Ethnographic pedagogy builds a bridge between nontraditional students' home community with the values of the academic community, but the point of "bridging" the two communities seems to be for the student to come over to "our side." This paper proposes an ethnographic pedagogical approach that is reciprocal, bridging both directions, becoming a call for teachers, not just the students, to learn about and change the position of alternative discourses in the institution. The paper discusses what is meant by alternative discourses. It then turns the notion of alternative discourses back into teaching and the institution, to consider how alternative discourses should inform the teaching of standardized written English. The paper focuses on a basic writing classroom where students were asked to practice ethnographic research on their own cultural community; more specifically, students were asked to research what the author/educator called at that time a "speech community." It explains that the class at California State University Fresno was made up of 17 students; 13 of these students identified themselves as having Mexican origins while 4 students identified themselves as being of other mixed origin. The paper addresses questions of how classroom learning can translate into better scholarly conditions for students. (NKA)