An inner-city second grade teacher-researcher and her university-based partner examine how she and her inner-city second graders learned to resist and expand the constraints of their mandated, scripted reading curriculum by exploring their neighborhood and classrooms as communities spaces for literacies learning. Drawing on an interactional ethnographic perspective and paired with sociolinguistic and literary theories, this teacher-researcher's membership in a professional development community both shaped, and was shaped, by her quest to draw upon and honor her students' lived experiences as texts to read, thus broadening what constituted texts, reading and writing and whose knowledge counted. (Contains 1 table and 4 figures.)