ABSTRACT
Imagine a young man-call him Isaac-sitting in a fast food restaurant talking into an audio recorder. He’s a participant in a study that’s trying to understand why some working-class young men embrace reading and writing for their own needs outside of school. It’s no great educational secret that young men in general are less likely than young women to read or write for their own purposes (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002) and that the dropout event rate for students living in lowincome families has, at times, been as much as four times greater than the rate of their peers from high-income families (Laird, DeBell, & Chapman, 2006). Still, against these odds and frequently without support from schools, we’ve known young men raised in working-class and working-poor communities who have used reading and writing as a means to make sense of the lives they were constructing.
