“It's Working, Seize It”

In a Kantian sense, improvisation marks a spontaneous call to “be.” This research showed how a focus on improvisation took everyone involved— students, parents, researchers, teachers (both seasoned and new)—off firm pedagogical ground. Improvisation challenged what we thought we knew about what best serves students in the development of effective, critical literacy engagements. This highlights the difficulty of a departure from what are constructed as safe and trusted/tested literacy engagements. The “hardcopy” literacies (Corbett & Vibert, 2010), which are understood in tandem with visual aspects of reading and writing such as decontextualized decoding skills, standard spelling, and neat handwriting, continue to set the measure by which all other curricula and literacies are judged and compared.