ABSTRACT
QUILL was a project to encourage real communication, a focus on audience and purpose, revision with a reason, and the development of a literate community. In software, curriculum, and teacher support, it embodied a particular approach to literacy development. Yet even in its most detailed form, this specification was only the starting point for the realization process. In each setting, the innovation looked different, adapted and appropriated by a particular teacher in a particular school in a particular cultural context. One of our goals in this book is to characterize these differences and to identify the reasons they arose. In the next chapter we look more closely at the settings in Alaska in which QUILL was used. This provides the background for our detailed analyses of QUILL realizations in chapters 5, 6, and 7, as we construct a situated evaluation of QUILL.
