Official Portraits and Unofficial Counterportraits of At Risk Students: Writing Spaces in Hard Times

This book chronicles 5th and 6th grade writers in a poor, culturally diverse, rural school in the southwest US coming into their voices, cultivating those voices, and using those voices in a variety of venues, beginning with the classroom community and spreading outward. The big ideas of official and unofficial portraits are presented, followed by data and facets of the theoretical construct of counterportraits in each chapter, as a response to official portraits.