the disciplines" (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012, p. 8). For example, in our EdD program, students have been afforded opportunities to practice presentation skills related to being/becoming a scholarly practitioner in our annual, online Doctoral Research Conferences. Our students have regarded these opportunities as being very helpful because they learn from others and they learn about their own abilities of being a scholarly practitioner in these events (Mertler & Henriksen, 2018). With respect to extending our efforts to new opportunities for 'mentor text like' efforts, we believe students would benefit from observing videos of DiP proposal and final defenses, which would aid students in dealing with stressful, major benchmarks in their programs of study. In these future situated experiences, the creation of a Mentor Text Guiding Framework for the defense videos (similar to that of Table 1) would facilitate students understanding of this aspect of performing the literacies of a scholarly practitioner in our program.

CONCLUSION
The strength of using MTs is in creating situated experiences (Lave & Wenger, 1991) that support student growth as scholarly and influential practitioners. Thus, the carefully scaffolded process affords them with multiple, situated learning opportunities over time that allow students to move to central roles as scholarly practitioners where they now contribute in meaningful ways to disciplinary-based literacy. In this process, students are transformed from being readers of MTs where they are consuming the MTs for content to being producers, that is to say writers of MTs that influence others.
Finally, consider the challenges you experience in your EdD program and how the MT strategy could allow you to more effectively deal with those challenges. Some questions to guide this inquiry follow. First, in your program, what are the disciplinary literacy expectations? What are the disciplinary content and the literacy skills you want your students to exhibit at the conclusion of the program? Next, how might MTs be useful to your program to aid your students' development of disciplinary content knowledge and disciplinary literacy abilities? Which MTs, DiPs and/or DiP drafts, would you want to use with students and why? What would serve as your DiP database and how would your students access it? W here would you situate learning experiences with MTs to best foster the development of disciplinary literacy abilities across your program? Taken together, we hope you find the MT strategies we describe in this essay to be useful in fostering students' disciplinary literacy-reading, writing, thinking, and performing abilities as you develop scholarly and influential practitioners in your program.