Beyond publication: Social action as the ultimate stage of a writing process

Abstract

This article reports on the activities undertaken in a U. S. high school through which students produced video texts designed to address key social problems. The authors argue against conventional “writing process” models that assert a single set of stages for all writing and that position “publication” as the final stage of “the writing process.” In contrast, they illustrate how teaching grounded in critical literacy theory and informed by principles of connected learning requires instruction in task-specific procedures for interrogating information, imagining alternatives, and taking social action as the ultimate goal of composition. The authors detail one teacher's instruction and illustrate its effects with examples from students' work to demonstrate the shortcomings of conventional “writing process” conceptions and offer an alternative that advances the citizenship potential of youth in addressing societal inequities.