"I Don't Want to Write for Them": An At-Risk Latino Youth's Out-of-School Literacy Practices

This single-case study demonstrates one bilingual Latino youth's out-of-school literacy practices and how he has learned to disconnect them from his academic work. Qualitative data taken from interviews, the participant's social networking sites, poetry journal, and observations of him in community organizations demonstrate the frequency and purposes of his out-of-school literacy practices of writing poetry, language brokering, reading, technology use, and activism. The findings suggest that the participant has many sophisticated and bilingual literacy practices that were never viewed as funds of knowledge in his subtractive schooling environment, leading to his educational failure.