Liminal Spaces of Writing in Adolescent and Adult Education sheds new light on persistent issues plaguing student writing. Through a compilation of approaches centered around the convergence of structure and agency in practicing writing, the book offers invaluable insights into cultivating agentic student writing for literacy researchers.

Liminal Spaces of Writing in Adolescent and Adult Education addresses the persistent gap in writing reform at the middle, secondary, and post-secondary level. Through an examination of “useful” and “liminal” writing, the book explores the intellectual and creative space where structured expectations verge with individual imagination in writing. The premise of the book is built around a multiplicity of ways to invite adolescent and adult students to enter into states of liminality where they are encouraged to experiment with style, form, genre, and voice. Through research featuring the perspectives of adolescents, classroom teachers, teacher educators, graduate students, and literacy researchers, the book offers numerous insights into fostering a liminal and useful approach to writing instruction. Each author takes the reader through a journey of finding the liminal as teachers, writers, and researchers. Taken together, this tapestry of perspectives puts forth the argument that liminal moments are necessary caveats to explore in order to cultivate fully actualized writing where students are in control of structures and traditional writing expectations but also free to imagine new ways of breaking with conventions and being as writers. Thus, the book argues liminal writing is critical in bringing about sustained writing reform.

Preface

Mellinee Lesley, René Saldaña, Jr., Julie Smit, Jin Kyeong Jung

Introduction: The Role of Liminality in Developing Useful Writing

René Saldaña, Jr., Mellinee Lesley, Julie Smit, Jin Kyeong Jung

Chapter One: More than the Second ‘R’: Revisiting Writing Instruction for Young Adults

Kristine E. Pytash and Mellinee Lesley

Chapter Two: Why We Write: The Scribal Identities of Adolescents Working against Standardization

R. Joseph Rodriguez

Chapter Three: The Shifting Identities of Literacy Graduates: From Learners of Writing Instruction to Novice Teachers of Adolescent Writers

Thea Yurkewecz-Stellato, Shelby Erhard, and Richard Rappold

Chapter Four: In Search of the Aesthetic: An Arts-based Approach to Writing Up Our Research

Elizabeth Stewart and René Saldaña, Jr.

Chapter Five: Literacy Legacies

Stephanie Millet

Chapter Six: Creating a Liminal Writing Class for Multilingual Adolescent Writers

Jin Kyeong Jung

Chapter Seven: Video Games in the Middle School Reading Classroom: A Cultural Canon or a Social Bomb?

Elizabeth Davis Jones

Chapter Eight: Writing Interviews

Kelly DeLong

Chapter Nine: Writing Catharsis: Inviting Students to Think and Then Write Outside of the Box

Rachel R. Graham

Chapter Ten: “I Really Wish More Girls Would Tell their Story”: Adolescent Girls’ Composing for Advocacy in the Liminal Space of Digital Media

Mellinee Lesley

Chapter Eleven: Voices from an “Underperforming” English Class

Whitney Beach

Chapter Twelve: “Places so far that I Could Only Dream”: An Interview with Cameron James

Cameron James, Mellinee Lesley and René Saldaña, Jr.

List of Contributors