Call For Papers: Writing Development Across the Lifespan
Proposals by 30 April 2017

The road to adult competence in writing is long, beginning before the earliest childhood scribbles and passing through many locations in and out of school and beyond. As well, writing competence enlists multiple dimensions of changing lives–experience of the world, development and repurposing of psychological resources, social interactions and organized activities that writing participates in, knowledge of cultural resources, emotional orientations, physical manipulation of technologies, social roles and status, and even economic power. Consequently, each person’s experienced path into writing is individual and leads to a different kind of writing competence. Yet our studies of writing and writing instruction tend to focus on a limited period in the life of a writer or a single level of education, and often view the competence as a single general thing. Even then, we have only a limited number of longitudinal studies that track change within the four or six years of a singe educational institution.

To foster more studies that look at writing development across the lifespan and writing policies and programs that extend across life periods, a special issue of Writing and Pedagogy is to appear in Summer 2018 (19:2). This issue invites submissions that have a longitudinal orientation or otherwise look at writing development, writing instruction, other interventions, curricula, or educational policies that stretch across age epochs or several years. Possible topics include:

• Comparison of texts from different periods in students’ lives.
• Writers’ retrospective views of their writing development over time.
• Longitudinal case studies of writers’ development over life periods
• Stratified samples of student writing at different ages
• Curricula and other writing interventions that extend over several years of student’s lives
• Writers’ transitions from one level of schooling or from one workplace experience to the next
• Application of developmental research and theory from other disciplinary domains that bear on writing development
• Studies of the influence of available social experiences and changes in those experiences on the changes in writing
• Comparisons of writing development under different cultural, social, or economic conditions
• Studies of writing development in moments of encounter with new writing opportunities
• Studies of differences of curricula, standards, and assessments offered for students of different ages
• Studies of the impact of different expectations and opportunities on writing development at different levels of schooling
• Contributors may also address an issue or topic that is not listed above but which illuminates some aspect of writing development from a lifespan perspective.

Guest editor contact information:
Charles Bazerman
bazerman@education.ucsb.edu
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA

For further information, please check:
http://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/WAP/announcement/view/116