ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we examine the complex social writing involved in children's video making as an example of one way to reclaim the social nature of all writing. We discuss the sociocultural contexts and processes that shaped the interactions of the authors including protocols and products, roles, and tools. We argue that video making is an opportunity for democratic writing, where multiple voices and contributions are included to shape the writing process. We observed how group writing in video making challenged the “author itative” stance of traditional writing where a single author controls the entire content and process. Democratic writing moves away from many typical school literacy practices and mirrors the collaborative, experimental, and multimodal literacies that occur in many out of school contexts such as broadcast media, video game development, and web page design (Sheridan & Rowsell, 2010).
