Paper Selfies: Centering Students' Identities in Baseline Writing

In this teaching tip, we--a literacy professor and two K-12 teachers--encourage a rethinking of the baseline writing assessment by sharing our experiences with "The Paper Selfie," an activity that juxtaposes the arts and young people's personal writing. By centering students' identities, their hopes, beliefs, dreams, and realities, alongside images they create to depict themselves, The Paper Selfie can serve a role in enabling young people to see themselves in their learning as we gather important data to guide our writing instruction. As such, this teaching tip provides an example of how a baseline writing assessment can be informative and meaningful.