| Students from non-dominant cultural and economic backgrounds enrolled in urban secondary schools are not receiving adequate writing instruction or opportunities to progress in academic writing fluency. Because academic writing is a gatekeeper, and persuasive writing is the currency for civic engagement, meeting expectations for academic persuasive writing is crucial for students' success. This study used a critical writing pedagogy to support and advance students' academic persuasive writing in an urban tenth grade remedial English class. An integrative theoretical framework of sociocultural theory, critical pedagogy, and writing theory promoted a powerful combination of evidence-based learning theory, pedagogical orientations to counter ineffective curricula, and a theoretically informed intervention.;This study investigated a classroom intervention for its facilitation of students' academic persuasive writing. A formative experiment as the research design met the research goals: to provide useful information applicable to practitioners, to facilitate writing with cohesive, as opposed to strategy oriented instruction, and to effect change in secondary literacy. This methodology is designed to provide a classroom intervention that will inform practitioners and provide real change in classroom settings. The classroom teacher implemented the intervention; the teacher and researcher worked in a partnership. The critical writing pedagogy was theoretically informed, and consisted of a set of coherent activities implemented over a four and a half week period.;Results showed that both students and the teacher assumed new roles. Students were initially producing compliant behavior for a passing grade. This changed as they engaged with academic persuasive writing through their agentic choice and positive development of their writer identities. The teacher employed pedagogical moves from a critical orientation to facilitate learning, and provided direct instruction to provide students with choices in their writing. The critical writing pedagogy successfully placed students on a trajectory of improving their academic writing. A multi-genre paper used the rhetorical transaction to increase choice for students' constructing arguments. Writing competency was re-conceptualized from rule bound, prescriptive practices to expression of personal voice in social and cultural issues. |
