As video games become a ubiquitous part of today's culture internationally, as educators and parents we need to turn our attention to how video games are being understood and used in informal and formal settings. Serious games have developed as a genre of video games marketed for educating youth about a range of world issues. At face value this…

In this dissertation I investigated how teachers interpreted intercultural differences and tensions embodied in fictional short stories and films. Participants in the study were 14 English teachers from China, South Korea, and the United States. My key research questions were: How are cultural differences understood and articulated by teachers…

The following study explored the structures and themes found in a few episodes of a popular TV sitcom ("Friends"). Drawing on James Gee's ideas about critical discourse analysis as the main analytical lens for this study, this study discussed the language found in a sitcom and analyzed the complexity of structures and vocabulary in the…

Media literacy education is an emerging field in the US. At the same time, accountability in public schools is soaring. Critical media literacy, with its liberatory pursuits, is very much at odds with repetition and recall. Yet media culture is persuasive and pervasive, and critical media literacy's concepts are in line with critical pedagogy. So…