Discusses how children move from personal to social narratives in writing workshops to create stories as tools for social action, addressing inequities in their school lives. Considers how social narratives can be used as tools for constructing and analyzing shared social worlds. (SG)

Critical literacy practices in a third-grade classroom involved working with texts that disrupted commonplace assumptions about social norms. As students read and talked about social issues such as racism, ageism, and sexism, they became "border crossers" in their school lunchroom. Without informing their teacher, they worked on a social action…