Secondary literacy instruction often happens to adolescents rather than with them. To disrupt this trend, we collaborated with twelfth-grade "literacy mentors" to reimagine literacy teaching and learning with tenth-grade mentees in a public high school classroom. We used positioning theory as an analytic tool to (a) understand how mentors positioned themselves and how we positioned them and (b) examine the literacy practices that enabled and constrained the mentor position. We found that our positioning of mentors as collaborators was taken up in different, sometimesunexpected ways as a result of the multiple positions available to them as well as institutionallevel factors that shaped what literacy practices were and were not negotiable. We argue that future collaborations with youth must account for the rights and duties of all members of a classroom community, including how those rights and duties intersect, merge, or come into conflict within and across practices.

The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt “struggling reader” and “struggling writer” labels.