The authors examined how high school seniors conceptualized the task of writing college admissions essays, the audience for that writing, and themselves as potentially college-worthy writers. In a survey and related interviews, students revealed more emphasis on generic good writing than on the narrative argument genre that college admissions…

Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

The essay is the most intimate of reading experiences, in which the reader is invited to eavesdrop as the writer works through a thought or excavates a memory. The writer can be explicit, in the first person, or just implicit, as the person behind the words, but he or she is absolutely, powerfully present. It's as if, for those few thousand words,…