What is Touchstone Text

This chapter is framed by a conceptualization of urgent writing pedagogies that support inquiry, collaboration, and reading and writing about meaningful topics that are responsive to the social times. It presents portraits of practice—rich descriptions and reflections by practitioner-researchers on theoretically-driven course design and instruction—from an ELA methods course for elementary teacher candidates that is taught by the authors. They share three ways their work on the topic of water justice in this course demonstrates an urgent writing pedagogy: (1) situating the teaching of writing inside inquiry into meaningful/consequential topics; (2) knowledge-building through text-rich inquiry; and (3) immersing teacher candidates as collaborative, multimodal, informational writers. Together, these portraits of practice demonstrate multiple ways of thinking about urgency as part of teaching and learning writing in schools and in literacy teacher education.