This publication describes a study of one small Bronx high school's attempt to create an intellectual culture that drew on and validated the realities of its diverse students. The study examined examples of teachers, students, and families drawing lessons from each other and using those lessons to improve and enrich the ways in which they approached the world. Researchers examined interchange in the classrooms and school communities, focusing on occasions when students brought their cultural perspectives into the collective discourse or teachers represented their own world views or the knowledge of institutional culture, their sense of school, to students or families. The publication presents three very different stories that focus on three students and their families: a 16-year-old African American boy of Caribbean descent, an 18-year-old Puerto Rican girl, and a 15-year-old Puerto Rican boy. (SM)