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…

With increased availability, accessibility, and capability of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, we argue that human processes of virtuous and multimodal composition can support meaningful communication. After defining our perspectives on writerly virtue and multimodality, we suggest how writers and their instructors might approach the use of AI…

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.…

Although school is only one of many places where youths write, the writing privileged in school is often upheld as standard, whereas adolescents' out-of-school writing often uses forms, styles, and topics not taught or allowed in school. Little is known about how K-12 educators can use research on out-of-school writing to inform in-school writing…

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,…

As a component of dialogic writing response, question posing is an essential strategy for crafting meaningful writing experiences. The author used qualitative content analysis to explore the question-posing feedback provided by eight secondary English teacher candidates in response to literary essays by ninth graders. Findings indicate that…

In this article, the authors, two teacher educators and three high school teachers, examine the impact of a professional development seminar held in spring 2017. In that seminar, participants read and composed brief autobiographical sketches in a variety of media and learned a new lexicon for multimodal close reading, composition, and design.…

Increasing attention has been directed recently to literacy education as a means for disciplinary learning and career readiness. All the while, concepts of print have dramatically changed because the majority of reading and writing now occurs in digital formats. Therefore, it is an ideal time to investigate the complexities of the writing process…

Prospective teachers often draw on their own experiences with writing as they envision and plan for future writing instruction. Rather than analyzing the types and topics of writing that teacher candidates engaged in as K-16 students, this study inquired into the mediational means shaping their writing processes. The teacher candidates in this…

Research about adolescents sharing creative writing in interest-driven online communities has suggested that teachers can play important roles in helping young writers realize the potential of online spaces. Framed by sociocultural notions of new literacies and a conceptual framework theorizing the rhetorical situation when sharing writing in…

How can social change become possible when secondary teachers approach argument as participation in ongoing conversations? The authors illustrate how--through writing, speaking, and reading to develop a letter to their principal arguing for a school policy change--secondary students participated in multiple conversational spheres across time and…

In this article, the authors report on what began as a series of rather desperate English teacher acts: The authors implemented a youth participatory action research photovoice research project with adolescents in a range of diverse communities that were united by young adults' detachment from their writing processes and products and from their…

Current research on instructional practices for secondary student writing reveals little emphasis on compositions requiring analysis, interpretation, and argumentation. Indeed, written expression in English language arts classes is generally confined to writing assignments of very limited length. Additionally, recent efforts for educational reform…

U.S. adolescents' prior technology experiences and exposure to digital genres vary, but they will often write digital texts as they enter college and adulthood. We explored middle school students' digital writing instructional experience in the context of a university-based summer digital writing camp. The sixth- through eighth-grade adolescents…