‘Just write anything’: exploring the school literacy practices of high school students in the United Arab Emirates

Today, many literacy scholars have accepted that there is a continuum of legitimate literacy practices. In view of this, this study explored the effects of schools’ literacy practices on eight high school students in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), juxtaposing these practices against the ‘knowledge processes’ framework to determine the extent to which these practices represent the whole literacy practices continuum. The findings indicated that schools predominantly rely upon didactic pedagogy in English and Arabic language classes. However, although such didacticism overshadows authentic literacy pedagogy, there were instances in which the participants ‘wove’ their lived experiences in with their school literacy practices. As students will find ways to break away from purely didactic pedagogy in any case, the authors implore schools to validate students’ lived experiences in the context of literacy instruction.