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…

With the rise in inclusive education practices, it is pivotal to explore the barriers to effective inclusive education to support diverse populations of students in the general education setting. Recent data show that teacher collaboration is a promising practice to support inclusive education, as it has been linked to increased student…

Being a graduate student while becoming a teaching assistant (TA) is fraught with struggles of knowledge and identity. While the field of rhetoric and composition has long theorized the needs of undergraduate students in first year writing (FYW) classes, it has only recently begun to theorize the needs of the TAs who teach a majority of the FYW…

Early Head Start policies describe parents as partners in decision-making and require families and home visitors to co-develop child and family goals. Home visitors face a range of challenges when facilitating decisions about goals and other issues, which requires interactional skills to apply institutional resources and policies to individual…

With the proliferation of standards and accountability systems in education, questions about how they function and intersect with broader patterns of institutional relations await investigation. The existing literature in social studies education is replete with studies that frame teachers' expertise for managing how instruction unfolds in the…

Or is commonly understood to be a conjunction linking two or more constituents. Ending a sentence with "or" is considered non-canonical in written interaction, but ending a turn with "or" occurs regularly in spoken interaction. This dissertation investigates the interactional work of turn-final or as in "Did his oxygen get…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine how interactions between undergraduate students and their learning environments influenced their development toward critical consciousness. Critical consciousness represents a complex way of making meaning of one's self in relation to one's social world that is necessary for meeting the…

Discourse analysis of literature circles can lead educators to understand the different types of interactions taking place as students talk about text. Social and academic interactions exist in both face-to-face and online discussions of reading material. This study examines two different settings of literature circles and compares interactions of…

There is extensive research evidencing the value of developing early oral literacy skills within sociocultural experiences. However there is a lack of research examining first-grade students engaged in dialogic learning using Internet communication technology. The purpose of this study was to analyze the collaborative peer-talk process of…

My work engages links between notions of disability and notions of deservedness; the ways in which they are consequential; and how they are constructed and sustained. For my dissertation research I studied a select group of people at two sites of high visibility and focused practice: I used ethnographic methodology to collect qualitative data…

This work approaches the concept of social media engagement through a lens of participation theory. Following the work of Goffman (1981) and others, this dissertation uses the concepts of the participation framework and the participant role to explore engagement as a function of participation in interaction. The purposes of this dissertation are…

Using a data-driven qualitative approach and drawing from language socialization and communities of practice theories, this dissertation study examines the second language (L2) identity-building strategies of 22 American learners of Russian who engaged in a six-week telecollaborative project with Russian native speakers in two genres of…

Over the course of 12 months, I conducted an ethnographic study in an urban preschool classroom in the northeastern Unites States. Employing a sociocultural perspective of early childhood development, I investigated the various social and academic discourses related to race and ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) presented in a…

The purpose of this study was to examine the equivalence or non-inferiority for comparisons of telephone focus group venue to face-to-face focus group venue, Internet video-based focus group venue to face-to-face focus group venue, and Internet video-based focus group venue to telephone focus group venue. Research questions examined the…

As a result of reforms like the Common Core Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and its framework, science instruction is transitioning from traditional forms of science to reformist curriculum. Classrooms committed to an epistemological approach to science education will have students engaging in a co-construction of…