“Today Is the Tomorrow You Worried About Yesterday”: Time in Secondary Writing Instruction

In schools, including literacy classrooms, scholars have argued that time is often seen as a “resource” to be expended rather than an entity that impacts our understandings of ourselves and our lived, temporal experiences. Time in literacy classrooms is also evident in the pressures of standardized writing tasks and testing needs. Given these contexts of time and expectations, this qualitative study considers how secondary English-language arts (ELA) students notice texts that are important to them, and how or whether time surfaces in these noticings. Data include 130 “noticing assignments” across 52 participants in three high school ELA class sections, focal participant interviews, noticing class session artifacts, and researcher field notes. This study has implications for literacy teachers and researchers committed to humanizing curriculum that supports students as they write about what is important to them at particular moments in time.