Working from the premise that literacy is a social process rather than an autonomous practice, The Way Literacy Lives offers a curricular response to the political, material, social, and ideological constraints placed on literacy education. Shannon Carter argues that fostering in students an awareness of the ways in which an autonomous model deconstructs itself when applied to real-life literacy contexts empowers them to work against this system in ways critical theorists advocate. She builds upon a theoretical framework provided by new literacy studies, activity theory, and critical literacies to construct a new model for basic writing instruction, one that trains writers to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one.