Abstract
Recently I asked students in a tutoring course that I teach to write a literacy narrative which, while beginning to tell the story of their own emerging literacy, had to conclude with the ways that their literacy has had or will have public consequences. As they shared each other’s drafts in class, it became clear that all the students had powerful stories to tell regarding their own struggles to become literate: stories of their coping with learning disabilities and personal loss, and stories of classroom failures that constrained their natural desire to play with language. For these students, the consequence of literacy couldn’t have been more obvious, as they recounted the shift from private powerlessness to personal empowerment.