Recent debates focus on literacy curriculum as if it is separate from teachers' other work, almost at times as if teachers and their contexts are irrelevant to what is the most appropriate literacy pedagogy. Perhaps learning to read and write is not hard work, but teaching is, no matter which theoretical orientation about literacy is adhered to. The multiplicities of other functions that teachers enact leave them positioned in contradictory ways against their imagined ideal literacy classroom. These contradictions sent one researcher into disadvantaged schools to talk with and observe teachers at work. This paper is a first exploration of these investigations in one school. The paper considers, through the stories and classroom discourse of teachers and their students, the question: What kinds of literate cultures do teachers construct in a disadvantaged school? It offers texts from everyday school and classroom life to reconsider what teachers do as they develop a literate culture. It describes the kinds of literate work that children do and discusses the dominant discourses that surround the construction of literate cultures at school. The paper provides examples of the ways in which these teachers make spaces for other kinds of literate cultures and the ways in which classrooms are sites for multiple and at times contradictory literacies which compete for time and priority. (Contains 19 references.) (NKA)