Valerie L. Marsh’s research while affiliated with University of Rochester and other places

In this study, I explored how a high school English class’s multimodal project broadened student and teacher participation. Previous research has established that multimodal composing expands the nature of classroom texts, opens opportunities for identity expression, and extends access to audiences. Less is known about how affordances work together to increase options for more students and teachers to participate in school‐based writing. Informed by affinity space and multimodality frameworks, this article adds to a small pool of classroom affinity space studies. Through grounded theory analysis, findings reveal that a multimodal project provided students opportunities to participate as interactive audience members, pursue less typical routes to status, and express identity; their teacher experienced an opportunity to participate more flexibly. Pertinent to a rise in online learning and increasingly prevalent and complex ways to create multimodal content, findings illuminate classroom affinity space features focused on broadening participation.

New literacies research and theory touts the advantages of participatory cultures where youth collaborate, connect, and share knowledge. However, these practices assume a certain level of trust. With a lens that combines sociological theories of trust and a new literacies theory of participatory culture, this paper draws on two studies of youth literacies practices. The participants represent urban and suburban as well as online and offline contexts. Findings bring to bear the centrality of trust to decisions and choices when participating in these communities, pushing research to consider trust and mistrust more thoroughly when theorizing benefits of participatory cultures.

To counter inequitable, hierarchical classroom structures, research in the fields of language and literacy studies often looks to the affordances of online spaces, such as affinity spaces, for learning that is collaborative and knowledge that is distributed; yet, researchers continue to locate their studies in virtual spaces, outside classroom walls. This study, situated in a high school writing class, repositions the familiar classroom practice of peer feedback as a way to access affinity space features. Using qualitative case study design and grounded theory analysis, the study reveals that, when supported by an emphasis on social connection, the practice of peer feedback served as a portal for students with a range of writing experience and interest to collaborate and exchange honest feedback, practices indicative of affinity space features. Yet, traditional expectations preserved teacher roles and student roles in ways that prevented the class from more fully accessing the affinity space features of distributed expertise, porous leadership, and role flexibility. Discussion expands the field’s understanding of affinity spaces and their application in physical classrooms by outlining new features, theorizing these classroom spaces, and advocating for a reimagined vision of peer feedback in ELA classrooms where role reciprocity and flexibility resist traditional, inequitable classroom structures. Copyright © 2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent’s writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory providing sensitizing concepts. Findings uncovered how she laminated identity positions of perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning as she enacted her passionate writer identity in personal creative writing, English classrooms, an online fanfiction community, and theater contexts. Using “identity cube” as a theoretical construct, the authors examine enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes. Findings suggest that adolescents approach writing with a durable core identity while flexibly laminating multiple sides of their identity cube, a reframing of identity that has implications for literacy-and-identity research.

Building upon research exploring adolescent writing in technology-mediated contexts, this article examines writing and sharing in the online space of Fanfiction.net. Drawing on qualitative data from a longitudinal inquiry with a 16-year-old who writes in multiple contexts, this study explores the writing opportunities afforded on Fanfiction.net and how the fanfiction public shapes one adolescent's practices and perspectives as a writer. Grounded in a view of literacies as social practices and contemporary theories of audience and networked publics, this instrumental case study presents the particularity and complexity of writing within the Fanfiction.net public. Findings reveal how fanfiction's access, anonymity, and conventions create a multifaceted experience of writing for and sharing with audience in ways unavailable to this adolescent in school. The article conceptualizes networked writing and offers recommendations to foster classroom writing with a similar emphasis on audiences. [Early View online - paper available upon request]