Reading writing reciprocity: Inquiry in the classroom Throughout our respective experiences as middle school teachers and teacher educators, we have worked with diverse populations of students with varying beliefs about education-students for whom achievement and success are perceived as foregone conclusions, students for whom school is viewed as a pathway to a better life, and students for whom school is believed to be one more trial to be endured. These latter young adolescents from an urban

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... chool, and their experiences with literacy specifically, are the focus of this article. Educators of young adolescents understand that students in that age group have unique cognitive, social, emotional, and physical needs. Middle school students often disengage from school because the dissonance between their needs and the realities of the context for learning is so extreme (Perlstein, 2003) . They crave clear and specific instructions from teachers, knowledge that their teachers care deeply about them as individuals, and the belief that they can do what is asked of them (Daniels, 2010) . Instead, what they often experience is a context where too many students compete for the limited time, resources, and patience of too few teachers (Cushman & Rogers, 2008) . Purpose This article describes a project that emerged from a shared concern that too many middle school students are not learning to think critically about what they read, write, and experience. Nor do they have the opportunity