Within the sociocultural theory of writing, texts are seen to result from cultural and social practices that affect the structure, content, and production of them in different knowledge communities. Accordingly, writing is not the same across subjects or contexts. Focusing on writing in subjects other than Language arts, this special contributes to understanding subject-specific writing involving both discipline specific knowledge, knowledge of representation, and production of knowledge in different, subject specific writing contexts. The issue advocates that disciplinary writing can start at an early age in primary school, that students have a range of preparedness for it, and that writing skills can be developed to support the learning objectives of the subject. The introduction considers the perspectives of writing to learn and learning to write as the underpinnings of writing across and in subjects. Consequently, the studies in the issue are related to these perspectives. The content areas scrutinized are Craft Education, Civics, Environmental studies, Science and Science orientation. This issue reflects the multifaceted, contextual, and hybrid forms writing can take, and, how writing can support learning in changing contexts and with different contents.

Much attention has been paid to the complexity underlying writing, but the versatile roles that collaborative writing can encourage in elementary students remain scarcely understood. In this exploratory study, we developed a framework for observing the participatory roles that elementary students spontaneously adopt as they engage in collaborative writing in environmental and social studies classrooms. To concretize the applicability of the framework, we illustrate how five students shift between the roles across task types. We identified 18 participatory roles and allocated them into six categories: content-, literacy-, performance-, process-focused, expressive, and off-task roles. While these generally align with previous research on participatory roles, literacy-focused and expressive role categories emerged as new data-driven findings. The concrete examples provided for illustrating how these roles are reflected when students engage in collaborative writing deepen the understanding of the variety and flexibility in roles adopted across the students and task types. We expect the framework to be beneficial for both teachers and researchers, to observe how flexibly students adopt roles from different categories when writing collaboratively. This can provide insights into designing instruction and selecting task types to effectively promote flexible and meaningful participation among all students when writing collaboratively in subject-area classrooms.