ABSTRACT
Teachers and students in this research took precautions about relationships and curriculum because of fears, habits, and histories inherent in living in the strict NCLB world for seven years. Even a genre may be a prison for some writers as they struggle to conform to requirements of length, language, space, form, structure, and function of that genre. In this chapter, the fifth and sixth graders move towards telling life stories in ways that elude the condition of ‘at risk’ or ‘failing.’ As I present various writers and the contexts in which they write, their in-school masks become more evident, as do the ways in which those masks are created and may hold them as prisoners within well-defined expectations and ways of being in school. We interrogate those masks, the sixth graders cautiously and the fifth graders more explicitly. The sixth graders engage by escaping some of the parameters of what constitutes a biography; the fifth graders engage by exploring the genre in a more traditional sense. Both paths lead to writers knowing more about themselves and others. In this chapter I present and discuss the work of both groups of children as we moved toward understanding the masks that others and we wear, and the ongoing need to deal with issues of safety and community.
