“Writing That Matters”: Collaborative Inquiry and Authoring Practices in a First-Grade Class

This article explores how a first grade class re-defines what constitutes writing achievement. The young children’s authoring practices upended notions of writing as the individual production of “model” texts with predetermined features, as was emphasized in curricular guidelines and high-stakes assessments, and of writing as disembedded from personal histories, collective inquiries, and civic concerns. Instead, being an author was anchored on collaborative and personally-relevant notions of “what matters” to students. Young children were able to use writing to investigate their classroom and neighborhood communities, in the process inquiring into the significance of human relationships and the varied purposes to which they might put their written work.