In this article, the authors begin this inquiry by describing their research with a class of middle school writers who played "Quandary," a free online educational game designed to teach argumentation, as part of a unit on writing arguments for environmental action. Regarding the subject area of English language arts (ELA), research has…

Providing students with the opportunity to generate new content and share it with a wide audience invites students to compose texts with the care and conviction that cannot be duplicated when writing solely for the teacher. This piece documents one teacher's effort to engage 99 eighth graders with an authentic writing opportunity: the…

Grounded in the three-part literary concept of the narrator, the narratee, and the implied reader, this article provides teachers and students with a heuristic for -- uncovering, attending to, and critiquing assumptions about youth found in the first-person narrative form that predominates in young adult literature.