Current Projects

Literacies in Times of Disruption: Living and Learning During a Pandemic

The wide-ranging disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic altered the experiences of place, technology, time, and school for students. This research project, coming out this year as a book from Routledge Press, 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. Understanding students’ perceptions of these times has implications for imagining innovative and empathetic approaches to literacy and learning going forward. 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.

Global Climate Change Education

I am involved with an international climate change and sustainability education initiative focused on helping students and teachers from around the world to develop a greater understanding of the local and global impacts of climate change. The goal of the project is to work with students to investigate the physical, economic, social, cultural, and political impacts of climate change in their own communities and sharing their experiences insights with students in other countries. One current project involves middle-school students from South Africa, the Philippines, Austria, Australia and the US. We hope that, through exploring climate change locally and then talking about it globally through digital and other media, the students may develop understanding and empathy about these issues that encourages them to think about how best to act to respond to climate change. My role in the project includes helping the students explore both the cultural aspects of climate change and the rhetorical approaches for reading and writing about these issues. One of the things I’m increasingly interested in is how to connect narrative/identity/history/memory into explorations of sustainability and climate change, particularly drawing on rhetorics of place. I’m interested in exploring how we can use narrative, art, digital media, play, and other approaches to engage students with these issues across disciplines and classes as well as in their communities.

Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency: Composing Identities

This book explores how people perceive their abilities and opportunities to read and write successfully when they perform literate identities. The perception of agency, not just whether a person is able to read and write but whether she or he perceives and feels able to read and write in a given context, is crucial in terms of how people respond to writing situations. 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. This book draws 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.