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

Helping children find their voices and the power of their writing is crucial for their success as writers, particularly in the current repressive educational setting in which many economically poor children attend school. This book chronicles 5th and 6th grade writerschildren of gang members, drug users, poor people, and non-documented and documented immigrantsin a rural school in the southwest US coming into their voices, cultivating those voices, and using those voices in variety of venues, beginning with the classroom community and spreading outward. Such children are showing up in schools and in research more and more. In their writing, they make sense of who they are as writers and human beings and ultimately learn that their voices carry presence and power.

Richard J. Meyer is Professor in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies at the College of Education, University of New Mexico.