Over the last few decades, scholars have conceptualized academic struggle, including learning disabilities, as socially constructed. When students, especially students of color, are constructed as struggling with school-based literacy, they can experience a variety of negative outcomes including higher dropout rates. In an attempt to unpack how academic struggle was constructed and deconstructed for two fifth-grade readers of color, we conducted a micoanalysis of the interactions between these readers and their teacher in one-on-one reading conferences. We examine how positions of struggle were (de)constructed, and findings suggest that the interactional key of the conferences, which was set by the teacher, seemed to contribute to how the students were positioned as readers within the conferring space.