What's brought along and brought about: Negotiating writing practices in two high school classrooms

This article presents two studies of students and teachers negotiating writing practices in two high school English classrooms in the United States. Both studies draw on a sociocultural framework of understanding writing as a social practice involving distributed, mediated, and dialogic processes of invention. Each study presents a different approach to investigating how writing practices are negotiated and how writing is produced related to that negotiation. Across the two studies, findings illustrate how the written texts students produce are a result of negotiations among historical writing practices students bring along, the sanctioned writing practices the teacher is attempting to bring about, and a myriad of other possible related issues. Considered together, the findings of the two studies have implications for understanding student writing as a negotiated relationship among multiple writing practices, social interactions with peers and teachers, and objects and artifacts at work within the writing events.