ABSTRACT
During my contact with the reading and writing practices of rural youth in a community in central Mexico, 1 I have found that the experiences that young people have constructed with writing throughout their lives acquire a distinctive place in the way they position themselves in relation to literacy at school. This positioning surpasses the mere referential function announced through many of the textbook activities that are used in the classrooms: whilst teachers do in fact often ask students to point out what they know about a given subject, based upon their own experience, the students’ own social practices involving literacy provide not only for the construction of knowledge, of the kind the teacher is asking for, but for broader understandings related to the shape and contexts of use in which this knowledge is constructed.
