ABSTRACT
Pedagogical entrapment has moved to pedagogical crisis in ‘failing’ schools, particularly when teachers are held hostage by curricula that claim to be based on research, even though they are not (Coles, 2003) and, further, do not meet local needs. In our many discussions of the qualities of writing, using language about writing that the children eventually appropriated, we made advances towards pedagogical liberation by composing, with children, places in which their truths were the points of origin. These were hybridized spaces (Bakhtin, 1981) in which multiple meanings, languages, and pedagogical opportunities contributed to the use of academic discourse as a necessary tool, but not for the sake of the tool, rather for the sake of the work.
