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This essay tells the story of a collaboration between an English education professor in a large urban university and a high school English teacher working in a school whose population consists almost entirely of new immigrants. The English education professor serves as a visiting teaching artist, introducing the students to studies of works of art, and collaborates with their teacher on developing the students' responses to these works and collecting the students' own poetry and collages into an anthology. The experience of discussing works of art and writing poetry had a significant impact on the students' academic performance in other areas, especially in regard to their sense of efficacy and their self-images as students. Most striking was the fact that there were no extrinsic incentives for participation in creating the anthology. Rather than working for grades, promotion, or credit toward graduation, the students were intrinsically motivated to participate in writing these poems, spending considerable amounts of time on many rounds of revisions because the work was valuable to them personally. The students' poems are breathtakingly beautiful and honest in their telling of the stories of their homes prior to coming to the United States and their adjustment to their new lives as Americans and New Yorkers.

For many teachers of middle school and high school, the greatest challenge they face in trying to help struggling readers improve their skills can be students' self-perception. When young people do not see themselves as members of the "literacy club," it is not just a simple matter of persuading them that becoming a fluent reader is worth the effort. Some students take a deliberate and public stance distancing themselves from the culture and all of the behaviors associated with school, from carrying books to doing homework to participating in class discussions. Convincing such students that they can do well in school without losing their identities requires patience and understanding, and an ability to build relationships in which students feel understood and cared for. In this article, the author presents an account of what it can look like when a teacher has the skill and the passion to be able to establish such an atmosphere. This article describes an ethnographic study of a ninth-grade literacy classroom in Urban High School, a vocational or Career and Technical Education (CTE) school located in the South Bronx in New York City. While the school's Automotive and Building Trades departments are successful by many standards, providing impressive professional internships in the automotive and building trades for many seniors who do well in both their shop and their academic classes, a significant number of students fail the English Language Arts Regents Exam and fail to meet graduation requirements. For most students at Urban, learning the trades that are taught there holds the potential for significant socioeconomic advancement; failure to pass academic literacy benchmarks can hold them back from advancing in or even from entering shop classes. Ironically, students who might come to reading and writing "through the channel" of a hands-on skill are held back from the opportunities to do so if they do not first master their academic class work.

In this article, the author argues that if we want teachers to help students develop voice and fluency as writers, we need to provide opportunities for teachers to engage in the same kind of work. In a course called "Writing, Reading and Teaching Poetry" that is part of the Master's Degree program in English Education at Lehman College/CUNY, teachers learn strategies for teaching and responding to writing in middle and high school. Accounts of teachers using these strategies in their own classrooms are included. The article also discusses the role of creative writing in helping teachers develop voice and identity. (Contains 1 footnote.)