You Need to Realize It in Yourself: Positioning, Improvisation, and Literacy

In this article, the author profiles a university student during her first year in a support classroom for students deemed to be academically underprepared. Focused on the impact of gender in the classroom, the study examines how this young woman crafted an identity through literacy at a Midwestern public university. The author argues that the student's identifying as a good girl emerged as a playfully improvised sense of self in literacy practices, which culminated into self‐efficacy in ways unforeseen. Classroom literacy practices, as a result, mediated this student's transition to the university through a required developmental program, which has implications for how educators respond to classroom identities when they do not match their expectations.