Pre‐service teachers collaborated with 6th grade students to audit a College of Education building looking for possibilities to “go green.” The student/teacher teams developed an e‐book collection of project descriptions, completed budgets, estimated timelines, and sustainability requirements for the university to consider. The e‐books also included short films in which the students promoted their ideas for green awareness. In this project, flipping instructional spaces and real‐izing the curriculum created new possibilities for student‐led inquiry. In other words, literacy in the service of communicating meaningful messages, rather than literacy for literacy's sake, created a current of intent in which the students learned genres to achieve their green goals and the teachers learned how to develop authentic tasks and texts to develop students' expertise.