Research

Current Project

All current research is on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My focus is on my students.

Recent Work

St. Louis Literacy Archive and Database (currently on hold due to pandemic)

UMSL’s strategic plan (2018 – 2023) embraces its role in educating St. Louis; this project supports that mission. It aims to compile and curate an interactive digital archive of local literacy artifacts that represent St. Louis’ historical and contemporary literacies (see Appendix A) and their shaping influence on St. Louis identity(ies). Ultimately, the goal is to design and deliver an interactive website and digital archive that represents multiple literacies across St. Louis and serves as a living database, functioning as a way to explore the city’s stories, people, and their connections to the city.

Mission Statements and Writing Center Identity

Writing centers are incessantly aware of how they are perceived by students, faculty, and other institutional voices. I am currently researching how writing centers frame their own identities through self-composed mission statements, which are then projected out to the larger learning community. This informal research examines how writing centers talk about their positioning within an educational setting, and if that talk matches how they are being understood by their clients, faculty, and others within their institutions.

Exploring the Interactions Between Writing Pedagogy and Technological Knowledge in Online Writing Consultation

Doctoral Dissertation, 2016

Abstract: Most professional conversation, training, and research for online writing consultation focuses on two aspects of online writing consultation—technological knowledge, often fixated on learning to use a technology to teach, and pedagogical knowledge, knowledge about writing and tutoring practices, which are often based in traditional face-to-face tutoring processes. This study looks at how writing tutors come to understand the interactions between pedagogy and technology by considering their talk both in reflection of their development as writing tutors in addition to their online consultation sessions. Following a small staff of seven writing tutors from their training onto their tutoring session and in their reflection of their practices, this study utilized both multimodal discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis to learn more about how they shaped their practices when working online. By analyzing tutors’ ways of talking about their practices, how writing consultants come to recognize and understand their pedagogical approaches through the lens of a tutoring technology, and how they interact with and utilize a technology meaningfully based on their pedagogical methods, assists in developing more comprehensive training for online writing consultants.

Critical Discourse Analysis in Education: A Review of the Literature, 2004 to 2012

Review of Educational Research, 2016

Abstract: This article reviews critical discourse analysis scholarship in education research from 2004 to 2012. Our methodology was carried out in three stages. First, we searched educational databases. Second, we completed an analytic review template for each article and encoded these data into a digital spreadsheet to assess macro-trends in the field. Third, we developed schemata to interpret the complexity of research design. Our examination of 257 articles reveals trends in research questions, the theories researchers find useful, and the kinds of interactions that capture their attention. We explore areas in the field especially ripe for debate and critique: reflexivity, deconstructive–reconstructive stance toward inquiry, and social action. We compare the findings with an earlier review published in 2005, reflecting on three decades of critical discourse analysis in education research.