To analyze some of the processes through which student voices and lived experiences can be either excluded or included, a study focused on elements of the classroom environment already addressed in previous analyses, examining "texts and talk" in two middle school English classrooms. The study analyzed how the classroom environments that the teachers constructed--through literature choices, classroom pedagogy, interactions with students, and responses to linguistic and cultural diversity--work in ways that either affirm or exclude the voices and lives of nonmainstream students. The research site was Arnhem, a small upstate New York city, struggling with problems typical of urban communities in the deindustrializing Northeast. Younger Hispanic families moving into the area where older citizens of Polish and Italian descent already lived occasioned a prolonged debate over the role of the schools. A New York State Education Department team investigated charges of racism in the public schools. Administrators mounted an initiative to encourage English teachers to incorporate more multicultural literature selections in class. Transcripts from classroom interactions show general patterns of student-teacher interactions, assumptions about textual authority, and treatment of language difference. Findings suggest that taken-for-granted assumptions about language learning that have undergirded language arts teaching are being called into question; whole language or process approaches to writing and reader-response approaches to literature offer promising alternatives to traditional teaching methods and can provide opportunities for students to bring their own perspectives to their reading and writing. (Contains 60 references.) (NKA)