'I Never Want to Write from Just My Perspective': Identity-Making in Youth's Collaborative Writing of Spoken Word Poetry
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| Title: | 'I Never Want to Write from Just My Perspective': Identity-Making in Youth's Collaborative Writing of Spoken Word Poetry |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Andrea Vaughan (ORCID |
| Source: | Reading Research Quarterly. 2026 61(2). |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 18 |
| Publication Date: | 2026 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Research |
| Descriptors: | Collaborative Writing, Oral Language, Poetry, Self Concept, Writing Attitudes, Adolescents, Perspective Taking, Self Expression |
| DOI: | 10.1002/rrq.70099 |
| ISSN: | 0034-0553 1936-2722 |
| Abstract: | Writing is an important site of identity construction and enactment, especially for adolescent writers. In this study, we explore several interactions across writing sessions in a youth after-school spoken word poetry team. The participants were engaged in writing a collaboratively-authored "group poem" in which they took up and wrote in one another's voices and perspectives toward a piece of writing that ultimately emerged from the assemblage rather than any one poet. This paper examines the poets' identity-making and perspective-taking through exchanges related to one part of their poem over the course of three different days. We ask: "How did youth poets engage with their own and others' identities and perspectives through the collaborative writing of a group poem?" We find that participants' writing reflects a flexible understanding of identity as they highlight different aspects of their own identities and move in and out of each other's to take up different perspectives. However, we also find that participants' perspective-taking allowed them both to express themselves and to understand each other. Throughout, we argue that all writing--not just writing with multiple authors--is collaborative and the product of an assemblage, rather than any individual, and call for attention to the sociomaterial landscape in which writers compose, including accounting for materials, bodies, and affect. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2026 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1503853 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGnY9eLdKqc9NXIg8rc9BvtAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDL__23pGOg554-azjQIBEICBm4_NYp3WmKaAirHNQ6z0FP2G1nx66wSIP64MOdgvetIlDhtR5cbVnJ77ARGIHm_CwndQYET_ilPOvPODpzgPW-U3fOnQuXVImfyeGeiLv0rJ1pfg0aVpcz82Vmo3e-Lpd5jHfK54y-WHkUaY_LqYTtcpz1nrm0Q4XdXMRmDzFIOmvymjDutEywZTC5zvmXzxU27aV2FLzwQxkMx- Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0193225966;[nrnu]02apr.26;2026Apr27.05:00;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0193225966-1">"I Never Want to Write From Just My Perspective": Identity‐Making in Youth's Collaborative Writing of Spoken Word Poetry </title> <p>Writing is an important site of identity construction and enactment, especially for adolescent writers. In this study, we explore several interactions across writing sessions in a youth after‐school spoken word poetry team. The participants were engaged in writing a collaboratively‐authored "group poem" in which they took up and wrote in one another's voices and perspectives toward a piece of writing that ultimately emerged from the assemblage rather than any one poet. This paper examines the poets' identity‐making and perspective‐taking through exchanges related to one part of their poem over the course of three different days. We ask: How did youth poets engage with their own and others' identities and perspectives through the collaborative writing of a group poem? We find that participants' writing reflects a flexible understanding of identity as they highlight different aspects of their own identities and move in and out of each other's to take up different perspectives. However, we also find that participants' perspective‐taking allowed them both to express themselves and to understand each other. Throughout, we argue that all writing—not just writing with multiple authors—is collaborative and the product of an assemblage, rather than any individual, and call for attention to the sociomaterial landscape in which writers compose, including accounting for materials, bodies, and affect.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70099-toc-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70099-toc-0001.jpg" title="." /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0193225966-3">Vignette 1: "It Goes Against Her Tone, Her Flow"</hd> <p>Two youth poets–both Black girls, both juniors in high school–sit in a computer lab after the school day has ended. Moonlight,[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>] a Black, Nigerian‐American girl, hums along to the music that streams through her headphones. Octavia, her Black, African American teammate, is clicking around in Google Drive, reading old poems she has previously written. Although only the two girls are present, they are writing and preparing to compete in a youth spoken word competition in which four poets perform a co‐authored poem–a "group piece." They have chosen to write their group piece in the form of an "I Am" poem, in which each poet will perform a section from her perspective about her culture, identity, and experiences.</p> <p>Moonlight and Octavia discuss the fact that their teammate, Mara, a Latina freshman student, has recently missed a few practices, so they might need to work on her part of the poem in order to keep it moving forward for the competition. Importantly, the poets in this group regularly write in one another's voices even when their teammates are present; they often get up and switch seats to take over each other's writing or turn their poetry over to each other to get new ideas. Because this is an established norm of their group, Moonlight and Octavia move forward writing Mara's section. As they continue writing, they do so in a different color font from the writing Mara has already done, indicating their understanding that she will have the final say over what she wants to keep, adapt, or delete from their contributions.</p> <p>They turn to Mara's portion of the group piece. Octavia writes a few lines, "First it was the spanish who.../Snatched our native tongue/Now we worship your god," using personal pronouns ("our" and "we") to continue Mara's section of the poem. Then Octavia stops writing, saying, "I don't like this. You know what it is? It goes against her tone, her flow."</p> <p>Moonlight and Octavia discuss the fact that Mara's part of the poem is written distinctly in her voice, noting "her tone, her flow." Mara's poem is also written from a first‐person perspective that centers her Mexican‐American identity, including experiences related to existing between Mexican and American cultures, fearing for her family's safety due to xenophobia and ICE raids, and appreciation for her family's language and culture. Moonlight and Octavia wonder how they, two Black girls, might write about Mexico and speaking Spanish, as well as the stereotypes faced by Latiné people in the United States. Octavia asks Moonlight if they can just "research some stuff," and googles "Mexican Independence" to learn more about the history of the nation of Mexico. Moonlight responds, asking, "We doing Mexican or just Latin culture?" as she googles "Panama culture" and then "Peruvian culture."</p> <p>They decide that they need to consult "a primary source" and suggest a phone call to their Mexican‐American friend, Sandra, while also listing Nicaraguan and Guatemalan friends that they have. Referencing various Central American nationalities and cultures, Moonlight and Octavia discuss times they have heard people say, incorrectly, that someone is speaking "Mexican" when what they mean is that they are speaking Spanish. Moonlight becomes animated, personally connecting as she has experienced people saying that her family is "speaking African," rather than Yoruba. Octavia notes that people say someone is speaking "Chinese" when in actuality languages spoken in China vary, including Mandarin and Cantonese. As a result, Moonlight writes the following four lines in Mara's section of the poem: "STOP SPEAKING AFRICAN/STOP SPEAKING MEXICAN/STOP SPEAKING CHINESE/<bold>STOP SPEAKING AMERICAN</bold>" (bold and all caps in the original draft).</p> <p>As they work on Mara's section of the poem, Octavia teases Moonlight about the fact that her own section is still somewhat lacking, saying "Before you start writing on anyone else's, can you write on yours?"</p> <p>Moonlight responds, "I have writer's block. I wrote it for someone else to intervene," reflecting these poets' practice of handing off their poetry to each other for help generating new ideas.</p> <p>As this exchange unfolds in the middle of these two writers googling different search terms about various Latiné cultures and stereotypes, Octavia responds, "Write about your culture," to which Moonlight retorts, "I did."</p> <p>Octavia answers, "I need a little detail!" and then starts singing the first song from Disney's film <emph>The Lion King</emph>, "The Circle of Life" which begins with a prominent vocal in the Zulu language. She continues, "Maybe you should start that way."</p> <p>Moonlight laughs and playfully answers, "Shut up!"</p> <p>Octavia continues, saying, "Or 'Hakuna Matata,'" and both girls crack themselves up laughing. Octavia says, "C'mon, Moonlight, I'm about to be African in a sec!"</p> <p>Moonlight answers sarcastically, "That's cute," while she keeps typing on Mara's part of the group poem. Perhaps in line with their conversation about people's ignorance in saying someone is "speaking African," Octavia adds, "I mean Nigerian," to which Moonlight replies again, sarcastically, "That's cute."</p> <p>They come back to the idea of stereotypes as a promising thread to follow as they write this "I Am" group poem about their personal cultures and identities. While they are comfortable talking about stereotypes that Black people face, they do eventually decide to consult their friend Sandra on the topic of stereotypes about Mexicans and Mexican Americans. In the middle of their after‐school writing session, they call her on FaceTime, explaining, "We've come to the conclusion that we have to write this [part of the] group piece ourselves. We have a part from a Mexican point of view, and we want to know about Mexican stereotypes, how you would refute them, what you want people to know about your culture." On FaceTime, the three girls talk about stereotypes that revolve around language, food, family, and immigration. The conversation ranges from being lighthearted in talking about their favorite Mexican dishes to being very serious in thinking about harsh eurocentric beauty standards, fearing for undocumented loved ones, and recalling instances of being called slurs by neighborhood children. Sandra shares her personal experiences, and throughout the conversation Octavia is often holding the phone in one hand and typing with the other. She concludes the FaceTime session by telling Sandra, "You've been very helpful, thank you." Sandra responds, "You're welcome. Your favorite Mexican person is always here if you need me."</p> <p>Octavia responds, "Your favorite Black person is here too." Moonlight leans over from where she is writing on Google Docs on her computer to enter the FaceTime frame and says, "Your favorite Nigerian person too." (Field Notes, 2.4.19).</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-4">The Study</hd> <p>These are moments from the spring of 2019, when the members of a Chicago after‐school youth spoken word poetry team convened with the intention of representing their high school in a local spoken word poetry competition. This team of three adolescent girls met after school one to two times per week over the course of a semester. During their time together, they wrote both individual poems and a group poem intended to be written by, in the voices of, and performed by all of the poets. In this context, the poets did not only write from their own perspectives; they also wrote in each other's voices and from each other's points of view, resulting in a collaborative poem that reflected the three poets' writing as a group. None of them could have written any part of the poem—even sections representing their "own" perspective—alone. Participants used various tools and methods to compose their group poem, including techniques for surfacing and writing in one another's voices. In that process, the poets took up one another's perspectives in ways that were sometimes approved as authentic, at other times rejected as wrong, but always welcomed. Their perspective‐taking crossed all of the borders that made them unique—racial, national, linguistic, aesthetic, rhetorical.</p> <p>This paper examines the poets' <emph>identity‐making</emph> and <emph>perspective‐taking</emph> through exchanges related to one part of their poem over the course of three different days. By "identity‐making" we mean the process of these poets' understanding and expressing their own and others' positions in the world. By "perspective‐taking" we mean the process of articulating what they saw when they tried to stand in one another's positions. In the interactions shared here, two Black poets drafted a section of their poem in the voice of their teammate, a Latina poet who was not present on the day of their writing. The two poets experimented with multiple techniques to write in her voice, including using Spanish words, researching Mexican‐American culture and history online, and calling a different Mexican‐American friend in order to get her perspective. Their teammate then returned to the group and read her teammates' writing in her voice as variously honoring, funny, wrong, and inspiring. The experience served to build connection and vulnerability–being seen by and witnessing one another–within this group. We analyze those interactions around this section of their poem as an assemblage (Deleuze and Parnet [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref2">15</reflink>]), in which we understand any piece of writing to be saturated with multiple perspectives, affects, and discourses and in order to think about how, even when writing about deeply personal issues of identity, participants took on one another's voices in service of a group composition that ultimately emerged from the assemblage, rather than from any one poet.</p> <p>We also attend to moments of <emph>vitality</emph>, or "the feeling of flow and aliveness" (Stern [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref3">49</reflink>], 23) in this after‐school writing context. Boldt ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref4">5</reflink>]) draws on the work of Daniel Stern ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref5">49</reflink>]) to illustrate how literacy and learning specifically can come to feel alive (p. 209). Boldt writes, "We can think of the experience of vitality as being taken up in, moving with, and contributing to an energized flow" (p. 209), in which energy moves in and through an event and its components. In this study, we attempted to trace the flow of energy in this collaborative space (e.g., when it surged, when it suddenly stopped), and found that participants' engagement with identity was playful and alive, fostering connection and possibility rather than finality. In this analysis, our research question was: <emph>How did youth poets engage with their own and others' identities and perspectives through the collaborative writing of a group poem?</emph></p> <hd id="AN0193225966-5">Literature Review</hd> <p>We situate this work in literature exploring adolescent writing across in‐ and out‐of‐school contexts. In particular, we draw on literature that attends to youth spoken word poetry, collaborative writing, and identity and perspective, as well as literature exploring connection, play, and vitality (Boldt [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref6">5</reflink>]) in youth writing.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-6">Adolescent Writing</hd> <p>Over the past 50 years, the lineage of research on writing has considered writing as a complex cognitive process (Bereiter and Scardamalia [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref7">3</reflink>]; Emig [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref8">20</reflink>]; Flower and Hayes [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref9">24</reflink>]), a creative act of communication and expression (Elbow [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref10">19</reflink>]), and socioculturally‐mediated practices within particular contexts (Bazerman [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref11">2</reflink>]; Dyson [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref12">18</reflink>]). More recently, research on adolescent writing has incorporated critical perspectives to analyze the roles of identity and power in the teaching, practice, and sharing of adolescent writing (Finders [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref13">22</reflink>]; Kirkland [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref14">29</reflink>]). As scholarship has shifted to more fully account for identity, researchers have attended to the impact of adolescents' hybrid (Paris and Alim [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref15">40</reflink>]), transnational/translingual (Black [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref16">4</reflink>]), and shifting (Corbitt [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref17">11</reflink>]) identities on their literacy practices. Scholars examining adolescent writing have long found that writing is critical to identity construction and self‐expression (Moje and Luke [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref18">36</reflink>]), that this identity work through writing happens in and out of school (Hull and Schultz [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref19">25</reflink>]), and that adolescents can have strong identities as writers (Lammers and Marsh [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref20">30</reflink>]). Here we examine a few aspects of the scholarship on adolescents' writing, specifically related to youth spoken word poetry, collaborative writing, and identity and perspective, in order to articulate our contribution to this body of research.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-7">Youth Spoken Word Poetry</hd> <p>Youth spoken word poetry (YSW) both within and beyond official school contexts has been well‐documented and researched as a rhetorical and social context for both literacy practice (Fisher [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref21">23</reflink>]; Weinstein [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref22">53</reflink>]) and political engagement (Davis and Hall [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref23">13</reflink>]). Research on YSW has spanned across the globe, including the United States (e.g., Muhammad and Gonzalez [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref24">37</reflink>]), the United Kingdom (e.g., English and MacGowan [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref25">21</reflink>]), and Australia (e.g., Jones and Curwood [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref26">28</reflink>]). Researchers have articulated how the practice and performance of YSW has supported youth to explore, express, and affirm their identities and cultures (Burton and Van Viegan [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref27">6</reflink>]).</p> <p>YSW is inherently performative, and poets attend to and craft the physical and gestural aspects of their performance (Dooley [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref28">17</reflink>]), their sound and rhythm (Weinstein [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref29">53</reflink>]), as well as their language and word choice (Seltzer [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref30">44</reflink>]) as part of their writing process. YSW is crafted toward real and imagined audiences, and poets consider how their poetry might be received onstage (Low [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref31">35</reflink>]; Somers‐Willett [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref32">48</reflink>]); for example, Call‐Cummings et al. ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref33">7</reflink>]) documented how a group of youth poets crafted pieces with intentions to "persuade an adult audience to listen to them and recognize their words, experiences, and knowledge as important" (p. 197).</p> <p>Additionally, youth poets' writing is entangled with their identity construction and expression, particularly around race (Campbell [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref34">8</reflink>]) and gender (Curwood and Jones [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref35">12</reflink>]). Curwood and Jones ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref36">12</reflink>]), in case studies of two Australian youth poets, examined how poets explored their own identities to "construct counternarratives that resist oppression and marginalization" (p. 54). In Muhammad and Gonzalez ([<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref37">37</reflink>]) work, a researcher and youth poet engage in conversation with one another and carefully explicate the power of youth spoken word poetry as a literacy practice which "affirms youth's multiple identities and helps them to explore their own positionality in the world—which is multilayered and changing" (p. 449–450). This kind of identity work is central to the crafting and performance of YSW.</p> <p>Importantly, this work often happens in the context of competition (Low [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref38">35</reflink>]). Somers‐Willett ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref39">48</reflink>]) explores how the composition and performance of identity is understood and affirmed in YSW poetry slams, writing, "The identities expressed by slam poets are performative—that is, they are performed consciously or unconsciously for audiences to certain ends" (p. 18). By attending to youth poets' understanding of identity as linked to performance, Somers‐Willet documents the tensions inherent to this kind of writing (e.g., flattening or narrowing identities to legible tropes), but also the possibilities of playing within that frame for parody and surprise (p. 90). We seek to contribute to this robust body of research by exploring how the poets in this study engaged with their own and one another's identities through writing YSW poetry, as well as how they explicitly took up one another's perspectives to craft a collaboratively‐authored group piece.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-8">Collaborative Writing</hd> <p>Scholars of youth's collaborative writing have long noted that this work involves negotiation of relationships and shared meaning‐making. Rish and Caton's ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref40">42</reflink>]) study of a high school fantasy writing project through a shared Wiki examined how students engaged in collaborative writing practices. Students maintained continuity across storylines, borrowed one another's ideas, and negotiated social roles (i.e., some students had accrued more social capital and authority than others when it came to decision‐making). Of borrowing one another's ideas, Rish and Caton write, "Students reported often not knowing where an idea came from that made it in their stories" (p. 24).</p> <p>Other scholars have examined adolescents' multimodal collaborative writing. Smith and Shen ([<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref41">47</reflink>]) advocate classroom scaffolds for collaborative writing with adolescents, including the promotion of "individualized and flexible roles" (p. 85) and "multidirectional flows of expertise" (p. 88). This resonates with Rish and Caton's ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref42">42</reflink>]) emphasis on social roles as central to collaborative writing and also suggests that these roles may not be fixed and can shift throughout a collaborative writing task. Smith ([<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref43">46</reflink>]) studied three pairs of adolescent writers composing in digital, multimodal contexts to articulate how writers worked together to produce collaboratively authored texts. Smith offers three patterns for youths' partnerships: designer/assistant, balanced division, and alternating lead (p. 14), demonstrating how relational work is central to collaborative writing.</p> <p>Within performed writing contexts similar to YSW poetry, researchers have studied young people's collaborative writing. Lenters and Smith ([<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref44">33</reflink>]) examined how teaching improv and comedy‐based activities to fifth‐grade writers influenced their "collaborative story building" (p. 179). Lenters and Smith highlight the role of comedy, laughter, and play in what they call "embodied sensemaking," arguing that this kind of meaning‐making happens in social context, involving bodies and materials. We seek to contribute to this body of research on collaborative writing by examining how the poets in this study not only composed a shared piece of writing, but also took up one another's perspectives and voices to do so.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-9">Identity‐Making and Perspective‐Taking</hd> <p>Scholars have long noted the importance of identity construction and expression to adolescent writing, particularly in relation to youth's writerly identities; engagement with intersecting identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and transnationality; and perspective‐taking, or understanding others' points of view. Research has found that youth's literacy and writing identities can span across in‐ and out‐of‐school contexts. Lammers and Marsh ([<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref45">30</reflink>]) explore the stable and shifting aspects of one adolescent writer's identity across social contexts including online writing, writing in school, and writing in out‐of‐school activities like theater, arguing for a conception of writing identity "as multifaceted and durable" over time (p. 110).</p> <p>Other research has explored how youth express identities related to gender, race, sexuality, and transnationality through writing. Coleman and Hall ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref46">10</reflink>]), in a study of queer youth's engagement with Wattpad to re‐story familiar narratives, name several ways that adolescent writers engage with identity through writing. These include "bending," in which writers can draw from an aspect of their own identities to re‐tell a familiar character's identity (p. 68); the authors write, "restorying identity allows students to draw from their personal experiences, which positions them as both knowers and authors of their own stories" (p. 68). Storm and Jones ([<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref47">50</reflink>]) articulate the notion of "disidentification" in adolescent writing, or the process by which writers "take representations that might have caused harm and, through playful satirical performance, [repurpose] them to be powerful refusals of that harm" (p. 537). We see echoes of this in the YSW literature (e.g., Low [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref48">35</reflink>]; Somers‐Willett [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref49">48</reflink>]) and the exploration of youth's performance of stereotype or narrow expressions of identity, in order to play with the audience's perceptions of those expressions. Through all of this literature, we see scholars frame identity in fluid and hybrid, rather than static or fixed, ways.</p> <p>Particularly for transnational adolescents (like those in our study), writing and digital practices can provide important spaces for identity construction, maintenance, and performance (Lima Becker and Corbitt [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref50">34</reflink>]). For migrant, transnational, and multilingual adolescents, digital and out‐of‐school writing can afford construction of multifaceted and hybrid identities. We seek to contribute to this body of literature an analysis of youth's engagement and play with multiple identities and perspectives–including those based on experiences they had not personally had–through collaborative writing. Building on literature from YSW that has explored related concepts (e.g., Curwood and Jones [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref51">12</reflink>]; Muhammad and Gonzalez [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref52">37</reflink>]), we see this study as contributing an exploration of how young people might engage this kind of perspective‐taking in order to collaboratively compose a piece of writing.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-10">Connection, Play, and Vitality in Writing</hd> <p>We turn here to scholarship which has explored ideas related to Boldt's ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref53">5</reflink>]) articulation of vitality as related to literacy, in which vitality is "a feeling of flow and aliveness" (Stern [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref54">49</reflink>], 23). The notion of vitality in literacy is related to Pahl and Rowsell's ([<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref55">39</reflink>]) concept of "living literacies." Taking up this concept to study the sanctioned literacies within a seventh grade English Language Arts classroom, Johnston ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref56">27</reflink>]) describes living literacies as "relational, embodied forms of literacy engagement," which "hold the potential to disrupt and reconfigure the power structures embedded within schooled literacy" (p. 1). Johnston highlights moments of students' overflowing energy that might be characterized as "off‐task," as well as the supportive collaboration and engagement that might lead to "shared learning and collective empowerment, where the traditional hierarchy of expertise gives way to a community of collaborative learners" (p. 9). Critically, for Johnston's participants, these moments of living literacies were directly related to connection and witnessing—seeing and being seen by—one another.</p> <p>Lenters et al. ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref57">32</reflink>]) also consider the potential of flexible learning spaces as they explore "collaboration as contamination" in a summer program where young children were collaboratively composing during narrative play. The authors frame "contamination" as "a catalyst that sparks new directions for mutually beneficial worlds" (p. 2); they do so as a contrast to typically positive associations with the word "collaboration" in order to account for the complications and tensions inherent to collaboration. Importantly, collaboration and connection through writing do not have to be neat or solely positive; in fact, intensity and connection may be messy and unruly, and may include tension and discomfort. We take up vitality as a tool to surface the feelings of aliveness and energy that accompany less‐than‐positive experiences, such as feeling misunderstood or uncomfortable.</p> <p>Importantly, as Boldt ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref58">5</reflink>]) writes, "Vitality can never be divorced from the fact that bodies are raced, gendered, sexed, dis/abled, and classed" (p. 210). While all of us are embodied, not all bodies are equally valued, or seen as normal. For marginalized and minoritized learners (e.g., Black students, Indigenous students, students of color, disabled students, queer and gender nonconforming students, fat students), "their embodiment, instead of being understood as an occasion for interpersonal connection and energetic participation, is often pathologized and punished. Their expressions of vitality are read as dangerous, and classrooms are often spaces of containment rather than emergent, energetic potential" (Boldt [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref59">5</reflink>], 210). While we surface moments of connection and joy in the writing of these participants, we also do not assume that vitality is a pathway to connection and joy for all students; particularly for marginalized students, expressions of vitality can be un‐recognized and un‐welcome.</p> <p>In this study, we build on scholarship exploring YSW poetry, collaborative writing, and the role of identity in writing in order to explore three poets' collaborative writing of a group poem comprising multiple perspectives and identities. We engage vitality as a construct to help us trace the flows of energy through this context, to help us to name tense, uncertain interactions as well as positive ones, and to attend to how youth's participation in this context was inextricable from their sense of connection and "vital mattering" (Boldt [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref60">5</reflink>]) to one another.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-11">Theoretical Framework</hd> <p>We understand literacy to be embodied and material (Clayson [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref61">9</reflink>]; Johnston [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref62">27</reflink>]); deeply connected to assemblages of human and non‐human beings, histories, feelings, and spaces (Zapata et al. [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref63">55</reflink>]); and emergent and unpredictable (Leander and Boldt [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref64">31</reflink>]; Stornaiuolo et al. [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref65">51</reflink>]). Our analysis is rooted in the notion of writing as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref66">14</reflink>]). Dixon‐Román ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref67">16</reflink>]) writes that the assemblage is "a sticky constellation of a multiplicity of forces producing an event, situation, or composite grouping or body" (p. 36). We respond to Albright and Jocson ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref68">1</reflink>]), who use Dixon‐Román's language of the assemblage to ask: "What is the sticky constellation of forces that produce certain texts, and how are those texts entangled with other human, nonhuman, and discursive bodies?" (p. 213).</p> <p>Because of its nature as a genre and social context, studying YSW poetry is conducive to understanding writing as collaborative, embodied, performative, and more expansive than words on a page. However, our view is that <emph>all</emph> writing is profoundly enmeshed with human and nonhuman bodies, multiple circulating discourses, and performativity/audience, even writing that is not explicitly performed or collaboratively authored. We work to attend to the non‐human aspects of this writing (e.g., tools and materials, space, discourses, histories, etc.) as well as to the aspects that might be thought of as "individual" (e.g., how one writer understood a given line over time, etc.) in order to contour our understanding of <emph>all</emph> writing, even writing with a single author, as collective.</p> <p>The majority of extant research related to adolescent writing, YSW poetry, and collaborative writing attends primarily to human actors, builds upon critical sociocultural theories of literacy, and utilizes qualitative case study and participatory action research methods (Albright and Jocson [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref69">1</reflink>], 214), with some exceptions (e.g., Smith and Prior [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref70">45</reflink>]). Albright and Jocson ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref71">1</reflink>]), among the few scholars bringing a posthumanist lens to YSW poetry, write that "Often within youth studies we position voice as emanating from conscious and self‐contained entities...As we are thinking, speaking, and writing our words are never wholly our own. Voice is entangled with objects, affects, bodies (human, nonhuman and discursive) and theories" (p. 215). In our study of youth's collaborative crafting of a spoken word piece, we take up this view of writing not as the product of an individual mind, but rather as an assemblage, or "sticky constellation." In this study, we analyze identity as both stable and shifting, something that contains different facets, but that is stabilized through the notion of chronotopic (literally, <emph>time‐place</emph>) lamination (Prior and Shipka [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref72">41</reflink>]); put another way, we have a sense of core identity because of a sense of consistent "self" across time and space, related to how others see and understand us, even as we build, grow into, move away from, shift, and reject different identities. We also hold with other scholars who question the validity of identity as a useful term at all, and who prefer terms like "becoming" to denote the constant flux and indeterminacy of individuality. For example, Deleuze and Guattari ([<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref73">14</reflink>]) offer the metaphor of the orchid and the wasp to illustrate the entanglement of two separate bodies which are not actually separate at all; as a wasp takes an orchid's pollen, and as an orchid is dependent on the wasp for its reproductive process, the two are entangled such that it is difficult to draw a line where each begins or ends. Likewise, we agree that individuals are not individual, but are better understood as the perpetual assembling and reassembling of practices, bodies, affects, and so forth, over time (Smith and Prior [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref74">45</reflink>]).</p> <p>Over a lifetime, humans' senses of identities might be better described in the language of becoming. Our study was only a semester in length, and so we aren't well‐positioned to speak to the participants' longer‐term senses of becoming; instead, we are more concerned with how they played with and across multiple conceptions of identity to craft this piece of writing. However, this notion of the individual as permeable and entangled (e.g., the wasp and the orchid) is useful for us to analyze writers' collaborative writing and perspective‐taking in the context of identity‐oriented writing. Looking with this notion of identity is helpful to see how poets' writing was saturated with other voices, discourses, materials, and (non)human beings, as well as how they stepped into and out of each others' perspectives.</p> <p>We also attend to power and privilege, and beware approaches that may dissolve boundaries in ways that obscure the role that identity plays in youth's experiences. In this work, we take up what Moje and Luke ([<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref75">36</reflink>]) referred to as the "position" metaphor ("identities are produced in and through...the ways people are cast in or called to particular positions in interaction, time, and spaces," p. 43). We rely on the identity as position metaphor for the powerful way it "makes space for other than discursive aspects of identity formation or even representation" (Moje and Luke [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref76">36</reflink>]), and for the way in which as a metaphor, "position" can highlight the potential for shift and change, as well as how people can position themselves or be positioned by others. Particularly as we work here with youth of color, multilingual youth, girls, and transnational youth, we assert that identity and position have real impacts in youth's lives, even as we question the fixity of those categories.</p> <p>Our analysis considers the forces, affects, and human, nonhuman, and discursive bodies which contributed to the assembling of this particular piece of writing in the three sessions under discussion. We approach adolescents' collaborative poetry writing with a focus on identity, perspective, and vitality within this framework because we think it has powerful implications for our understanding of <emph>all</emph> writing as collaborative, and for illuminating <emph>all</emph> writing as assemblage, even that which appears to be individually authored. We also think this analysis is useful for understanding the porosity of identity and individuality in adolescent writing. Finally, we center on vitality because we think it is useful for surfacing something important about collaboration and connection: that it can be joyful <emph>and</emph> uncomfortable, affirming <emph>and</emph> dissonant, and that this kind of risk is what makes writing matter, what makes it feel alive.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-12">Methodology</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0193225966-13">Participants</hd> <p>This study focuses on three youth poets who comprised a spoken‐word poetry team on the West Side of Chicago. The three youth poets were all girls and all attended the same selective enrollment public high school. Mara, a first‐generation Latina student who chose to write about immigration issues facing Mexican immigrants and Mexican‐Americans, was a freshman at the time of the study and was a newcomer to the team. She occasionally missed practice due to her JROTC program. Moonlight, a first‐generation Nigerian‐American student, chose to write about the pressures and microaggressions she experienced as a Black girl and as the daughter of immigrants. She was a junior at the time of the study and had been on the school's spoken‐word team for 3 years. Octavia, a Black junior‐level student who had also been on the school's spoken‐word team for 3 years, chose to write about anti‐Black racism juxtaposed against the beauty and vibrancy of predominantly Black Chicago neighborhoods.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-14">Context</hd> <p>The three poets were engaged in the work of co‐authoring a "group piece" within the parameters of the particular nonprofit‐sponsored spoken‐word poetry competition in which they hoped to engage. This competition involved school‐based teams from around the city and required teams to prepare individually‐ and collectively‐authored and performed poems, known respectively as "indie" and "group" pieces. The poets met once or twice a week for 1–2 h across the course of an academic semester. As this group was an official after‐school activity, they met in their school's computer lab after school let out. Some days, team coaches would be in the room working with them on writing, and other days the coaches would let them into the lab to work independently without supervision. The team's coach (Author2) acted as a facilitator, meaning when she was present, her work with the youth was focused on supporting them toward their own writing goals, rather than explicitly teaching or directing. This was a conscious choice made by Author2 in order to ensure that the poem was authentic to the team members. Some meetings were focused on writing, while others attended to other performance aspects of the spoken‐word piece, such as determining tone of voice or gestures and deciding which poet would perform which lines.</p> <p>While this was a school‐sponsored after‐school group on school property, the school suspended the team's participation in the spoken word poetry competition due to team members' failing in‐school grades, unserved detentions, and diminishing group participation as other team members stepped away for a variety of personal reasons (e.g., parenting a newborn). However the team continued to meet regularly after their team's participation in the competition was suspended. They completed their group poem even though they never had a chance to perform it onstage. We share this to illustrate the unique nature of this space as a context that was school‐sponsored and then suspended, and the ways in which school can intrude into "out‐of‐school" spaces.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-15">Researcher Positionality</hd> <p>At the time of this study, Author2 had coached this team for 2 years. As an English teacher at the high school, she became involved with the team as a part of an early research project as a doctoral student and stayed as she found value in supporting youth's interest‐driven writing. Author1's research focuses on youth out‐of‐school writing practices and so she was invited by Author2 to study the team. Author1 maintained a hybrid stance as an outsider to the group and participant observer, and she became more and more familiar with the poets over time. At times the poets would ask her for feedback on their writing. They were also sometimes aware of her as the only white person in the room as seen when they might joke about making a stereotype about an "ignorant white person" in their writing. Author2 was formerly Moonlight and Octavia's teacher their sophomore year in an Honors World Literature class. As such, she was familiar with their in‐school writing and enjoyed seeing how their out‐of‐school practices were both similar and different. As a first‐generation Mexican‐American woman, Author2 found affinity with all of the poets either as the child of immigrants or as a woman of color, shared identity markers that would become central to the poem that the youth poets decided to construct.</p> <p>At the early stages of this work, we adopted an approach to data collection and analysis that positioned this work as a qualitative case study (e.g., Yin [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref77">54</reflink>]) focused on performativity, embodiment, and writing; this is reflected in the methods we used to gather and analyze our initial set of data. However, as time went on and we continued writing, presenting, and discussing these data, we found ourselves talking about what still stuck with us, even years later. We talked about moments that felt almost too strange to write about in professional contexts, perhaps because they may be (mis)understood as offensive, but that still lingered and resonated with us. And we talked about how our own understanding of the youth's writing had shifted over time, moving away from a stance of trying to validate or valorize their out‐of‐school writing for more official audiences, toward a stance of deeper curiosity and appreciation. While we never tried to stand outside the data as neutral observers, our prolonged engagement with this dataset highlighted our own entanglement with the assemblage during and since these events.</p> <p>This led to a different approach of engaging with our dataset. We have come to describe this using Jackson and Mazzei's ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref78">26</reflink>]) approach to "thinking with theory," which shifts the "emphasis from what we can know about an object (method and epistemology) to what a particular object <emph>does</emph> when we enact inquiry (ontology)" (p. vii). We sought to shift from standing outside of the dataset, splitting and categorizing it, to instead asking "How do things (collaboration, perspective, identity, writing) work here?" This led us to different approaches, including the crafting of vignettes (shared in the introduction and below). These differing approaches reflect our ongoing conversation with one another over more than 6 years now. One reason why we describe our work together as a process of "thinking with theory" is that attending to the participants' writing together invariably draws us back to our own understanding of our (Author1's and Author2's) thinking and writing together. In this way, we see a movement back and forth between our own process and the data, such that our understanding of the ideas under discussion in this manuscript (identity, perspective, collaboration) are not neatly separable between "researcher" and "researched."</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-16">Methods</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0193225966-17">Data Collection</hd> <p>We worked as partners to inquire into the participants' identity‐making and perspective‐taking. Author2 coached the team while Author1 was a participant observer in 13 of the poets' 60–120‐min practices over the course of one academic semester. We were prohibited by the school district's research review board from audio‐ or video‐recording team sessions, and so Author1 took field notes in a shorthand, sketched scenes of poets writing, and collected participant writing from Google Docs (including by downloading the current version of the group poem at the end of each session), as seen in Figure 1. Immediately after each session, Author1 retreated to a neighboring cafe to compile the data into a detailed picture reflecting the day's session. Due to our work triangulating across multiple data sources, using a shorthand to gather as much detail as possible, and writing up recollections immediately after each session, we are confident that our work reflects the nature of the group's engagements together. However, this is an imperfect method and there is always the possibility we missed or misrepresented something. We attempted to address that concern through interviews and member‐checking with participants. Below is an example of this bringing‐together of multiple data sources; here in Figure 1 we present field notes, participant writing, and sketches from the same session, all of which informed the creation of Vignette 1 (shared above).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70099-fig-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70099-fig-0001.jpg" title="1 Excerpt from field notes, interview, participant writing, and sketches of the session." /> </p> <p></p> <p>Author1 engaged in semistructured interviews (which were allowed to be audio‐recorded) with all of the participants including Author2. She asked questions to the poets about their writing process such as, "What is the role of your teammates in supporting your writing?" and "How do you collaboratively write a group poem?" She asked questions to Author2 such as, "Can you tell me about your role as the coach?" and questions about the team's history and dynamics. Poets also completed process drawings (Prior and Shipka [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref79">41</reflink>]) to illustrate their writing process of both individual and group poems. Because we have engaged with the dataset over a period of years, there are now questions we wish we could have asked the youth that we didn't ask at the time; this is a limitation of the study. At the culmination of data collection, Author1 shared emerging findings with the youth poets in a member‐checking session, asked for their reflections, and used their insights to refine the findings. Overall, the poets were deeply curious about being a part of research, and often asked to look at field notes, or asked about what theories or scholars we were using to think about their writing together. We worked to be as transparent as possible with them during our time together, and to engage with them as full, complex, and brilliant people.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-19">Data Analysis</hd> <p>In our first stages of data analysis, we independently and then together engaged in descriptive and process coding (Saldaña [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref80">43</reflink>]) of the complete dataset including the field notes and the interview transcripts to create an initial set of codes. We refined and organized the codes by coding the set multiple additional times and categorizing the codes in order to see larger trends across the data set (e.g., "collaboration, identity"). (For a detailed codebook, see Vaughan and Lesus [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref81">52</reflink>].) This coding process originally allowed us to trace the collaborative perspective‐taking happening in this group's writing, which led us to explore how the poem was constructed through conversation, collaborative drafting and editing, and perspective‐taking over the course of the four‐month‐long study. Doing so prompted us to use the varied data sources, including the drafts of the group piece from different points across the study, field notes, sketches, process drawings, interviews, and member checks, to trace how different bits of conversation appeared, disappeared, and/or transformed across the youth's writing. Over time, we attuned ourselves to the assembling and reassembling of this context; we followed Albright and Jocson's ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref82">1</reflink>]) question, "What is the sticky constellation of forces that produce certain texts, and how are those texts entangled with other human, nonhuman, and discursive bodies?" (p. 213). Rather than trying to split and isolate aspects of the poets' writing, we widened our lens to include the poets, their writing, the material and non‐human actors in their writing, people outside of the writing space, and other elements that meshed with and produced the youth's writing.</p> <p>This prompted us to examine one thread of interaction across multiple sessions, and to analyze it through the creation of a series of vignettes, which are presented below. For these reasons, vitality (Boldt [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref83">5</reflink>]) became an important theoretical frame for us to take up as we followed the flow of energy (e.g., places where it surged or shifted, places where it stopped or halted) through these interactions. We started with a series of interactions that stuck with us and that we hadn't stopped talking about together or trying to understand. We traced the flow of energy and intensity through the assemblage across multiple meeting sessions. To do this, we drew from our multiple data sources to construct vignettes that wove in markers of vitality, including participants' tone/volume of voice, meaningful silence, touch, embodied movement and gesture, engagement with material objects and digital media, and engagement with others outside of the space. The construction of the vignettes as a method of data analysis allowed us to step back inside these experiences and to think with them, rather than standing outside of them. Of course, attempting to isolate a thread of interaction is inherently futile, as there is no separating these exchanges from everything that came before and after, or from everything within and outside of this learning and writing space. This analysis was guided by our research question: <emph>How did youth poets engage with their own and others' identities and perspectives through the collaborative writing of a group poem?</emph></p> <hd id="AN0193225966-20">Three Vignettes</hd> <p>We share three vignettes to trace how this interaction among the three participants unfolded on three separate days. We use present tense to recount these vignettes, as Boldt ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref84">5</reflink>]) does, to reflect the ways in which "the happening of this story is not something confined to the past but a new happening in this retelling, one that keeps happening as it participates in [our lives] and those of others (including readers) in the present and into the future" (p. 207).</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-21">Returning to Vignette #1: "It Goes Against Her Tone, Her Flow"</hd> <p>In Vignette #1, shared in the introduction, Mara is absent from the team meeting session, and Moonlight and Octavia write from her perspective on her section of the group piece. They encounter trouble in doing this, both because their writing "goes against her tone, her flow," and also because they recognize that they, two Black girls, are trying to write from the point of view of Mara, a Mexican‐American girl. They decide to call a Mexican‐American friend who is not on their team, Sandra, to ask her about experiences and stereotypes related to being Mexican‐American and take notes on their conversation. At the end of the session, several new lines of poetry, as well as their notes with Sandra, remain in Mara's section of the group poem.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-22">Vignette #2: "It Was Authentic!"</hd> <p>The following practice in the same week, Moonlight, Octavia, and Mara are all present. Moonlight and Octavia explain that they attempted to add to Mara's part of the poem, but that in order to do so "authentically" they conducted an interview, saying they "needed more primary sources." Octavia says, "We need Mara to be here to write her part. We had conversations with other people about how would you represent yourself, what stereotypes are there about you."</p> <p>Mara says, "I read it."</p> <p>Octavia gestures at the part of the poem where they had taken notes in their conversation with Sandra, saying "Those are from interviews we did." They skim through the list and answer a few questions about what different parts mean, and then Octavia says that they were trying to write for Mara to be helpful. Octavia concludes, "But you do you!" conveying that Mara was fully in control of what remained in the final draft of the poem.</p> <p>Mara jokes, imagining her teammates writing for her, saying, "You guys are all like, 'Oh, sombreros, tacos'" as she pretends to type and they all laugh together. Mara tells her teammates that she thought Cris, a Latina student who started the season with the team, had written it, saying, "I thought Cris wrote it. I was proud." Moonlight and Octavia excitedly ask Mara which part she thought was written by Cris. When she says, "The whole thing," Octavia and Moonlight squeal and laugh excitedly, proclaiming, "It was authentic!"</p> <p>The three girls continue to peruse the piece, with Octavia and Moonlight showing Mara what they added while she was gone. Mara expresses confusion at a line about being tall and skinny, and another line about "a ritual for Jesus." Octavia explains, trying to relay the information gathered from their interview with Sandra, "She was talking about a ritual where you make a cake and there's Jesus inside. And there's a stereotype that if you're Mexican you're either tall and skinny, or short and fat" even as she qualifies, "I don't take Spanish, mind you."</p> <p>Mara continues asking questions about ideas and lines that Moonlight and Octavia wrote into her section of the poem. At one point, she stops to ask Octavia, "What were you trying to put?" Octavia leans over to see Mara's computer, and says, "Oh!" She types on Mara's keyboard to correct what she had written, such that the resulting sentence is "From a dreamer to la gringa." Octavia then tells Mara, "I didn't know the grammar." Mara responds, "Gringa, I just learned where that word came from," and explains her understanding of the origin of the word "gringo/a," sharing the folk etymological theory that the word originated from Mexicans yelling "green go home" at U.S. soldiers, who wore green uniforms during the Mexican‐American War. The line–drafted by Octavia–remains in the document.</p> <p>As Mara continues to look over the additions, she announces, "I have a thought, but I don't know how to word it properly. I want to talk about ICE and how they're tearing families apart, so I wrote, 'Mi casa es tu casa made us family, ICE tore the heart of my casa leaving us stranded and cold.'" Octavia clarifies, asking "So you don't like the last line?" The previous last line of the section had been written by Octavia: "Weeks upon weeks we fight over a wall, one our president can't seem to get over," which was in reference to the fact that this writing took place during the 2019 35‐day‐long government shutdown over funding for a border wall between the United States and Mexico.</p> <p>Mara replies, "I like the idea, but I just want to word it better." Moonlight jumps in, saying, "I could talk to you about that. Like, first gen, I got fears of ICE coming and taking my family. There's stereotypes that immigrants are just Mexicans coming and taking your jobs, but immigrants aren't just Mexicans." The girls launch into a serious conversation:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Mara And it's so weird that the solution is a wall on the southern border.</item> <p></p> <item> Moonlight Or like, the Muslim ban, like what are you going to do with everyone else then?</item> <p></p> <item> Octavia When you say ripped out of their home. Like my friend, ICE kept showing up at her house. And she was born here, but she leaves and goes to Mexico and is worried she can't come back. So I don't know if you want to write about that</item> </ulist> <p>This conversation leads to many tangents that include American Imperialism and the novel <emph>Things Fall Apart</emph> before the poets decide to set a five‐minute timer to focus their writing. As they do so, Mara has an idea to write about ICE ripping families out of their homes, calling ICE "the wolf knocking on our doors." Octavia includes a bullet point under this section, writing "Do you want to introduce the idea of the three little pigs," comparing ICE to the big bad wolf in the fable of the three little pigs (see Vaughan and Lesus [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref85">52</reflink>]). Mara extends this suggestion, and this comparison persists in the final draft of the poem.</p> <p>At the end of the session, Mara's dad arrives to pick her up. Before she leaves, she turns back to Octavia and Moonlight and says, laughing, "I'm still imagining you here coming up with ideas." (Field Notes, 2.7.19).</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-23">Vignette #3: "I Didn't Write That"</hd> <p>About 2 weeks later, the poets are working through Mara's section of the group piece again. They turn to the line related to "speaking Mexican." Octavia shares, "I got that from my cousin, she's got a real bad habit of that: 'They was speaking Mexican.'"</p> <p>Octavia adds a space after the line and faces it, thinking but not typing. She says aloud to Mara, "I don't know how to wrap this [the final line of Mara's section] into your part. Like I do, but I don't." Octavia dances in her seat as she faces the computer, not typing anything.</p> <p>The poets continue typing in the Google Doc, discussing various topics, including what graphics they want to include on their team sweatshirts this year and service learning opportunities they want to take advantage of before applying to colleges. Eventually, their attention turns back to Mara's section of the poem when Octavia says, "We need a transition between Mara and the fourth part. What's your last line?" Mara replies with the line: "And for the last time, No, I am not speaking Mexican."</p> <p>Moonlight looks up, and says, "Oh, you liked it, you like what I wrote?" referring to the fact that she had originally written in the "speaking Mexican" idea a few sessions back. The implication is that the line's persistence in the poem means that Mara liked it enough to keep it. Moonlight continues, saying, "Yay! I feel like an accomplished writer," expressing pleasure that her addition to Mara's section remains in the draft. Then Mara pauses, saying:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Mara (reading) Wait, "From a dreamer to la gringa"?</item> <p></p> <item> Moonlight You put that</item> <p></p> <item> Mara I didn't write that</item> <p></p> <item> Moonlight Yes you did!</item> <p></p> <item> Mara (insisting) No, I didn't write that.</item> <p></p> <item> Octavia (jumping in) I suggested it, but you [Mara] wrote it down</item> <p></p> <item> Moonlight It's about how you were saying how when you go to Mexico, you're the gringa.</item> <p></p> <item> Octavia (realizing) Oh, you [Mara] just wrote it to spare my feelings! Take it out!</item> <p></p> <item> Moonlight She doesn't like it, look at her facial expression!</item> </ulist> <p>Mara clearly doesn't like it, and has her sweater pulled up over her face. Mara deletes this line from her section of the poem, and the poets continue writing (Field Notes, 2.21.19).</p> <p>Below, Figure 2 illustrates Mara's section of the group poem after each of the three recounted writing sessions. The text colors, text features (e.g., bolds, italics), and text highlights reflect a set of specific and agreed‐upon tools the team used to facilitate their collaborative writing (for more detail, see Vaughan and Lesus [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref86">52</reflink>]).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70099-fig-0002.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70099-fig-0002.jpg" title="2 Mara's section of the poem after each of 3 recounted sessions." /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0193225966-25">Findings</hd> <p>Above we have traced one thread of interaction among three youth poets across several weeks of writing a collaborative group poem about their personal experiences and identities. In this study, we examine the assembling and reassembling of writing, the poets' bodies, physical space in the computer lab and its long tables of desktop computers, Google Docs and its affordances and constraints, a search engine for research, iPhones and FaceTime to call and interview a Mexican‐American friend who was not in the room with them, media (<emph>The Lion King, Things Fall Apart</emph>, "The Three Little Pigs"), emotion and affect (e.g., stress and frustration, silliness, embarrassment, etc.), dance, touch, and movement in the room (e.g., physically moving around the room to write at each other's computers, Mara pulling up a sweater over her face), and narratives of Latiné, Black, immigrant, and transnational histories and identities, which came right up to the present day. We see their poetry as "a product of a knot of forces and intensities" emerging "from this collective network of human and nonhuman agents" (Jackson and Mazzei [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref87">26</reflink>]). And still, as authors and researchers, these threads are not complete; they have resonated with us, and meant different things to us across the time since these events, colored by our own conversations with each other, colleagues, and loved ones. At the time these poets were writing in 2019, they were grappling with the presidency of Donald Trump and what it meant for immigrants, ICE raids, language ideologies, and other marginalized people. Today in 2025 and 2026 we as authors feel echoes and resonances in current events, and these interactions are laminated with new meanings.</p> <p>Our research question was, <emph>How did youth poets engage with their own and others' identities and perspectives through the collaborative writing of a group poem?</emph> In our study, the poets' writing was characterized by "the feeling of flow and aliveness" (Stern [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref88">49</reflink>], 23); it was vital, alive, shifting, in motion (Boldt [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref89">5</reflink>]). Their writing together had real stakes, which is to say that in some sense it risked something; by taking up one another's perspectives, the poets articulated something about their understanding of themselves and each other. They opened themselves up to both rejection and connection. They allowed themselves to both witness and be witnessed. Below we discuss three findings we draw from our analysis of the poets' writing and interaction as articulated in these vignettes.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-26">Identities and Perspectives as Both Flattened and Complex</hd> <p>How does identity work in these interactions? We here look at two facets of their identities: their identities as writers and their engagement with ethnic/racial/national/linguistic identities to understand their engagement with identity as something both richly complex <emph>and</emph> flat and static.</p> <p>In some ways, the poets engaged with identity and perspective as complex, hybrid, and fluid. All three participants embodied identities as poets—they positioned themselves and each other as serious writers engaging in a variety of craft‐oriented practices to draft a collaborative spoken word poem. They met after school for hours to work on their poem; they traded places and authoritatively wrote on one another's parts of the poem; they trusted each other to write within their shared Google Doc; and they cared deeply about their own and each other's voices—enough to stop and change tactics when they thought they were getting it wrong ("It goes against her tone, her flow"). In an interview, Octavia shared more about how she thought about perspective‐taking in collaborative writing:</p> <p>Where I really struggle is, I don't feel right telling someone else's narrative. So like, I'm not Hispanic, like I can't sit here and tell you about the things that I go through as a Hispanic person....It's also a whole lot about flow. Like usually, when I write with someone else, it's like, "Hey, can I hear one of your poems?" cause like usually people tend to write in the same style. And I know Mara has a certain style about her, and she, um, what's she use? I think it's homophones, words that sound the same, but not the same? Yeah, she uses that a lot, and she uses a lot of wordplay. And I don't, that's just not my style, I'ma throw it at you and you can catch it, or I'ma be like very vague and give you the big picture of it. And that's just my writing style. (Interview)</p> <p>Here Octavia reflects a deep understanding and respect for her teammates' perspectives and voices, articulating some specific aspects of her own and Mara's differing writing styles. She shares that she takes care to learn her teammates' voices as she works to approximate them in her collaborative writing. At the same time, she expresses discomfort with "telling someone else's narrative," and acknowledges the limitations of her understanding of others' experiences. We see this understanding reflected in her effort to learn from (Sandra) and defer to (Mara) other Mexican‐American girls in this writing. For Octavia, perspective‐taking is both about respecting difference, and about rhetorical and stylistic choices.</p> <p>We know from interviews with the poets that they thought about their own identities and perspectives as somewhat permeable, changing, and open to influence through experiences in the world. In an interview, Octavia said:</p> <p>I see the difference of opinions throughout all my poems...I think it shows my growth as an individual and also my growth in understanding others and my consideration of others, so I never want to write from just my perspective, because I understand that other people's identities and perspectives have shaped mine, Black or not. So like, I think that's important to point out, because like, if there wasn't so much animosity between the races now, would I still be the same person? Would I still have the same thoughts? Would I still like, wear my Black pride the same? And so I think it's important to show every aspect of that. (Interview)</p> <p>In this way, Octavia reflects on how different points of view have shaped her writing, including how her "growth in understanding others" is connected to her writing, and that other people's identities–even those who aren't Black–have shaped her own. She goes on to describe how reflecting on current events putting racism into the public conversation have shaped her, even questioning whether she would "be the same person" or "have the same thoughts" were she not engaging with these discourses.</p> <p>In an interview, Moonlight reflected on her thinking about identity in the context of writing the group poem, saying:</p> <p>This is actually the first time that I've actually ever talked about my culture in a group piece. And it's because I didn't want to say something wrong. Like I didn't know everything about my culture, like I didn't feel like I was ready. Like there's beautiful, powerful Latino poets and Black poets, who'd say like, exactly how other people were feeling...And this was the first poem, that I started to talk about just being me, in the sense that that's my identity, and like nobody's gonna take that away from me, and that's kind of like the message in our group piece, that like even though I don't know if I'm Nigerian, I don't know if I'm Black, I don't know what I am, and you're not gonna tell me who I am, and you're not gonna be able to do that...So it was kind of like, also express who we are, but also express that we don't know exactly who we are. So that's what it was about. (Interview)</p> <p>Here Moonlight thinks through her own identity‐oriented writing in the context of the Chicago youth spoken word community more broadly, reflecting on times when "beautiful, powerful Latino poets and Black poets" could express something resonant with a crowd in a competition, and contrasting her own feelings of uncertainty, saying "I didn't want to say something wrong" and "I don't know what I am." Moonlight describes her work on this group piece as leaning into that indeterminacy, saying that she wanted it to "express who we are, but also express that we don't know exactly who we are." She rejects static notions of identity to open up the possibility to "express that we don't know exactly who we are."</p> <p>Mara expressed something similar in an interview, saying:</p> <p>And when I think about...standing in front of someone and telling them, "Oh, well this, this, this, this is part of my culture, this is part of who I am," it's like, basically telling them all, this is who I am, it's not like who you think I am...So like me telling someone off, saying, "Well, this is me," I feel like it kind of individualizes me, even though I might be writing about a broad group of people... I'm Mexican...I feel like that's something that everyone can relate to, even if it's not something that you personally share. So like, you might not connect to it because you're not Mexican, but you might connect to it from another way. (Interview)</p> <p>Mara's thoughts on this identity‐oriented writing mirror Moonlight's, specifically the insistence that she define herself rather than let other people tell her who she is. Mara also shares here that doing so "individualizes me," reflecting her understanding of identity as going beyond predetermined notions about broad groups. She also expresses that writing about her specific identity and perspective is a way to invite in all kinds of listeners, even those who don't share her specific identity, saying "you might connect to it from another way."</p> <p>However, we also notice the poets take up and play with flattened notions of identity as something stable and essential, at least stable enough to step into, by borrowing an essentialized version of identity in order to write their poem. They interview a Mexican‐American, Spanish‐speaking friend, Sandra, and write down her reflections as though one Mexican‐American girl's experiences could stand in for another's. At the same time, they hold enough space for Mara to claim authority over this section of the poem and assert her own perspective. We never get the sense that Octavia and Moonlight are confused about their own identities, or think that they can actually perfect Mara's voice; instead, they step into an essentialized version of Mexican‐American identity in order to write something that she has the power to either affirm and extend, or to reject and delete. In this way, identity functioned as a tool in service of crafting the poem, as well as something indeterminate and unfixed that yielded possibility rather than definition.</p> <p>Throughout the study the poets play with how they are perceived and positioned in broader culture. Rather than reject stereotypes, they go deeper into them; rather than critique others for saying "Stop speaking Mexican," they say it themselves and add, "Stop speaking American." In an interview, Octavia said:</p> <p>My identity shapes how I speak about myself, but also how I speak about others. So like, as a—like I'm Black, historically we've been oppressed. I would never purposely downplay another race unless I'm ironically bringing attention to it. And also like how I write poems from the stance of like, like I've done a poem from the stance of a white police officer. It's like, how it's really easy to feel targeted even when you may not be, but acknowledging that it doesn't mean targeting doesn't happen. So it's very much like my identity forming how I view other events. (Interview)</p> <p>Here Octavia reflects on how she engages with identity in both rich and flattening ways for rhetorical purpose; she describes that she might "downplay another race" to "ironically bring attention to it," as well as try to step inside another point of view, that of a white police officer, with her Black identity informing her perspective‐taking. We know from other research on YSW poetry that this is not unique to these poets, and that many poets play with stereotypes in their writing (Low [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref90">35</reflink>]; Somers‐Willett [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref91">48</reflink>]).</p> <p>Even describing Moonlight and Octavia as two Black poets somewhat flattens the richness and difference of their identities. In Vignette 1, they share an exchange in which they discuss Moonlight's identity specifically as Nigerian‐American. Where at other times in the study the girls reflected on shared experiences stemming from the ways in which they are both positioned as Black girls in Chicago (e.g., around people touching their hair), in Vignette 1, Octavia positions Moonlight as different from herself, both acknowledging the specificity of her African identity and also teasing her, making a potentially offensive joke by singing "The Circle of Life," to which Moonlight responds by laughing and replying, "Shut up!" They reject certain stereotypes as dehumanizing and also play with them–in both their poetry and in their friendship and writing processes.</p> <p>Throughout these interactions, the poets engaged metadiscursively, moving in and out of identity positions through writing; they were aware of present and potential audiences, and shifted dynamically across them. In our understanding of the poets here, identity was fluid and flexible enough to try on and swap out as the participants took up one another's voices and stepped into each other's identities (e.g., Octavia using personal pronouns "we" and "our" to write in Mara's voice). At the same time, participants reflected an understanding of identity as something negotiated through their awareness that identity is–at least in part–about how others see you, your language, skin color, body, and practices. The instability of identity is demonstrated clearly when Mara finds herself connecting to the writing that Octavia and Moonlight crafted in her voice, believing it was written by Cris, another Latina poet they knew. Though it wasn't, her teammates' approximation of her voice still felt resonant to her.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-27">Cacophony in Collaborative Writing</hd> <p>How does collaboration work in these interactions? We look now to the reverberations of these interactions in the final poem, attending to the ways in which this multi‐authored piece of collaborative writing is reflective of, and emergent from, the assemblage of this particular group in this particular space and time.</p> <p>In Vignette 2, Mara reviews what Octavia and Moonlight had written in her voice, sharing what she likes and clarifying what confuses her. They drafted a line ("Weeks upon weeks we fight over a wall, one our president can't seem to get over") that they described hoping she would like, and described liking themselves. When Mara returns to her writing, she deletes the line. Octavia asks her, "So you don't like the last line?" and she responds, "I like it, but I just want to word it better." She takes an idea about the proposed border wall and turns it into a line: "Mi casa es tu casa made us family, ICE tore the heart of my casa leaving us stranded and cold," moving from a large‐scale political event to something very personal. Octavia then suggests connecting this to the fable of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf, which Mara does. In fact the final version of the poem reads,Mi casa es tu casa made us family, till ICE became the wolf knocking on our doors, demanding us to open up or they would blow our house down.We demanded the ones dressed in green leave our land.With our thick accents and the little English we knew, we said "Green‐go!"</p> <p>This stanza, then, is an assemblage of many human and non‐human actors: Mara's original concept of ICE invading a family's home, echoes of Moonlight's and Octavia's use of google to surface issues related to a variety of Latiné communities, a FaceTime conversation with someone not on the team, wider cultural conversations about immigration and anti‐Mexican xenophobia in America, Moonlight's suggestion to take it further, the fable of The Three Little Pigs, Mara's sense of discomfort and embarrassment, pulling a sweater over her face, and even the shadow of Octavia's rejected line "From a dreamer to la gringa" in the mention of "green‐go" or "gringo." While the words lay flat on the page, they reflect many interactions in which the poets shared their own perspectives, or tried to see the world through each other's. It reflects a particular stance–dire issues facing Mexican‐American communities in the United States–but is inflected with the voices, experiences, and perspectives of others (e.g., Mara's firsthand fear and rage; Moonlight's similar, but different experiences of being from an immigrant family and speaking a language other than English; Octavia's similar, but different experience of fearing for friends' families and their interactions with ICE). Like Boldt ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref92">5</reflink>]) writes, metaphorical waves pass through these interactions, carrying and transferring energy between them; the poets here are animated by one another's affect, gesture, ideas for writing, emotional reflections, and sober realizations. The stanza examined here is emblematic of the entire group piece in that it wasn't just a set of three discrete voices stitched together. Each speaker's individual voice ended up imbricated with one another's inflections. Each poet's perspective was different than it would have been had she not had others writing with her, for her, and alongside her. As Octavia put it in an interview, "I think that it's not necessarily the difference in writing styles, because I think a lot of times that's what makes a good group piece." (Interview).</p> <p>In an interview, Moonlight shared about her experience taking the lead on writing a group piece for the previous year's team, saying:</p> <p>Like I wrote a group piece last year for the group...And it was just like, something felt wrong, like there was a voice missing, there [were] voices missing, like my voice wasn't strong enough. But not like it wasn't strong enough, like–I needed more people to say it with me. And I realize that this isn't an indie piece, this is a group piece. And so I shared it with the rest of the group, and they were like... "this is so like good," like they liked it. And I was appreciative, because when I realized it was a group piece, I started embracing my inner like, [another poet's name]...Like she was one of the artists that I channeled, and I wrote a whole thing for [her]. Then I wrote a whole thing for Octavia. Then I wrote something for me, then I wrote something for someone else...And then—yeah, I got edits (laughs). So, it was edits like, "Ooh, we should add this and this and this"...Every group piece that has ever been written by the group of individuals that I have worked with, has been different. (Interview)</p> <p>Though this recollection was from the previous year, it highlights something important about these poets' processes. Moonlight articulates this when she says, "my voice wasn't strong enough...I needed more people to say it with me," and describes "channeling" the voices of other poets to write the first draft of this piece. In both this year's writing experience documented through these vignettes, as well as Moonlight's recollections of the previous year's experience, cacophony and multi‐voicedness was central to the poets' writing process. We choose to call our participants' writing cacophonous because their writing together was noisy, unpredictable, and abundant in its multi‐voicedness. Moonlight describes the uniqueness of each group poem as emerging from that particular group, saying "every group piece...that I have worked with, has been different."</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-28">Difference and Connection Through Perspective‐Taking</hd> <p>How does perspective work in these interactions? The poets in this group were not afraid of difference (of writing styles, of experiences, of identities); rather, they embraced it. They viewed it as a strength of their collaborative writing, demonstrated in their work to learn one another's voices, in their practices of trading places as a regular routine, and in their openness to others rejecting their suggestions.</p> <p>We noted that in both of their interviews, Moonlight and Octavia used the same language to describe their collaborative process: "bumping heads." Octavia said, "I know when I'm writing with Moonlight, I'm gonna bump heads with her, that's just our friendship, we bump heads a lot. But it's also something that really improves us, because she excels in one thing, and I excel in another." Moonlight said, "Me and Octavia, we bump heads (laughs) all the time. But we love each other so much, and we respect each other's writing process so much. But sometimes, I'll be like, "This sounds better," and she'll be like, "No it doesn't!" and then 5 min later, she'll realize it sounds better." Through these interview excerpts, we see the poets' understanding of difference as central to their writing process.</p> <p>While the youth poets permitted one another to take on each other's voices, their ability and freedom to ultimately veto others' suggestions was important. Though Moonlight and Octavia added new ideas to Mara's section of the poem, and though she kept and incorporated some of their writing, she ultimately maintained ownership over her part of the poem and rejected a line that Octavia had added to her piece, with Octavia's full blessing and even at her insistence. As evidenced by Moonlight's recognition that Mara didn't like the line ("She doesn't like it, look at her facial expression!") and Octavia's acknowledgement that Mara had only included the line to spare her feelings, Moonlight and Octavia encouraged Mara to trust herself to know what she wanted to include in her part of the poem.</p> <p>These instances of connection that the poets shared illustrate the space they built for themselves, which included vulnerability, trust, and connection. As Moonlight shared in an interview:</p> <p>That's one thing I like about writing, is you make somebody else not feel lonely, but you also make yourself not feel lonely. So that's when I write. I sometimes don't even write for me, sometimes I write for someone else...I know I'm not the only one. I know I'm crying now, but somebody's probably crying like five minutes later after I wipe my tears. (Interview)</p> <p>Even in moments of less than positive feelings, this was evident. For example, when Moonlight and Octavia anxiously awaited Mara's feedback on what they had written from her perspective, and as they somewhat nervously explained their process, their pleasure and laughter permeated the room while Mara joked at what they must have sounded like. Similarly, when Mara came to a part she did not like, she uncomfortably retreated into her sweater, prompting giggles from her teammates who demanded that she remove whatever she disliked.</p> <p>As another example, in Vignette 1, Moonlight and Octavia are talking about "speaking Mexican" versus "speaking Spanish." Moonlight connects to this personally, relating to people saying "speaking African" rather than Yoruba. They add a line, "And for the last time, no I am not speaking Mexican" on Mara's part of the group piece. They also extend this idea into other languages they know, writing: "STOP SPEAKING AFRICAN/STOP SPEAKING MEXICAN/STOP SPEAKING CHINESE/STOP SPEAKING AMERICAN." Later in their FaceTime conversation with Sandra, they discuss the varieties of Spanish dialects across regions, and during this conversation, Moonlight bolds "NO I AM NOT SPEAKING MEXICAN" in the group piece. When Mara returns in the next observation, she keeps this line.</p> <p>In Vignette 3, the poets return to this idea, and Octavia shares her personal experience, saying, "I got that from my cousin, she's got a real bad habit of that: 'They was speaking Mexican.'" Moonlight also says to Mara of this line, "Oh you liked it, you like what I wrote? Yay! I feel like an accomplished writer." Both of the poets–Moonlight and Octavia–feel a sense of ownership over this line. Not mentioned in this moment, but still lingering, is the connection to Sandra, who shared about the diversity and range of Spanish dialects across Mexican and Mexican‐American communities. And finally, there is Mara, who keeps this line in her section about her culture and identity. Both difference and connection in perspective‐taking opened possibilities.</p> <p>Central to our understanding of perspective is a rejection of the notion that it is possible to stand outside of a scene and take an accurate, neutral, omniscient view of it, or that each individual actor has a single perspective that they perpetually hold claim to. We view the entire assemblage as having agency and subjectivity, rather than viewing each participant as a separable individual with unique power to act, to know, or to see. We use the term "perspective" to talk about what the poets expressed from their positions, and argue that perspective‐taking is what happened when they tried to stand in different positions and share what they saw; this activity was enmeshed with affective flows (e.g., pleasure and pride in "Yay! I feel like an accomplished writer"), technologies and material tools (e.g., iPhone, FaceTime, Google Docs), histories and discourses (e.g., memories of family members, the notion of "speaking Mexican" or "speaking African" and what it meant to different participants). We see their perspectives as inextricably linked to their ongoing intra‐action with the human and non‐human beings in this space, and the possibility of perspective‐taking itself as a recognition that the entire assemblage is saturated with agency, possibility, and vitality.</p> <p>In this way, we see difference and connection as generative forces, and perspective‐taking as creative work, as writers came to understand themselves and each other more deeply through the act of collaboratively writing a poem. Their perspective‐taking was often serious—think of the poets soberly discussing their own and their loved ones' fears about ICE, deportation, and other consequences of xenophobia. It was also playful and funny–think of Mara imagining how her teammates were writing in her voice, by miming typing on a computer and saying, "You guys are all like, 'Oh, sombreros, tacos,'" which made everyone laugh. The connection they shared was evident throughout the observations and interviews. As Mara shared in an interview, "So, outside of this program, it's been hard to connect with people, because not everybody wants to share...their personal experiences...And [here] I feel like we have a good communication, we all share our ideas and we kind of like branch off of those ideas to make something that...is true to everybody in the group." In her interview, Moonlight shared something similar, saying:</p> <p>I would not be in [this school] probably right now if I didn't join this group...[Here, people] share stories that they've never even shared with even like their moms or their sister, and we know them. And we'll just be with our other friends, and we'll just say something funny, and it'll be an inside joke or something, because like, we know this about you. And like we listen to what you're saying. So when people are like, "Oh my god, you remember from my poem!" like yeah, I remember this about you...You actually learn who the person is, and they find out who you are. (Interview)</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-29">Discussion</hd> <p>In this study, we set out to understand how a group of young poets collaboratively composed a spoken word poem in an after‐school writing group. In the work of attending to their writing processes, and over a period of years spent turning these data over together, we began tracing certain flows of intensity in their engagement with one another. We noticed that they were taking on one another's perspectives and writing in one another's voices. They engaged with their own and others' identities in ways that surprised us, and continue to resonate with us.</p> <p>In this study, we have sought to think with theory, to ask "How do things (collaboration, perspective, identity) work here?" As we have examined these interactions we are not impartial observers, and we have not sought to pin down or demarcate the territories of these poets' writing. Rather, we feel in ourselves and our own writing how these concepts can be vital, in that we were changed by our engagement in this work. Put another way, we also have participated in "vital mattering" (Boldt [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref93">5</reflink>]) through our witnessing, reading, and writing together. Through our construction of the vignettes, we attempted to take a stance that allowed us to step into the dataset rather than stand outside of it. When the poets were together in 2019, they discussed and wrote about many things (e.g., xenophobia, ICE raids, government dysfunction, linguistic racism) that take on layered meanings for us now in 2025 and 2026, and that, rather than staying fixed in the past, indicate a sense of "flow and aliveness" (Stern [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref94">49</reflink>]). We are entangled in this study within and beyond the timeframe of the data collection, and we can feel the theory thinking in us as we think through it.</p> <p>Certainly the relationship between literacy and identity has been explored in a rich body of literature (e.g., Lammers and Marsh [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref95">30</reflink>]), including in youth spoken word poetry (Curwood and Jones [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref96">12</reflink>]; Muhammad and Gonzalez [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref97">37</reflink>]). We echo what other scholars of YSW poetry have found about young people playing with notions of stereotype in writing (Somers‐Willett [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref98">48</reflink>]), and taking up identities other than one's own in order to express a point of view (Low [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref99">35</reflink>]). Still, we see very little in the literature that examines how young people try to approximate <emph>each other's</emph> (i.e., their peers') voices in the act of collaborative writing. Research on YSW establishes that poets engage with multiple real and imagined audiences (e.g., Call‐Cummings et al. [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref100">7</reflink>]). Our work extends that literature by considering how the poets functioned as audience for each other; as the poets wrote in one another's voices, they awaited each other's feedback, hoped that their offerings would be well‐received, and tried to get it right. As identity only continues to gain salience in our broader cultural, political, and educational discussions, further research is needed to explore how young people may engage with identity in ways that are not only about self‐expression or self‐exploration, but are also about <emph>seeing each other</emph> through play with identity as a tool for writing.</p> <p>As illustrated in this study, writing in another's voice does not have to necessarily be an appropriative or critical act; within the context of a supportive group deeply engaged in collaborative writing, the act of taking up another's voice may lead to vulnerability, connection, and possibility. While this kind of identity work always involves the potential for harm and/or tension, we still wonder about how adolescent writers are engaging with multiple conceptions of identity to craft collaborative writing, and what happens to their relationships with one another in those processes. Further research is needed to understand more.</p> <p>In this study of collaborative writing, we focused on understanding how a group of poets wrote a shared poem together. Research on collaborative writing highlights the importance of social relationships (Rish and Caton [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref101">42</reflink>]), and that these roles are not fixed (Smith and Shen [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref102">47</reflink>]). Rish and Caton ([<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref103">42</reflink>]) noted that their participants reported not knowing where a given line had come from; we see echoes of this in our tracing of lines across the study, and of poets questioning who, exactly, had written what. Much of the literature on collaborative writing has attended to the ways in which human writers are shaped by their interactions with one another. However, we believe that all writing—even writing with an individual author—is collaborative in the sense that, "What the author writes is always the product of a collective assemblage of enunciation" (Jackson and Mazzei [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref104">26</reflink>], 12). We join other researchers calling for greater attention to the sociomaterial landscape in which writers compose, including accounting for materials, bodies, and affect (Johnston [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref105">27</reflink>]) to illustrate and understand the forces that produce collaborative texts. Lenters and Smith ([<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref106">33</reflink>]) articulate the importance of laughter, play, and "embodied sensemaking" to collaborative writing; we affirm this by highlighting the role of affect, discourses, and (non)human beings in collaborative composition.</p> <p>We affirm research on writing and identity that has highlighted how young writers play with identity, including through "bending" (Coleman and Hall [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref107">10</reflink>]) and "disidentification" (Storm and Jones [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref108">50</reflink>]). We seek to add a focus on how identity‐making and perspective‐taking might play a role in collaborative writing. In this study, we see the possibility of identity‐making and perspective‐taking as emerging from the entire assemblage. None of the poets had a neutral, omniscient view outside of their participation in the space; neither did they have single, unique subjectivities that could be swapped in and out, like changing slides on a Viewmaster. Rather, the potential for seeing things differently was opened up through the intra‐action in this space. The process of conducting their writing via a shared Google Doc with various techniques for collaborative writing, their practice to write in each other's voices and to bring any resources to bear on generating new ideas (e.g., FaceTiming friends, googling search terms), and their sensing of and moving with the embodied and affective flows in the room (e.g., joking, dancing, realizing a suggestion was not welcome and created discomfort) all made it possible to see and write from shifting positions. Further research may explore how writers intra‐act within assemblages not only to collaborate and produce writing, but also to shift what they are able to see and notice by looking from different perspectives/positions.</p> <p>Our understanding of vitality does not necessitate a procession to friendship or pleasant emotions. As Boldt ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref109">5</reflink>]), referencing Niccolini ([<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref110">38</reflink>]), writes, "There is no promise that affect leads to beautiful places, that vitality is always the product of joy" (p. 215). Within these poets' work together, there was the potential for harm. The poets discussed painful, traumatic, and activating experiences (only a few of which are referenced in these vignettes). They engaged with ugly stereotypes and joked about their own and each other's identities. They wrote in one another's voices. They misunderstood one another at times. The fact that there was a potential for harm is serious, but is also a mark of what made these interactions real; there were no predetermined outcomes, and that <emph>opened up</emph> space for connection, rather than closing it off.</p> <p>In this context, the poets collaborated at the "unruly edges" (Lenters et al. [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref111">32</reflink>]). Their collaboration included practices that we don't think would be encouraged or even allowed in typical K‐12 writing contexts, such as writing in each other's voices, FaceTiming friends, or joking about one another's identities. We do not seek to valorize these practices or approach them uncritically; we simply name that for these poets, their work together happened beyond prioritizing productivity or the "just so" conditions for collaboration (Lenters et al. [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref112">32</reflink>]). We don't know whether we should promote these practices for uptake in either in‐ or out‐of‐school settings; they originated from the specific context of this group and don't need to be replicated elsewhere to be significant. However, we do think about implications for collaborative writing contexts as welcoming–rather than seeking to eliminate–cacophony.</p> <p>What might it look like to welcome cacophony in youth writing contexts? In a classroom or out‐of‐school writing context, this might look like including interaction as a part of writing activities. Having conversations with classmates, peers, or co‐writers could open up possibilities for seeing things differently. This could look like creating designated areas for authors who want to talk through their writing with someone else, or offer it to someone else for a pass at extending their writing. This might take the form of inviting authors to read their work and pose a question for discussion from others willing to give feedback, or posting writing around the room and having peers perform a gallery walk, leaving post‐it notes of suggestions or questions for the author. It could also look like a teacher, facilitator, or writer reading excerpts of writing and facilitating a subsequent discussion around the text, so that the writer would hear a conversation about their writing and decide how the written piece would (or would not) respond to this conversation. It might take the form of inviting writers to consider the non‐human beings and forces that influence their writing—for example, through creating process drawings (Prior and Shipka [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref113">41</reflink>]) to identify how their writing is entangled with the world, rather than relegated to their minds and the page. In other words, there are so many ways—both in and out of a classroom—to explicitly make a piece of writing the start of a conversation so that it can evolve with a cacophony of voices.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-30">Concluding Remarks</hd> <p>We return to the metaphor of the orchid and the wasp (Deleuze and Guattari [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref114">14</reflink>]) to articulate that these poets were entangled with each other and the entire assemblage in which this writing emerged. However, this notion of cacophony matters to us because it denotes a noisiness, a multiplicity, rather than speaking in one voice. Their entanglement did not obscure the unique experiences and histories that contributed to this writing, nor did their writing lose a critical edge in a sort of "we're all the same" kind of way. Rather, their poem sought to speak clearly about power; their collaboration sharpened the critical edge of this poem, rather than dulling it down to a least common denominator. While we hold with those scholars who question the very nature of identity and individuality, we continue to assert that these identities have real impacts in youth's lives, even as we question the fixity of those categories.</p> <p>We see the power of this group's collaboration in the fact that it had real stakes; the poets were engaging with something real because they were allowing themselves to witness and be witnessed, including potentially to be harmed or be misunderstood. This work was cacophonous–it was noisy, messy, unruly, and rather than working to smooth out their differences, the piece of writing produced by this assemblage reflected a sharp, critical engagement with multiple histories and perspectives that could speak back to power. Their willingness to engage with real risk opened up space for the possibility of connection, of really seeing and being seen by another, rather than closing it off. The friendship and connection felt by members of this group suggest that perspective‐taking is not just seeing someone for who they are, but can also encompass the work of looking <emph>with</emph> them, seeing and confronting what it is that they face, and that taking up their voice to do so is not necessarily an appropriative act–within the context of a group like this one, it can also be an act of love.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-31">Funding</hd> <p>The authors have nothing to report.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-32">Ethics Statement</hd> <p>Research data collected from human subjects were collected in accordance with and under the supervision of the Institutional Review Board at the University of Illinois at Chicago.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-33">Conflicts of Interest</hd> <p>The authors declare no conflicts of interest.</p> <hd id="AN0193225966-34">Data Availability Statement</hd> <p>The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. 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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: 'I Never Want to Write from Just My Perspective': Identity-Making in Youth's Collaborative Writing of Spoken Word Poetry – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Andrea+Vaughan%22">Andrea Vaughan</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1362-1415">0000-0003-1362-1415</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Melina+Lesus%22">Melina Lesus</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Reading+Research+Quarterly%22"><i>Reading Research Quarterly</i></searchLink>. 2026 61(2). – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 18 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2026 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Collaborative+Writing%22">Collaborative Writing</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Oral+Language%22">Oral Language</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Poetry%22">Poetry</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Self+Concept%22">Self Concept</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Writing+Attitudes%22">Writing Attitudes</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Adolescents%22">Adolescents</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Perspective+Taking%22">Perspective Taking</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Self+Expression%22">Self Expression</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1002/rrq.70099 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0034-0553<br />1936-2722 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Writing is an important site of identity construction and enactment, especially for adolescent writers. In this study, we explore several interactions across writing sessions in a youth after-school spoken word poetry team. The participants were engaged in writing a collaboratively-authored "group poem" in which they took up and wrote in one another's voices and perspectives toward a piece of writing that ultimately emerged from the assemblage rather than any one poet. This paper examines the poets' identity-making and perspective-taking through exchanges related to one part of their poem over the course of three different days. We ask: "How did youth poets engage with their own and others' identities and perspectives through the collaborative writing of a group poem?" We find that participants' writing reflects a flexible understanding of identity as they highlight different aspects of their own identities and move in and out of each other's to take up different perspectives. However, we also find that participants' perspective-taking allowed them both to express themselves and to understand each other. Throughout, we argue that all writing--not just writing with multiple authors--is collaborative and the product of an assemblage, rather than any individual, and call for attention to the sociomaterial landscape in which writers compose, including accounting for materials, bodies, and affect. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2026 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1503853 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1002/rrq.70099 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 18 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Collaborative Writing Type: general – SubjectFull: Oral Language Type: general – SubjectFull: Poetry Type: general – SubjectFull: Self Concept Type: general – SubjectFull: Writing Attitudes Type: general – SubjectFull: Adolescents Type: general – SubjectFull: Perspective Taking Type: general – SubjectFull: Self Expression Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: 'I Never Want to Write from Just My Perspective': Identity-Making in Youth's Collaborative Writing of Spoken Word Poetry Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Andrea Vaughan – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Melina Lesus IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 04 Type: published Y: 2026 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0034-0553 – Type: issn-electronic Value: 1936-2722 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 61 – Type: issue Value: 2 Titles: – TitleFull: Reading Research Quarterly Type: main |
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