Essential to a flourishing society in a changing environment, knowledge creation has become pervasive across social sectors. Creative work with knowledge and ideas requires dynamic forms of collaboration in which individuals adapt goals as new advances and problems emerge. To prepare students for creative knowledge work, new classroom designs…

This dissertation is a mixed-methods ethnographic study of students in the introductory class in the Engineering & Computer Science (ECS) department at University of California, Davis (UC Davis). I collected audio-recorded natural speech and questionnaire data from students attending this course during two academic quarters, Fall 2016 and…

This research examines differential participation in three specific classroom literacy activities over an academic school and their relationship to progress on school-based measures of literacy progress in one urban kindergarten linguistically diverse classroom. Exploring the experiences of three kindergarten beginning English language learners…

This qualitative case study reports on a three-year writing enrichment program among second, third, and fourth graders at a public urban elementary school in a medium-sized midwestern city. Designed as teacher research, the inquiry is a phenomenological examination of the experience of the workshop for its participants, including more than one…

Science classrooms in the United States have become more diverse with respect to the variety of languages spoken by students. This qualitative study used ethnographic methods to investigate the discourse and practices of two ninth grade science classrooms. Approximately 44% of students included in the study were designated as English learners. The…