Over the past two decades, I have conducted a number of qualitative studies in school, community, and online contexts in order to understand the interactions and processes involved in teaching and learning. My research builds on sociocultural and situated perspectives to investigate how youth engage with poetry and literature in creative, critical, and digital ways, and it considers the implications for practice and pedagogy. I have highlighted some of my key studies here, and my curriculum vitae offers more information about my grants, partnerships, and publications.
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Spoken Word Poetry
Spoken word poetry involves written text, freestyling, rapping, singing, and playing music, and it can promote intercultural understanding, critical dialogue, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. With support from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, my ongoing research-practice partnership with the Bankstown Poetry Slam in western Sydney explores spoken word poetry as a practice, a process, and a product. The study commenced in 2016, and findings from school-based research with Katelyn Jones have been published in Literacy and in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy with forthcoming articles in English in Education and English in Australia. Another study on Instagram poetry with Kate Kovalik has published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy too.
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Digital Technologies and Teacher Professional Learning
In one project, Sydney colleagues Martin Tomitsch, Kate Thomson, Graham Hendry, and I designed an innovative approach to professional development. Funded by a grant from the Office for Learning and Teaching in 2014, and an extension grant in 2015, we created Ask Charlie, a mobile website that automatically provides academics with personalised recommendations for teaching resources and allows academics to connect with each other. It drew on design-based research methods to understand how digital tools can support academics in their professional development. Findings from this study have been shared in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.
In more recent projects, I have explored how social media tools can be used to shape teacher professional learning. Carly Biddolph and I investigated Twitter as a professional development tool for secondary English teachers, and our findings were published in New Literacies and Teacher Learning and we detailed our methodological approaches in Researching New Literacies: Design, Theory, and Data in Sociocultural Investigation. Yolanda Lu and I also examined how Facebook groups shaped pre-service teachers’ identities in an article published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education.
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Children’s and Young Adult Literature
As part of an online ethnography, I researched how young people participate in online affinity spaces related to young adult literature, such as The Hunger Games trilogy. My focal participants were drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Through talking with fans and participating in fansites from 2011 to 2014, I learned how the culture of online spaces can support reading, writing, and designing practices and promote the development of leadership skills. Through collaborations with Jayne Lammers from the University of Rochester and Alecia Magnifico from the University of New Hampshire, we explored qualitative approaches to studying online fandoms. Findings from this study have been published in the several edited collections as well as Literacy, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Language Arts, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, and Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction.
I have also conducted a number of other studies on contemporary children’s and young adult literature, including a critical analysis of representations of (dis)ability in Children’s Literature in Education. Regan Gauci and I have considered the intersections of Asia literacy, the Australian Curriculum, and young adult texts in articles published in the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy and English in Australia.
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Digital Tools, Social Identities, and Cultural Models in Teacher Professional Learning
This ethnographic case study examined how English teachers’ technology integration can be supported by professional development. Over the 2009 to 2010 school year, I designed and facilitated professional learning communities at two high schools; participants included English teachers, library media specialists, and technology coordinators. Drawing on microethnographic and critical approaches to discourse analysis, I focused on how teachers’ interactions within the learning community revealed their social identities and cultural models. Findings from this study have appeared in the Journal of Literacy Research, Teaching Education, English in Australia, E-Learning and Digital Media, and the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education.
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iPoetry, Digital Literacy, and the Secondary English Curriculum
In this three-year action research project, library media specialist Lora Cowell and I investigated how technology could facilitate high school students’ multimodal composition and critical engagement. As a high school English teacher, I wanted to learn more about how my pedagogy shaped meaningful technology integration in the secondary English curriculum. From 2004 to 2007, we worked to develop, implement, and reiterate a digital poetry project. We gained insight into how audience and mode shape students’ use of digital tools. We also learned how professional development can effectively support technology integration in school. Findings from this project have been published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and the International Journal of Learning and Media as well as the edited book Collaborative Models for Librarian and Teacher Partnerships.
