ABSTRACT
Although my students and I negotiated a critical literacy curriculum, which is described in detail in Chapter 2, we were not free from curricular mandates and the threat of standardized testing. Our school board dictated specific programs to follow (Fig. 1.1). As the classroom teacher, I made sure that I understood what was expected of me through the mandated curriculum in order to more readily map the work we were doing, our lived curriculum, against what was expected of us. Doing this made it much easier for me to articulate to parents, colleagues, and administrators the ways in which our negotiated curriculum surpassed the required curriculum (Fig. 1.2). I did this as a way of creating as much space as I could to engage in the literacy work that I felt would offer my students more opportunities for participating in the world by contributing to social change and that would give them access to more powerful literacies—that is, literacies that could make a difference in their 16lives, allowing them to participate differently in the world, for example, as young people, females, or underrepresented minorities.
