Current Research:

The primary strand of my work is driven by questions about the intersections of literacy, identity, life experiences, and children’s opportunities for positive, sustained, and productive relationships with schooling. I am interested in two related aspects of identity that impact children’s experiences in classrooms: first, the out-of-school identities and experiences children bring with them to literacy classrooms and, second, the identities that get constructed and performed within classrooms. I have investigated several questions related to these dual aspects of identities: What is the relationship between the gender, race, class and intellectual identities children perform in classrooms and their negotiations of literacy curricula, instruction, and policy enactments they encounter? How do students’ life experiences, particularly the difficult circumstances, intersect with their relationships with school literacies? How can educators learn from children’s experiences with these negotiations to best support those who have been chronically underserved by public schools? To investigate these questions, I have conducted intensive qualitative investigations of classrooms in four state contexts. Across these studies, my findings emphasize the consequences of children’s encounters with school literacy practices for their social and academic positioning and opportunities to achieve success in the ways that officially count in US schools.

Teacher Research for Equity and Opportunity (TREO)

The TREO project was designed to support research collaborations between teachers who are current and former students in CU’s masters program and my university-based research team to explore questions of mutual interest related to equity and opportunity in classrooms and to bring a framework, drawn in part from literary trauma studies (see study below), to those questions. In its first two years, the project has involved six teachers from four different CU partner districts, across a range of grade levels (2 nd, 5 th, and 10 th), in this collaborative work. Through intensive classroom data collection and ongoing regular discussions among members of the research collaborative, we examine, first, how, by whom, and to what effects understandings of students’ lives are documented and interpreted in schools serving students of color and socioeconomically struggling students and families, and, second, how teachers talk about their attempts to support and serve as advocates for non-dominant students in each school context.

Reconsidering the difficult stories in children’s lives and literacies (embedded within the TREO project)

This project, which is both theoretical and empirical, investigates the presence and role of challenging life experiences, including those born of poverty, on children’s literacy practices and efforts to construct and sustain a positive relationship to schooling. I am the first scholar in literacy studies to combine trauma studies—an interdisciplinary field that examines the role and functioning of trauma in human experiences—with critical theories of literacy and poverty studies. In this project, I am using the insights of trauma studies to develop a theoretic framework that conceptualizes classrooms through metaphors offered from trauma studies, such as “testimony and critical witness” and “the speaking wound”. I argue that such conceptual lenses enable educators to first, account for the emotional dimensions of students’ engagements with literacy and, second, address the material and emotional consequences of economic struggle and racism without falling into the trap of the deficit narratives that often circulate about non-dominant students. By emphasizing the need for metaphors that centrally engage the emotional dimensions of life experiences that enter classrooms, my work complicates and seeks to extend the prevailing frameworks that draw primarily on ledger metaphors such as “resource” and “fund” to conceptualize how students draw on out-of-school experiences for their literacy learning.