"If your horse is dead, dismount," is Dakota tribal wisdom that reminds us to do the most obvious thing. In this paper, we describe how middle school students in summer school finally challenged us to 'dismount' from our traditional remedial reading instruction. In our new approach, middle schoolers chose topics for study and shared what they were learning. Ongoing interviews, along with tutor reflections and researcher observations, showed the criticality of students' identities in their topic studies. Pursuing questions that were connected to their identities resulted in self-regulatory behaviors, including goal-setting and persistence. Additionally, students labeled as struggling readers demonstrated a broad range of literate behaviors, including reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and composing. This paper adds to the research that challenges a model of remedial instruction where students are positioned as deficient and instead reframes literacy instruction as a tool for helping students act agentically.