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Letters to the Next President: Guidelines for Promoting Civic Writing

8/26/2020

 
By Jacob Steiss
In our last blog, we highlighted research by Antero Garcia and his colleagues that analyzed thousands of letters written by secondary students to the next president of the United States. The corpus of letters showed the capacity of students to use their literacy skills to advocate for social and political changes they see as significant. We believe their research demonstrates a way to engage students in civic writing today, though educators will have to be flexible and responsive to their own students’ interests, cultural backgrounds, and writing skills. In this blog, we share considerations and guidelines for engaging in civic writing in your own classroom.

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Letters to the Next President; Fostering Civic Literacy through Authentic Writing Tasks

8/19/2020

 
By Jacob Steiss
In this two-part blog, we will highlight the work of Dr. Antero Garcia and his colleagues, with help from The National Writing Project (@WritingProject) and KQED (@KQEDedspace). The project analyzed letters written by over 11,000 students from over 300 schools and 47 states. These letters were written to the future 2016 president, who had not been elected yet.

​In examining students' compositions, they found that adolescents are engaged and eager to speak out on civic issues that impact their communities, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform. Though written as a classroom activity, the writing also represents and sustains civic identities of youth engaging in activism that addresses government leaders.  
"Students wrote alongside and in solidarity
with ongoing civil rights movements"
We see this research as particularly important for writing researchers, teachers, and school leaders as it describes the civic concerns and interests of adolescents and outlines a meaningful and authentic writing task educators may implement in their classrooms.
​
The project also highlights ways that teachers may focus their instruction to support students' crucial thinking and argumentative writing skills. In part one of this blog (here), we will discuss what researchers learned from studying these letters to the next president. 

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What is a Transformative Justice Approach to Literacy Education?

8/3/2020

 

By Jacob Steiss

In “A Transformative Justice Approach to Literacy Education,” Dr. Masiha T. Winn describes how teachers can use “restorative justice as a lens through which to view their roles and responsibilities to students.” She identifies key questions to guide instruction through a restorative justice lens and outlines multiple levels of inquiry for students to examine the intersections of history, justice, race, and language in their lives. This approach to education creates a space for youth to develop and express literate identities while critiquing and speaking back to social, institutional, and political forces affecting their communities.
​“A restorative justice English education seeks to create and sustain writing, reading, thinking, and action-oriented communities in which children, youths, and educators can cultivate purposeful literate identities and trajectories.”

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The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305C190007 to University of California, Irvine. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
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