Working with a community-based organization, we engaged middle school youth in mapping the realities of and dreams for their neighborhoods. We document the process we used to guide youth reflection on themselves as learners and, more specifically, detail our discoveries about their schools as learning places. Using critical literacy as a frame, we assert that youth insights about the physical, relational, and agentive environments of school reveal that they were able to read themselves as products of their community “text” in ways supported by scholarly understandings of educational inequity. This advanced and legitimized youth representation in our university-school-community partnership effort.

Mode of access: Internet.