In schools, literacy is often positioned as a fixed set of reading and writing skills. This can limit what counts as an academically acceptable literacy practice despite the complex and nuanced ways people communicate in their personal and social contexts. With this tension around conceptions of literacy in mind, I wondered how teachers thought…

This dissertation is motivated by the limits of current conceptualizations of college transition-- the metaphorical bridges, pathways, and tracks to college that represent a linear trajectory upheld by normative educational progress narratives often oriented toward Eurocentric, English-dominant, text-based standards for academic writing and…

Many Career and technical education (CTE) teachers concern themselves with the practical application of skills in their course content. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have increased the emphasis on disciplinary literacy in courses making every teacher a literacy teacher requiring every teacher to teach students to be literate in their content…

The push to teach coding in schools continues to gain momentum. Coding helps students develop skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as improve overall academic performance. However, students with disabilities often face challenges in areas such as problem-solving, mathematics, and multistep reasoning when learning…

We are currently experiencing unprecedented waves of forced migration (UNHCR, 2022a), leading to an increase in anti-refugee rhetorics which in turn fuel policies that have life or death consequences for refugees (Gotlib, 2017). In this context, refugee voices are urgently needed in scholarly, public, and political realms, yet these perspectives…

This dissertation examines individual, constricted agency in a multilingual environment within the context of a language discussion group and the form of social capital possessed by their Mexican Indigenous diasporic community living on the California Central Coast. The research is based on participant-observation ethnographic work with a language…

Schools in the United States are witnessing a rich ethnic and linguistic diversity in their student corpus. Languages spoken by these children vary from state to state; however, Spanish is the second language most spoken after English (Office of English Language Acquisition, 2015). As a nation, there is a tremendous potential for these students to…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how English as Second Language (ESL) instructors perceived and implemented new literacies in their pedagogical contexts. The research was viewed through the Communicative Language Teaching and the New Literacies Studies theoretical lenses. A basic interpretive qualitative case study was…

The high school English classroom is a complex space of literacy practices and communicative interaction. Teachers and students engage in literature study in ways that are dialogic and multifaceted. The navigation of both print and digital texts along with the constructive operations surrounding those texts including the textual operations…

Students are now involved in a vastly different textual landscape than many English scholars, one that relies on the "reading" and interpretation of multiple channels of simultaneous information. As a response to these new kinds of literate practices, my dissertation adds to the growing body of research on multimodal literacies, narratology in new…

A growing number of researchers claim that diverse students with potentially diverse literacies are unable to take up the necessary literate practices to be successful in the university and upon leaving they are unable to master these literate practices, specifically the need to address critical thinking, problem-solving, and writing and to…

Viewed through a sociocultural lens, this work examines two fourth grade teachers and their newly acquired teaching practices in balanced literacy. With a strong Vygotskian influence and sociocultural perspective, I look at how these practices promote teacher growth and influence student achievement. I argue that method does matter. Therefore,…

This study investigates an elective English class, in which students in grades 10-12 collectively read and collaboratively wrote fantasy fiction in four groups. The purpose of the class was to have students consider the choices fantasy and science fictions writers, directors, and video game designers make when creating a fictional world. The…