529 FEATURE ARTICLE Conceptualizing Scholarship on Adolescent Out-of-School Writing Toward More Equitable Teaching and Learning: A Literature Review Andrea Vaughan How can K–12 educators use the existing literature on adolescent out-of-school writing in their curricula? M ost youths compose every day in forms that go beyond official writing curricula in K–12 classrooms. These out-of-school compositions include social media posts, creative writing in after- school programs, and song lyrics, yet as Ives (2011) noted, “many of the literacies students possess go unnoticed or untapped in schools” (p. 250). Literacy researchers have looked beyond the traditional classroom to examine and document adolescents’ various out-of-school writ- ing contexts, forms, and functions and to explore how these instances might contribute to the field’s under- standing of literacy writ large. In this literature review, I examine research on adolescent out-of-school writing published in the last decade (2009–2019) to synthesize the literacy field’s knowledge of this phenomenon. In ad- dition to documenting the writing done by adolescents in their out-of-school lives, this research serves as a cri- tique of school and schooled writing as the only or best ways of writing and challenges prevailing notions of what counts as “good” writing and who counts as “good” writers. Engagement with this literature has the poten- tial to promote more equitable teaching and learning by informing how K–12 writing educators teach, evaluate, and talk about both in- and out-of-school writing. Despite the breadth of research on out-of-school writing, educators still lack a useful understanding of what this knowledge means for in-school writing instruction and how, if at all, it should be operational- ized in classrooms. I offer implications of this work for school writing, arguing for connections that go beyond ignoring, domesticating, or uncritically accepting students’ out-of-school writing practices. Theoretical Framework Critical Sociocultural Perspectives This work is situated in a critical sociocultural frame- work of literacy (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007) that views writing as inextricable from its social and cultural context and that explicitly attends to issues of identity, agency, and power. Street (1984) noted that literacy is more than the technology that facilitates it; rather, it is a social process that makes use of various technolo- gies for specific social purposes. In other words, com- munication technologies (e.g., alphabets, parchment and quill, word processor) do not arise from nowhere but rather are developed and maintained for particular purposes, as well as controlled, in many cases, by those with political and social power. Sociocultural approaches to writing in particu- lar view texts as artifacts-in-activity (Prior, 2006) and writing as a form of social action happening in school, home, and community (Dyson, 2001, 2008). Delineating out-of-school writing draws our attention to in-school Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy Vol. 63 No. 5 pp. 529–537 doi: 10.1002/jaal.1009 © 2019 International Literacy Association ANDREA VAUGHAN is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA; email avaugh6@uic.edu.