Reading Is About Relating: Urban Youths Give Voice to the Possibilities for School Literacy

This study is framed by sociocultural perspectives and presents findings from focus groups conducted with students from an urban middle and high school that has documented success in reading achievement. Students illuminated the kinds of literacy events that the school valued, the texts that enabled them to negotiate their own identities and the world around them, and affirmed that they read for escape, to deepen their thinking, and to achieve according to more conventional notions of reading success. Students also suggest that the school's literacy practices were co-created by both school adults and the students themselves, a finding that holds important implications for school practice and research.