This study investigated how one exemplary teacher and her 10 students with learning disabilities and two students with the dual label of learning disabilities-emotional impairment socially constructed and reconstructed the literacy event of Sharing Chair. Following a free writing period in their personal journal, students were afforded opportunities to share their writing with a student audience and receive feedback in the form of comments and questions from a peer/teacher audience. Sharing Chair was selected because it is believed to foster the development of conversation as a discourse form, serve as a bridge between students' experiences beyond school and the cultural conventions of the literacy community, and afford a number of literate behaviors not typically found in special education classrooms. In Sharing Chair the roles of author and audience member, with their unique rights, duties, and responsibilities, allow participants to be differentially positioned in the discourse. These various discursive positionings, in turn, require students to engage in different literate behaviors. Conversational strategies such as telling stories, actively listening, questioning, and building intertextual links with others were allowed and privileged in this discourse space. This study contributes to emerging research suggesting that becoming literate is one's developing facility with a number of school-based discourses.
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