In this volume, university researchers and urban school teacher-researchers co-author chapters on the teachers' year-long inquiries on a range of literacy topics that they conducted as part of a collaborative school-university action research project. Central to this project were the teacher-researchers' attempts to transform their teaching practice to meet the needs of pupils from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgounds, and their finding that their inquiry efforts resulted in developing more collaborative styles of teaching. Because the everyday interactions between teachers and pupils are realized by social talk in the classroom, the university- and teacher-researchers analyzed classroom discourse to study and document the teachers' efforts to make change in the locus of power in literacy teaching and learning. The chapters include many classroom discourse examples to illustrate the critical points or incidents of these teachers' inquiries. They show the successes and the struggles involved in shedding teacher-controlled patterns of talk. This study explores the process of urban teachers' journeys to create dialogically organized literacy instruction in particular literacy routines - called, in this book, "curriculum genres". The book is organized in terms of these curriculum genres, such as writing curriculum genres, reading-aloud curriculum genres, drama curriculum genres, and so forth. Teacher inquiries were conducted in various primary and senior years, with pupil ages ranging from 5 to 14. Three occured in bilingual classrooms and one in a special education classroom. The first and last chapters, written by the editors, provide the background, theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the project.