Eighth graders, gender, and online publishing: A story of teacher and student collaboration

During the 1997 through 1998 school year, a group of 35 gifted and talented eighth-grade students at Fall Creek Valley Middle School in Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, had the task of creating the school's first online literary and art magazine. The process of creating such a publication was unique to Fall Creek and a significant step toward incorporating networked writing technologies into a middle-school language-arts curriculum. This article explores issues of access, gender, and collaboration as they relate to this middle-school class and its magazine project. The purpose of the article is to present one way that writing for online publication (a literary magazine World Wide Web site) fits within a language-arts curriculum and presents the ways collaboration between a university teacher, a middle-school teacher, and eighth-grade students can develop new curricular opportunities for students and new collaborative ventures for teachers.