University of Wisconsin-Madison

Faculty Member, Curriculum and Instruction

Associate Professor

School of Education

About

The purpose of my research, teaching, and service at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is to promote theories and practices of literacy education that challenge school standards and advance the field of multiliteracies.  In our multilingual, multicultural, and socioeconomically stratified times, there is a strong need to reconceptualize literacy education in light of new technologies, interactive and visual texts, diverse student bodies, and contemporary contexts for literacy learning. 

The inspiration for my scholarship comes from teachers in the field, including the daily pressures under which they work and the political realities of 21st Century schooling.  Much of my research requires collaborative work with educators, and fortunately, I have long-standing and strong relationships with teachers in the field.  I have been a teacher and reading specialist for over 13 years myself, and as such, I have not really left that sphere in terms of my friendships and the knowledge I have of various colleagues’ innovative work in literacy education. Additionally, I administer the certification programs that lead to the Wisconsin State Reading Teacher and Reading Specialist licenses.

My research follows two interrelated lines of study, both of which require ongoing collaboration with classroom teachers, literacy specialists, and principals:

1. First, I study the limits of contemporary literacy pedagogy using poststructural analyses of power, knowledge, and discourse.

2. Second, I work to push the limits of contemporary literacy pedagogy using social semiotics and sociocultural theories to analyze the relationships among print literacy, visual literacies, and multimodal literacies in the classroom.

Both strands of my scholarship are grounded in literacy research and the practice of teachers. For the first strand, framing the limits, I critically examine reading research and current reform efforts to show how contemporary literacy instruction establishes particular rules about reading, writing, and text in the classroom, often with effects that run contrary to sociocultural and new literacies.  For the second strand, pushing the boundaries, I work with teachers collaboratively to revise methods of literacy instruction through innovative design based research around graphics-rich, highly interactive, and multimodal texts.  Taken together, my research aims to design literacy pedagogy that is more in line with today’s students, texts, and contexts.