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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.

This manuscript examines the civic perspective-taking of second-grade students in three majority non-white classrooms as they participated in a civics unit with a perspective-taking focus. Specifically, this work examines student learning related to key concepts within the unit through analyses of individual student work samples and small group work and discussions. Based on these data, a rubric of learning civic perspective-taking and related concepts is presented. Patterns in student work are examined through three student exemplars that demonstrate advanced, developed and limited levels of understanding of key concepts throughout the unit. Larger patterns of student understandings from these three classrooms are also discussed.