Friends and authors: Spontaneous co-composing in a writing workshop

Much of this research attended to what might be termed side-by-side composing: authors working on their own individual pieces and discussing them with others as needed. Others have studied co-composing—that is, multiple authors crafting a single text—describing the various aspects of these collaborations and their constraints and affordances.

Nevertheless, few of these researchers have examined settings in which children spontaneously undertake co-composing. The study described here is a case analysis of a group of third-grade boys who chose to work together to write a superhero story over a period of six weeks. Mobilizing Bakhtin’s construct of heteroglossic discourse, the study explores interactions among the authors and aspects of their final product.