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Students need support through intentional writing instruction to develop their discipline-specific writing skills outside of Language Arts. Yet, we argue not all writing instruction provides the same opportunities for student learning. In this study, with the support of professional development, teachers engaged students in civic perspective-taking through writing, focusing on locally relevant public issues. Drawing from disciplinary literacy and genre pedagogy, our research team conducted a descriptive study where thematic analysis was applied to examine second and third graders' civics writing samples. Our findings indicate that students' engagement with key civic concepts became more complex and purposeful as they practiced argumentative writing. Development continued from second to third grade in both the sophistication of their civic perspective-taking as well as their writing. Additionally, we found that student motivation to engage in argumentative writing increased in all classrooms across both grade levels when engaging with locally relevant public issues. This article provides details about the elementary civics writing curriculum and the students' writing outcomes as well as includes the two graphic organizers used in the curriculum.

Building capacity in teachers to teach students skillfully and respectfully across the diversity gap is complex work that requires teachers to learn to see with what we term as angled perspective. If an angled perspective is learnable, then it is teachable. Using our narratives as religiously and ethnically diverse women teacher educators, we share through our own learning and growth, how this type of analysis can contribute to coalitional building for teacher education, and thus K-12 teachers. Through our conceptualization of identity theory, positionality, and intersectionality, we argue angled perspectives contribute to solidarity work in education. We share implications for teacher educators to integrate angled perspectives into curricula across teacher preparation courses.