The purpose of this dissertation is to explore ways in which educators can provide space for critical literacy and transactional responses with literature in early childhood classrooms. This approach to early literacy involves bringing the following three theories into practice when teaching young children: Transactional Theory of Reader Response,…

The Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic posed challenges for laboratory-based courses. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore students' experiences, as related to engagement, in a HyFlex laboratory course that was designed for on-campus and online students to learn together. The research questions were: 1. What are the students'…

This teacher-research study explored how opportunities for multimodal project learning provided time in the classroom for ongoing conversations and inquiries that promoted student agency and growth, cultivated content and literacy learning, and inherently provided authentic assessment opportunities. This study documented the multimodal curriculum…

This study investigates the instructional practices of a chemistry professor during an immersion summer program, with a focus on employing multimodal discourse within a studio-based learning environment. For this study, multimodal discourse includes natural language, gestures, mathematical expressions, symbolic visual representations, and manual…

This is an exploratory study of how pedagogy in the form of math stories, shapes young learners' perceptions, motivations, and sense-making of math concepts. The research is presented in an exploratory documentary, with audio-video data collected through the iPhone. The pilot test of story-driven math learning solutions was conducted by two…

This qualitative study analyzed the meaning-making practices of urban adolescents participating in a college preparatory program featuring philosophical inquiry into cosmopolitanism and the creation of multimodal texts. In contrast to studies of composing that focus on individual outcomes, this dissertation traced group meaning making. The study…

This descriptive study investigates what happens when an English Language Arts teacher implements multimodal instruction in his senior-level World Literature course. The study is grounded in theories of transmediation and New Literacy Studies and examines the following research questions: (1) What does multimodal instruction enable students to do…