In the mid-1980s, researchers began to study writers working in collaboration. Much of this research attended to what might be termed side-by-side composing: authors working on their own individual pieces and discussing them with others as needed. Others have studied co-composing--that is, multiple authors crafting a single text--describing the…

Children are experiencing life at a time of rapid technological development. They increasingly utilize new technologies, navigate, and create multimodal forms of communication. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) evolve, reshaping the nature of literacy. Meanwhile, state, federal, and professional organizations are rewriting the…

All young people have stories to tell. Yet when children and teens declare that they hate writing or are too embarrassed to admit they like it, elevating their voices becomes challenging. It is urgent that educators, policy makers, youth development workers and leaders, and philanthropists work together to find a way. In the land of free speech,…

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…

Writing circles are "small groups... meeting regularly to share drafts, choose common writing topics, practice positive response, and in general, help each other become better writers" (Vopat, 2009, p. 6). In this exploratory study, writing circles were employed with elementary teacher candidates in hopes of enhancing their perceptions…

Drawing from a sociocultural perspective of literacy, with the goal to promote the use of African Native Languages (ANL) in schools, I conducted a Participatory Action Research in one multilingual primary school community in North West Tanzania. For three weeks, 19 teachers, 19 parents and 119 6th grade students collaborated with each other in a…