How can teacher educators continue to ensure that literacy is placed in the forefront of the public domain? This author explores this question by first examining the narrow assumptions about reading and literacy that shaped the NCLB law. The author then argues that studies of literacy incorporating a sociocultural stance provide a different lens through which we can understand reading and demonstrates how she uses such research to educate pre-service teachers. Such a localized, contextualized approach to literacy helps her students to mediate the law and the particular, local realities they find in their classrooms through action research and public forums for sharing their learning.