An ethnographic study examined 2 case study students, "Nick" and "John," as they engaged in an integrated literature-United Sates history class cotaught by an English and a social studies teacher in a high school in New York state. The emergent critical perspectives and pluralistic understandings of Nick and John were examined as they were invited into a problem-posing pedagogy and thereby into the dance of creative and critical thinking. Nick engaged in the "stretching" and moving invited in the class to expand his intellectual horizons and learn from multiple perspectives. John, on the other hand, frequently referred to his fundamentalist religious stance and held fixed opinions, resisting much of the multicultural literature and some of the classroom dialogue. Nick opened himself up to the dialogic dance and grew by leaps and bounds toward productive citizenship, the communal dance of the human race. John, on the other hand, entered on the fringes and seems to have left the same way. It seems that he never had any desire or ability to know the joy of dancing with other partners, to be part of the community of learners, to experience the possibilities of expanded humanness. (Contains 44 references and 3 notes.) (RS)