“What Do We Want Our Book to Look Like?”: Reimagining the Academic Writing Process Through Community-Centered Composing

This study explores how a team of university and youth co-researchers collaboratively inquired into, and participated in, the process of writing for educational change. We refer to the collective literate processes through which researchers worked to center community priorities in academic writing as community-centered composing. We document how our writing group negotiated tensions related to the form, content, and audience of our collaborative writing, as we grappled with how to share our research with educators. We suggest how practitioners might draw on community-centered composing to meaningfully involve youth writers as partners and reimagine academic writing in school as a relational, affective, and action-oriented process.