Imagination, Engagement, and Agency in Adolescents’ Composition Narratives

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Imagination in the Literate Lives of Adolescents and Adults

Abstract

This research study was designed to ask about middle school writing practices and the perceptions students' placed onto such practices. A corpus of interview data emerged that the author has termed writing project narratives, which were told by sixth grade students during interviews with the researcher. These narratives were about writing projects that were longer in time (i.e. multiple days) than the traditional literacy event chronotope; however, they were shorten in duration than the average literacy narrative (often almost autobiographical in nature). These writing project narratives, similar to Bamberg’s small stories, are key to understanding student engagement and perceptions of agency in composition theory.

Author

• Robert Heggestad, The Ohio State University