Understanding Young People’s Writing Development: Identity, Disciplinarity, and Education

This collection offers an inclusive, multifaceted look at individual students’ patterns of writing trajectories, as well as their development of an identity as a writer. Building on rare longitudinal research, this translated text explores how adolescents learn subjects through writing and learn writing through subjects. Contributors consider issues relating to different forms of writing and grapple with students’ ambivalence or resistance to this at school, together offering an examination of how the education system can rise to the challenge of offering today’s students meaningful and appropriate writing instruction.

Bringing knowledge from writing researchers and educational researchers together, Understanding Young People’s Writing Development explores:

• Young adults’ complicated experiences with the school writing project
• Practices, purposes, and identification in student note writing
• Knowledge construction in writing as experience and educational aim
• The pedagogical challenges and perspectives of writing and writer development
• Creativity as experience and potential in writing development
• The impact of digital technologies and media on student writing

Using students’ work to aid the understanding of practice, this book will help highlight the importance of viewing individual writer developments from a social, institutional, and societal context, and raise questions that will advance writing pedagogy and the teaching and learning of school subjects.