This discussion introduces a heuristic to guide writing instruction with adolescents and young adults. Our framework, called "Open World Writing," consists of six writing territories (vision, material, design, voice, flow, polish) that provide focus and clarity for writing and educators working across academic and creative writing…

This article presents the findings of a study in which college freshman reflected on the process of writing a literacy narrative and considered the impact of such writing on their narrative identities. The author synthesizes existing scholarship on literacy narratives, discusses the methodology of interpretive phenomenological analysis utilized,…

The author provides a conceptual framework that illustrates the spectrum of authentic writing assignments and operationalizes authenticity, in an effort to guide practitioners toward crafting writing assignments that are meaningful for students by reflecting and replicating the kinds of writing that occur outside of the academic context. The…

Students who understand their writing process and see themselves as writers are more likely to successfully tackle unfamiliar genres and writing tasks. In this self-study, a college English professor and two first-year college students make a case for an extended-metaphor assignment that helps students build stronger identities as writers.…

With dialogic writing assessment, teachers can scaffold students' writing processes in ways that are flexible and responsive to students' individual needs. Examples of teachers using this conference-based method of classroom writing assessment illustrate how to practice assessment that is dynamic and relational rather than static and standardized,…

This article explores the written reflections and multimodal analyses of 31 middle school students who engaged with video games as texts. For four consecutive days, students spent 30 minutes playing video games and then 30 minutes writing reflections on their experiences and perceptions, resulting in 124 total reflections. Students focused on how…

Students who are quiet while reflecting on information before sharing their thoughts are often mistakenly judged as not participating in class. To better understand how quiet students navigated the space of a Midwestern U.S. suburban classroom, a yearlong action research study was conducted to learn more about student needs and test how adapting…

This article shares a study of an interview/writing project for adolescent girls, which was a component of the Girls Writing Science Project at a diverse urban high school in the Southwestern United States. The group of high school girls planned, initiated, conducted, and wrote interview profiles of women scientists from their local community.…

Because authenticity in education is a subjective judgment regarding the meaningfulness of an activity, a need exists to co-investigate with students classroom factors increasing authenticity of writing. In this case study, one 8th grade student's needs for authentic writing are explored in detail. Xavier's take on authentic writing…

Although the popularity and use of graphic novels in literacy instruction has increased in the last decade, few sustained analyses have examined adolescents' reading processes with informational texts in social studies classrooms. Recent research that has foregrounded visual, emotional, and embodied textual responses situates this qualitative…

Through a student/teacher classroom conflict, the author explores ways adults produce student writers as vulnerable. Drawing on post-structural concepts of adolescence, identity production, interrogation, and vulnerability, the author details how an English teacher invited students to perform vulnerability in personal narratives about issues like…

This practitioner research study investigates the power of multimodal texts within a real-world context and argues that a participatory culture focused on literary arts offers marginalized high school students opportunities for collaborative design and authoring. Additionally, this article invites educators to rethink the at-risk label. This…

Despite the emphasis on increasing the frequency with which students engage in analytic writing, we know very little about the "writing diet" of adolescents. Student notebooks, used as a daily record of in-class work, provide one source of evidence about the diversity of writing expectations that students face. Through careful…

This article shares two National Writing Project Teacher Consultants' interest in examining student engagement in writing flash fiction using mentor texts. Our two-week unit centered on two high school freshmen classes (one class identified as "at-risk" and another class identified as "college prep"), and we found the use…

As states continue to implement CCSS, science teachers will be asked to incorporate more discipline-specific reading and writing in their classes. Yet, according to national studies, few science teachers have previous experience to draw upon and most have little to no training in writing pedagogy. This article reports on one science teacher's…