Current Projects

Global Climate Change Education – Ripple Effects International

I am involved with several international climate change and sustainability education projects focused on helping students and teachers from around the world to develop a greater understanding of the local and global impacts of climate change on culture and their lives. I’m particularly interested in exploring how we can use narrative, art, digital media, play, and other approaches to engage students with these issues across disciplines and as well as in their communities. I think we can find new ways to connect narrative/identity/history/memory into explorations of sustainability and climate change, particularly drawing on rhetorics of place. The newest collaboration I’m involved in is Ripple Effects International, a collaborative, cross-cultural initiative with the goals of helping people learn more the global and local effects of climate change, develop empathy for others, and appreciate and advocate on behalf of nature. In a Ripple Effects project, young people take photos of water in their world – of any kind – write reflections about the images and what they mean to them, and then those images and reflections are published or circulated some way in the local community. Then, through Ripple Effects International, there is also the opportunity to see and connect to similar images and writing by young people around the world. We also collect and provide access to resources for teachers and community members to support creating their own Ripple Effects projects, as well as resources for environmental and literacy education. Other climate change education projects I have been involved in include working with middle-school students from South Africa, the Philippines, Austria, Australia and the US toward exploring climate change locally and then talking about it globally through digital and other media.

Literacies in Times of Disruption

I have an ongoing interest in how the disruptions of our times, such as the pandemic or climate change or political upheavals, affect students’ experiences and relationships with writing, place, technology, teachers, time, and school itself. My most recent book, Literacies in Times of Disruption: Living and Learning During a Pandemic (Routledge Press) shows the impact on students’ of affective and embodied experiences of this disruption and uncertainty, and the memories and narratives constructed from those experiences. This book explores how students’ responses to these extraordinary times shaped their identities as learners and writers, as well as their perceptions of education. The book traces the voices of a diverse group of university students, from first-year to doctoral students, over the first two years of the pandemic. Students discuss the effects of having their homes forced to serve as classrooms, work, and living spaces, as they also navigated much of school and life through their digital screens. The affective and embodied experiences of this disruption and uncertainty, and the memories and narratives constructed from those experiences, challenged and remade students’ relationships with place, digital media, and school itself. In a time when disruptions, including but not limited to the pandemic, continue to ripple and resonate through education and culture, this book provides important insights for researchers and teachers in literacy and writing studies, education, media studies, and any seeking a better understanding of students and learning in this precarious age.

Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency: Composing Identities

I have ongoing interests in how the perception of agency, not just whether a person is able to read and write but whether that person perceives and feels able to read and write in a given context, is crucial in terms of how people respond to writing situations. My continuing research on these issues has resulted in a book and a number of articles and chapters. Though some may consider agency difficult to define, it is a goal often articulated in research, on course syllabi, and in learning outcomes. It is important to investigate how individuals perceive agency, and what factors they regard as enabling or constraining their actions. At any moment there are many factors shaping agency and literate identities from social forces – history, material conditions, institutions, social roles, semiotics – to internal conditions – motivation, emotion, narrative, and memory. My work has drawn on interviews and observations with students in several countries to explore the intersections of the social and personal in regard to how, but also crucially why, people engage successfully or struggle painfully in literacy practices. If we can identify such patterns and moments we can, as teachers and researchers, rethink our approaches to teaching as well as intervene in the learning of individual students to help facilitate a sense of agency as writers and readers.

Writing Centers, Enclaves, and Creating Spaces of Pedagogical and Political Change within Universities

I believe that rhetoric and composition faculty and programs can play a role in the conceiving of the future of the university that is both disruptive to corporate structures and standardization and more focused on learning and exploration. What’s more I maintain that such a role need not be limited to issues of writing pedagogy, but can address broader concerns of the nature of learning and the structure of the institution. Using the example of Writing Centers, which have grown to more than 1,400 in the U.S. in the last forty years, I am interested in  how such programs, which often maintain significantly different visions of pedagogy as well as different political and institutional presences, can offer the possibilities for creating change in the larger university.  In a recent article in the Writing Center Journal, I draw on Victor Friedman’s (2011) concept of “enclaves” to discuss how Writing Centers can draw on their pedagogical and participatory values and practices to work as agents of institutional change in universities. Both the approaches to teaching writing, as well as efforts to create a culture of writing and participation at the university, can generate a different conversation about literacy and education in university settings increasingly driven by ideologies of standardized assessment and commodification.