This book chronicles 5th and 6th grade writers - children of gang members, drug users, poor people, and non-documented and documented immigrants - in a rural school in the southwest US coming into their voices, cultivating those voices, and using those voices in a variety of venues, beginning with the classroom community and spreading outward.

At the heart of this book is the cultivation of tension between official and unofficial portraits of these students. Official portraits are composed of demographic data, socioeconomic data, and test results. Unofficial counterportraits offer different views of children, schools, and communities. The big ideas of official and unofficial portraits are presented, then each chapter offers data (the children's and teachers' processes and products) and facets of the theoretical construct of counterportraits, as a response to official portraits. The counterportraits are built slowly in order to base them in evidence and to articulate their complexity.

Many teachers and soon-to-be teachers facing the dilemmas and complexities of teaching in diverse classrooms have serious questions about how to honor students' lives outside of school, making school more relevant. This book offers evidence to present to the public, legislators, and the press as a way of talking back to official portraits, demonstrating that officially failing schools are not really failing - evidence that is crucial for the survival of public schools.

Preface

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Writing Spaces and Hard Times

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Searching for Our Truths

Before the Work Began

Portraits and Counterportraits

Mesa Vista Elementary School (MVE): The Official Portrait

Finding the School

Homelessness

Chapter 2: Writers Reveal Themselves

Becoming More than an Observer

First Pieces of Writing

Initiating Data Analysis

Teacher as Screamer

Strictness, Power, and Microaggressions

Strict Schools and the Search for Joy

The Counterportrait Up to This Point

Chapter 3: Claiming Spaces to Write

The Sixth Graders' Space

Finding the Space to Write

The Fifth Graders' Space

The Biography Assignment Begins to Evolve

Writing Spaces and the View of the Child

Counterportraits So Far

Chapter 4: Rewriting Self and Writing About Others

Sixth Graders' Non-Biography Biography Work

Moving Towards Increased Sharing

Fifth Graders Begin Biography Writing

Composing Classmates' Biographies

Counterportraits (so far), Context, and the Presentation of Self

Chapter 5: Expanding Writing Spaces as Communities of Practice

Fifth Graders Interview, Transcribe, & Write

Some Fifth Graders' Transcriptions (Excerpts)

And in the sixth grade…

Communities, Boundaries, and Counterportraits

Legitimizing a Context for Counterportraiture

Chapter 6: Writing Changes Writers: The Impact of Inertia

Good News

Sixth Graders Consider Expository Biography

Featured Fifth Grade Writer

Working for Hours

Counterportraiture, Working in the Plural Form, & Inertia

Chapter 7: Heroes, Dark Secrets, Otter Pops, & Struggles

In the Fifth Grade

Featured Fifth G