- Department:
- School of Education, Urban Teacher Education
- Campus:
- IUPUI
More About me
As such, my research agenda insistently hones in on students’ community cultural wealth and repertoires of practice as a way to center what classroom discussions and related activities in English classrooms must sustain, develop, and expand as teachers work to reimagine teaching for equity and social justice. My work adds to and broadens our understanding of how literacy education can be leveraged to disrupt educational injustices experienced by youth of color in urban schools by attending to pedagogical practices, discourse and interactions, and capturing student experiences and responses to their day to day educational experiences.
In schools, curricula that integrates media and technology to leverage youth’s existing digital literacy practices allow students to express their identities (Curwood & Gibbons, 2010), provide opportunities for resisting exclusionary discourses and other injustices (Price-Dennis, 2016; Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2018), and create spaces for deconstructing dominant negative media narratives of urban youth (Duncan-Andrade, 2007). My goal is to expand on this line of research by focusing on how the use and production of digital media by youth in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms can support Latinx and other non-white language learners to share and explore their own experiences with social inequality and seek to address this injustice. In creating opportunities for youth who are labeled language learners (but in fact are multilingual) to bring their existing practices of media use and online communication to the classroom, the goal is to promote equitable and personalized learning as they address issues of social justice. The research questions that guide this project are the following. What critical learning related to social justice is afforded through curricular units that include media and technology? How do youth in ESL classes enact critical literacy practices in digital spaces?