Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

The purpose of this qualitative project is to examine the use of a noticing assignment in one fourth-grade dual language arts classroom. We, the authors, consider the texts most interesting to students and how these texts relate to humanizing and responsive writing pedagogies. Learning to write in K–12 schooling contexts is often dictated by state-sanctioned standardized assessments, creating a space in which writing is equated with the rules of grammar rather than with deeper meaning making, inquiry, or joy. For youth from historically marginalized communities, this lack of joyfulness in writing instruction is particularly evident. In this study, we consider the following research questions: (1) How do students in a fourth-grade language arts course interact with texts that are interesting to them? (2) How might the act of noticing support students’ understandings of their own literacies as valued, worthy, and connected to the spaces and places in which they live and learn? and (3) How do students voice their perceptions and experiences of writing and writing instruction through the noticing project? Data include 16 fourth-grade students’ noticing journals, pre-project surveys of youth feelings toward writing, focal group interviews, and researcher field notes. Findings demonstrated that youth held varied perspectives toward writing, that they engaged in multiple LA skills to notice and respond to their and others’ noticings, and that they engaged in discussions of social (in)justice through their noticings. This study has implications for educators and researchers working toward more humanizing writing pedagogies connected to youths’ lived experiences, interests, desires, and curiosities.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the need for criticality toward writing assessments that privilege standard language ideologies and correctness-based approaches. However, teachers continue to experience discrepancies between their intentions and actions, struggling to address both content and form in facilitative, constructive commentary. This study uses the activity theory framework of pedagogical tools, composed of conceptual and practical tools, to analyze through interviews and commented-on papers how two college composition graduate instructors responded to student writing. This study finds that while one teacher held and enacted consistent and congruent pedagogical tools grounded in sociocultural theories of writing development, the other experienced entrenched conflict between competing beliefs about evaluative and process-oriented purposes for teaching writing. These contrastive experiences illustrate how instructors’ development of pedagogical tools is mediated by interactions between their epistemological orientations and language ideologies, reinforcing the need to surface tacit beliefs about Standardized English and academic writing. This study concludes with recommendations for productive intervention in novice composition teachers’ development of response practices.

I offer a meditation on current challenges faced by literacy educators and researchers and uses those challenges to suggest new directions for the field. Citing the precipitous decline in interest in the humanities and the field of literacy education, I consider the significance of tools such as ChatGPT for the teaching of writing. I explore the significance of out-of-school literacies and the linguistic diversity of today’s students in terms of their implications for literacy instruction. I also remind us of the chilling political climate in which we find ourselves, especially with regard to LGBTQ+ identities. Given these contemporary challenges, I suggest that we in the field of literacy education rethink the nature of writing instruction, restructure our research paradigm to be more inclusive and democratic, and continue to be forceful political advocates for pedagogies, practices, and policies that will ensure a just and equitable literacy education for all.

Drawing on critical theories of labor and commodification, this qualitative embedded case study explores how students experience alienation and intimacy in the work of writing for an English language arts class. Analysis of fieldnotes from 30 observations, student writing products, and reflective interviews with focal students and the teacher illuminated the meaningful assemblages where conditions of intimacy permeated instruction. Two practices supported intimacy in working conditions: knowledge about writing built through a collective process of noticing, and open-ended work time characterized by “managed nonmanagement” (, p. 176), or calculated flexibility in rules and expectations. Findings illustrate how a literacy practice might contribute to students’ experience of alienation or intimacy (or both) while writing, depending on conditions of industrialization and commodification. Even as the teacher strove to deindustrialize work, commodification through grades and standardized assessments heightened alienation in the writing environment. The study provides an example of an educational context governed by an industrial system of assessment where local actors (the teacher and students) disrupted alienation by working in smaller scales and more closely with texts.

This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college, and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning, the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color, and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach, integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge, and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action, meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies, and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.

This article will explore what I have conceptualized as critical celebration within an afterschool writing club for and with Girls of Color (GOC). Using a feminist of color theoretical framework and building upon existing literature about GOC and their writing practices, critical celebration will be defined as a lens used to view GOC as important, dynamic, and brilliant in the face of an overabundance of deficitizing narratives and erasure, and to also open opportunities for girls to view the experiences and identities of GOC like them and unlike them as important sources of knowledge as they develop critical insights toward solidarity across difference. Using this definition, I will then describe the ways the feminist of color writing pedagogy engaged in this group made space for critical celebration of and by GOC, thereby offering important implications for justice-oriented literacy education, not only for GOC, but for all students.

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In this Forum, colleagues remember and celebrate the life and legacy of Arthur Applebee, a former editor of Research in the Teaching of English and a leader in the field for many years, who passed away after a short illness on September 20, 2015. Intellectually, Arthur will be remembered for the sheer scope of his work over four decades, for his mentoring of several generations of scholars, for his contributions to research on literature and writing instruction in secondary schools, and for his theoretical work on “curriculum as conversation,” which has left an indelible mark on classroom discourse studies and English teacher education. More personally, Arthur’s friends and colleagues cherished his human kindness, generosity, humility, thoughtfulness, gentleness, equanimity, and affability.

This article identifies five categories of resources that preservice teachers drew on as they considered student writing and planned their own approaches to assessing and teaching writing. Identifying these resources helps us better understand how beginning writing teachers think about student writing—and better understand mismatches that commonly occur between what teacher educators teach and what new teachers actually do. Our study builds on literature that considers how writing teachers are prepared, extends research about how preservice teachers use what they learn, and adds layers of detail to literature about the resources that beginning teachers draw upon to aid and support them in their work. The pedagogical and research projects described in this study stem from a communities-of-practice framework. Our methods surfaced preservice teachers’ claims about writing and the resources they drew upon to support those claims. Drawing upon our rhetorical view of writing, we worked inductively to identify these claims and resources, using grounded analysis of transcripts from preservice teachers’ VoiceThread conversations to develop a taxonomy of 15 resources grouped into 5 categories: understanding of students and student writing; knowledge of context; colleagues; roles; and writing. This research has implications for educators and researchers working in teacher preparation. Scaffolded instruction is essential to help beginning teachers use particular resources—and to employ resources in ways connected with rhetorical conceptual frameworks. To that end, the taxonomy of resources can be used as a tool for individual and programmatic assessment, as well as to facilitate scaffolded instruction.

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

This study uses dialogic theory to understand teacher-writers’ practices across in- and out-of-school contexts. Using case study methods to closely observe and interview a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, as well as analyze their writing, the study identified similarities in the teachers’ appropriations of language, textual practices, and ideologies across contexts. However, each teacher appropriated distinct practices in discipline-specific ways, with one focused onthe literate practices of creative writers and the other focused on the literate practices of online, networked writers. These contrastive examples highlight ways in which teacher-writers’ literate and instructional activities dialogically inform each other in both similar and distinct ways. Ultimately, I make the argument that dialogic perspectives that attend to teachers’ out-of-school practices provide richer, more complex understandings of instructional practice than currently popular conceptions of “best practices” and “value-added” teaching.

Although current research and professional development on teaching of argumentative writing focus on “best practices,” we offer the construct of argumentative epistemologies to consider how English language arts teachers approach teaching and how they understand their students’ capacity for and interest in argumentation. Drawing on historical emphases in writing theory, we describe and illustrate three argumentative epistemologies: structural, ideational, and social practice. In an observational study of 31 high school English language arts classrooms, teachers’ enacted writing instruction foregrounded either formal elements of students’ arguments, the ideas and content of students’ arguments, or consideration of the complexity and variability of social contexts within which students wrote arguments. Case study analysis of three teachers illustrates the three argumentative epistemologies, how these epistemologies were socially constructed during instructional conversations, and how they were made visible through language use in and about classroom literacy events. These argumentative epistemologies have significance for teacher education, school writing research, and professional development, furthering our understanding of how and why teachers choose to adopt particular approaches to argumentative writing.

Editors Juzwik and Cushman introduce the November issue, which examines how teachers know, understand, and approach writing, the teaching of writing, and, more broadly, classroom discourse.

Paradigms of writing instruction and of writing assessment are interconnected, and they are, or should be, affected by the sociocultural context in which they are embedded. In the case of writing assessment, the predominant context is the assessment of the writing proficiency of second- or third-language writers of English. Since the Second World War, English has taken a hold as the language of business and politics, and much of that interaction occurs between and among multiple groups who share only English as a common language. English is also dominantly the language of intellectual exchange, and English language tests are a critical component of decision-making about the movement of people from less-developed countries to countries where they can gain greater educational opportunity. English tests have great value. Everywhere in the world, English proficiency is one of the essential keys to unlock the door of educational opportunity and all that promises for an individual’s future. The assessment of writing is, then, socially and politically significant not only within a country’s internal struggles for opportunity for all through quality education, but also between nations.

The increasing diversity of students in contemporary classrooms and the concomitant increase in large-scale testing programs highlight the importance of developing writing assessment programs that are sensitive to the challenges of assessing diverse populations. To this end, this paper provides a framework for conducting consequential validity research on large-scale writing assessment programs. It illustrates this validity model through a series of instrumental case studies drawing on the research literature conducted on writing assessment programs in Canada. We derived the cases from a systematic review of the literature published between January 2000 and December 2012 that directly examined the consequences of large-scale writing assessment on writing instruction in Canadian schools. We also conducted a systematic review of the publicly available documentation published on Canadian provincial and territorial government websites that discussed the purposes and uses of their large-scale writing assessment programs. We argue that this model of constructing consequential validity research provides researchers, test developers, and test users with a clearer, more systematic approach to examining the effects of assessment on diverse populations of students. We also argue that this model will enable the development of stronger, more integrated validity arguments.

This paper discusses the teaching of writing within the competing and often contradictory spaces of high-stakes testing and the practices and priorities around writing pedagogy in diverse school communities. It uses sociospatial theory to examine the “real-and-imagined” spaces (Soja, 1996) that influence and are influenced by teachers’ pedagogical priorities for writing in two linguistically diverse elementary school case studies. Methods of critical discourse analysis are used to examine rich data sets to make visible the discourses and power relations at play in the case schools. Findings show that when teachers’ practices focus on the teaching of structure and skills alongside identity building and voice, students with diverse linguistic backgrounds can produce dramatic, authoritative, and resonant texts. The paper argues that thirdspaces” (Soja, 1996) can be forged that both attend to accountability requirements and also give the necessary attention to more complex aspects of writing necessary for students from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to invest in writing as a creative and critical form of communication for participation in society and the knowledge economy.

The debate surrounding how best to support African American student writers continues today as the gap between achievement scores persists. This qualitative analysis documents the classroom structures and instructional practices of two English Language Arts teachers working in a predominately African American public middle school, whose students demonstrated growth on the state’s standardized assessment of English Language Arts. Teachers were chosen based on value-added measures of student achievement using test score gain and observational data of their writing instruction. Both teachers explicitly and repeatedly targeted writing skills and strategies during instruction and offered aligned instructional supports. Tasks assigned were intellectually challenging and aligned with the targeted skills and strategies. The data suggest ways to balance both skill and strategy instruction and a process approach to writing instruction, which many argue is supportive of African American students’ writing development.

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers’ writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis &amp; Sumara, 2006) to analyze how one teacher learned to teach writing within and through the emergent, nested, interacting systems of teacher education and the school where she took her first teaching job. Data sources were fieldnotes of her teaching and interviews about her instructional decisions, which were coded using constant comparison (Glaser &amp; Strauss, 1967) and the theoretical lens. Findings indicate the teacher’s understanding of writing instruction emerged through interactions between systems as she reproduced and recombined the ideas, values, goals, and activities she encountered within her undergraduate and graduate courses, her school district, and her sixth-grade classroom. The study concludes with discussions of the dynamics of learning to teach writing that emerged through the research and the implications of these dynamics for teacher education, educational policy, and future research.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

This article explores a third-grade teacher’s use of critical writing pedagogy to encourage students’ exploration of issues that were important in their lives from personal as well as social perspectives.

These two recipients of this year’s Alan C. Purves Award reflect on their work (reported in RTE Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 269–303) on “A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School” and the lessons they learned from their original research study as they tried to replicate the project in two additional districts outside their service area, to determine if the implications of their study would hold beyond the local context. The Alan C. Purves Award is given to the RTE article in the previous volume year judged most likely to impact educational practice

This study was conducted by members of a site of the California Writing Project in partnership with a large, urban, low-SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient.

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In this article, we present secondary students’ perceptions of their writing and writing instruction. Using the NCTE/IRA Standards as the foundation for a survey, we questioned nearly 2,000 public-school students concerning what they wrote, how they wrote, and the extent to which they wrote in their language arts classes.

English departments are increasingly under pressure to offer writing courses online, but research that informs effective pedagogies—including effective ways to respond to students’ drafts—is still limited.

A year-long, 2-level case study was conducted to examine both the complex writing performances of three students in a 2nd-3rd grade class and the instructional strategies of their teacher, focusing on the interplay between the children’s strategy use and the teacher’s instruction.

The purpose of this research was to examine both what it means to teach writing and what it means to write in a first-year university course in the history of science. More specifically, I investigated what students learned about writing when the focus was mainly on subject matter and only secondarily on writing and rhetoric. A number of converging methods of research were used to address this issue: audiotaping classroom discourse and taking field notes, interviewing students and collecting retrospective protocols about their responses to a writing assignment, and analyzing students’ texts. The analyses indicated that classroom discourse focused primarily on framing concepts that brought into focus different and conflicting conceptions of the scientific method and the ways authorship in history is colored by writers’ subjectivity and perspective taking. Although students’ interpretations of the writing assignment were not very detailed, the texts they wrote revealed some understanding of how to use comparisons as a tool for analysis in writing history, the importance of attending to context in examining a given historical phenomenon, and the extent to which writing history is both interpretive and rhetorical. Yet neither the focal students nor the other students participating in this study responded uniformly to the assignment. The data raise the question of whether disciplinary courses in writing provide an authentic alternative to the space general writing skills courses currently occupy, particularly if such classes exist as sites where students are introduced to critical thinking and argumentative writing in college.

This semester-long qualitative study explores the effects of a high-stakes, direct writing test on 3 teachers and their students in 1 rural Maryland high school. Out of the 23 students in both classes, 14 students had been identified for special education services for physical or learning problems; all had either failed the test once or had not yet taken it. The researchers conducted interviews with teachers and students, observed their classrooms, and collected samples of student writing and other artifacts to address 3 questions: (a) How did the test influence teacher beliefs about writing instruction? (b) How did these teachers adapt their instruction to respond to the demands of the test? (c) How did students who had not passed the test respond to their writing instruction and how did preparation for the test affect their attitudes/beliefs about writing? Our findings suggest that an emphasis on test preparation diminished the likelihood of the teachers’ engaging in reflective practice that is sensitive to the needs of individual students, that the high-stakes assessment process discounted the validity of locally developed standards for assessing writing, and that the criteria for passing the test failed to take into consideration the rich variety of American culture and the complexity of literacy learning.

Investigates cross-cultural tensions in Western writing pedagogy as reflected in Turkish teachers’ oppositional and accommodative attitudes and how those attitudes played out in classroom interactions. Discusses teachers’ perceptions concerning the effects of Western rhetorical styles on Turkish students’ thinking and identity, assumptions regarding philosophical and instructional objectives of Western approaches, and their views on what counts as good writing.

Examines, using grounded theory methods, an interactive, televised writing course taught via Teletechnet, a distance-education program at Old Dominion University. Shows how technology affects a writing classroom and influences the construction of students as writers. Suggests that institutional contexts are reconfigured in televised instruction as virtual and material spaces that allow interesting tensions to emerge.

This article reports on a study of the relationship between classroom context and the revisions of student writers. Specifically, the study examined the nature of the instructional context of the writing in one senior high school classroom and explored potential connections between particular features of the teacher’s approach to writing instruction and the frequency and types of revisions students in that class made to their essays. Drafts of students’ essays were coded for revisions, and results of the coding were examined with reference to specific features of the instructional method and related features of classroom context. Results of the study indicate that students in the present study, like students in some previous studies of revision, focused their revisions on surface and stylistic concerns. The study suggests that specific features of the classroom context, particularly the workshopstyle structure of the course, the interactions among students and the teacher regarding the students’ writing, and the nature of the teacher’s strategies for responding to and evaluating students’ writing, may have reinforced the teacher’s and students’ traditional views of writing quality and revision and may have thus contributed to the students’ focus on lower-level concerns in revision.

This study provideas framework for analyzing t e multiplea spects of reader perspective in a teacher’s approacth to writing instruction. This framework is based on an examination of one teacher’s written comments on her students’ paper as well as on observations of her classroom. Analysis showed that the teacher’s perspectivaes a reader, as reflected by her written commenotsn students’ papers, differed (a) across students, especially for the two students at either end of the ability rangea; and (b) a cross writing assignmentrs, evealing differences in their difficulty but in ways not predicted by the theory underlying the assignment sequence. Groundeind the social processes of writing and reading in the context of the classroom, the framework gives researchers and teacher as way to explore reader perspective in teacher response to student writing and its influence on writing and learning to write.

This paper compares the effects of pencil-and-paper and computer-assisted versions of a process/model approach in a college writing program with the effects of a more traditional approach. Three empirical measures are used in the study: a frequency count of linguistic markers of argumentation and comparison/contrast based on previous work by Odell (1977), a measure of the number of arguments, and a measure of their logical integrity. All significant differences favored students in the experimental sections, who used more markers, made more arguments and made stronger arguments. Students in the computer-assisted (CAI) version of the experimental approach used still more markers than students in the pencil-and-paper version, suggesting that the CAI materials may enhance the efficiency of student learning of some formal aspects of reasoning in writing. These results suggest that it may be possible to attain a postprocess paradigm for teaching writing and thinking that transcends the dialectic that places process and product in opposition to each other.

This study examined cultural and instructional influences on the comprehension of figurative language by elementary school children in Harlem, New York. Specifically, it examined children’s exposure to and participation in the creative, verbal street game called “sounding” or “playing the dozens,” and it studied the effects of a program of creative writing instruction provided by visiting writers. The results indicate that the special instruction tended to improve the figurative language comprehension of the children. Also, those children who frequently engaged in sounding comprehended figurative language better than those who did not. This latter effect could not be accounted for by differences in general language ability. The results are taken as support for a “language experience” view of the development of figurative language comprehension in preference to any strong form of a “cognitive constraints” view.