This paper considers how Australian young people living in relative poverty, per se, are portrayed in media reports and how a specific group of socioeconomically disadvantaged young people are constituted in teachers' classroom talk. The paper begins with the examination of several newspaper reports, part of an archive of articles concerned with young people, disadvantaged schools, and literacy. It then discusses teachers' discursive practices in literacy lessons and offers an analytic framework for investigating teacher talk from a Foucauldian perspective, with power as productive and discourse as constitutive. The discussion in the paper stems from 18 months observation in 4 classrooms during literacy lessons in 1 disadvantaged school and explores normative discursive practices where teachers exercise power in managing the class to be made literate. The focus is on the impact of macro discourses upon what teachers say and do and how they constitute "the student" in the local, micro everyday institutional practices of schooling. (Contains 4 figures, a table, and 26 references.) (NKA)