Middle school social studies teachers are increasingly working on argument writing in their classrooms so that students can successfully write counterarguments that acknowledge competing perspectives about historical and social issues by the end of eighth grade. The authors' prior research indicates that eighth-grade students "can" grow…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

This paper explores how students, as multimodal storytellers, can weave powerful narratives blending modes, genres, artefacts and literary conventions to represent the real and imagined in their lives. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of student writing in a middle years class for immigrant students learning English as an additional…