ABSTRACT
Attending to disturbances that might warrant more public attention-like LeeAnne Walters’ experiences, suicides of gay youth across the country, school policies for dealing with bullies, or the range of concerns eighth graders raised-would fashion writing instruction as a “contex[t] of discovery” (Crick & Gabriel, 2010, p. 212) where young people might identify problem situations that arise in people’s everyday lives, including their own. And yet, Applebee and Langer (2011) note that “writing as a way to study, learn and go beyond-as a way to construct knowledge or generate new networks of understanding-is rare” (p. 27). Where writing classes do engage students in inquiry, they often create a “context of discovery” related to generalizable issues or conceptual themes, like heroes, adulthood, or change. Inquiry related to questions that are existentially perplexing are certainly worthwhile; however, deliberation that remains hypothetical remains distant from the goals of deliberative publics, which consider “how particular cases, not general issues, can be dealt with effectively” (Danisch, 2015, p. 413).
