My research investigates the underlying cultural, semiotic, economic, and historical assumptions that shape research and practice in education across a wide range of textual modes. The goal of this research is to refine and improve current practice in language and literacy curriculum and teaching.
I am currently working on two research projects. The first focuses on uses of computer-mediated communication and service-learning projects to advance transcultural exchange between pre-service secondary teachers in the US and students in international universities in Morocco and Hong Kong. I also take students from the secondary education program on a service-learning trip to a high school on the Navajo Nation each winter. A second more theoretically oriented project is to develop and test an approach to the semiotic analysis of multimodal texts that relies principally on the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, with reference to Saussurean theories at fully symbolic levels.
I am also co-editor (with Sarah McCarthey and Paul Prior) of Research in the Teaching of English (2008-2013) and was lead editor for a project commemorating 100 years of research by NCTE (Vol. 45, No. 2).
Recently completed projects have focused on the history of poetry education in the US and its implications for teaching poetry performatively in middle and lower-level high school classrooms, and a study of how social theory frames current qualitative educational research. I have also completed a series of case studies of students with a long history of struggle in school that questions three theories of school failure, and another study focusing on computer technology and struggling adolescent readers. I have examined the individualism of reading and writing workshop approaches, the historical and cultural roots of librarianship and their impact on elementary students of different genders, social classes, and cultural backgrounds, the political and instructional implications of the Whole Language movement, and the cultural and theoretical assumptions underlying phonemic awareness research and its citation within state and federal reading policies.