The current research builds upon the sociocultural orientation to family literacy with the creation of a community-based family literacy experience, "the preschoolers' book club," for a group of white, middle-class preschool children and their families. These families and their shared literacy experiences were framed as a set of nested case studies. Through the theoretical lens of Holland et al.'s (1998) "figured worlds", small-scale case studies of each family informed evolving book club gatherings, allowing for flexibility and responsiveness to families' needs and interests. Families, despite their common demographic background, demonstrated a variety of conceptualizations of and purposes for literacy, displacing the assumption that this population of families practice school-like literacies at home. The book club gatherings grew into a home-school hybrid space wherein families explored various roles and the traditional teacher-student relationship was deconstructed. Implications from this research include: (re)positioning the researcher as a participant-observer, the feasibility of building a evolving group education experience based on existing family literacy practices, and the need for schools to become increasingly aware of and responsive to the diverse and unique literacy learning in which all young children engage at home before entering a formal school setting. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]