Literacy as Social Practice

This line of inquiry takes up the first question in my research: how do teachers come to recognize the histories carried in everyday literacy instruction?

I approach literacy as a cultural-historical practice. Literacy is mediated by tools, relationships, institutions, and the ideas built into them. From this perspective, what counts as reading and writing is a question answered through practice. So is the question of who counts as a reader and writer. These questions get answered in classrooms shaped by histories that often precede and exceed the people in them.

This framing matters urgently for students with disabilities. Schools have long defined literacy narrowly, around one way of speaking, processing, and showing what you know. Those definitions have positioned disabled students as deficient rather than as meaning-makers participating in cultural practice. When literacy is understood as social practice, the problem of persistently low literacy outcomes is relocated. The problem does not live within students. It lives within the activity systems, discourses, and schemas that organize their instruction. And those systems can be reorganized.

None of this argues against explicit, systematic reading instruction, which has strong evidence behind it. I study how reading research is turned into tools, routines, and decisions about children, and what teachers do with them.

The projects in this line of inquiry take up that work from four directions. My dissertation traces the historical and cultural schemas through which teachers come to understand literacy learning for students with disabilities. My practitioner scholarship translates these commitments into pedagogy. My current study examines how teachers design literacy instruction with artificial intelligence. My next study will follow how a reading score becomes an account of a child.

Critiquing Coloniality as a Tool for Inclusive Learning: Becoming Aware of Colonial Vestiges in Special Education Practice · University of Kansas, 2025

How do teachers come to understand literacy learning for students with disabilities? And can those understandings change? This study located the answer in history. Teachers inherit discourses and cultural schemas that shape their professional identities and constrain what they are able to imagine for their students.

The study drew on critical disability studies, decolonial theory, and cultural-historical activity theory. I partnered with nine teachers of students with disabilities in a semester-long qualitative study of critical reflection. The study traced how engagement with critical historical knowledge shifted teachers’ identities, described the dialogic practices that fostered reflective critique, and identified what moderated teachers’ reflection.

Teachers came to see their practice as shaped by personal and collective history, and began to locate problems in systems instead of in students. Two committed to deeper changes in what, and whose, knowledge they teach. The study shows that these understandings can begin to be remade, and what that takes: historical knowledge, sustained dialogue, and time.

This project anchors my line of inquiry.

Deconstructing identity: Empowering student diversity through critical literacy for enhanced transitions · Teaching Exceptional Children, 2024

Critical literacy asks students to examine the relationship between language and power. It invites them to critique the narratives written about them and to author more empowering ones. For secondary students with disabilities approaching transition, this is not an abstract exercise. The stories schools tell about who they are shape the futures they are invited to imagine.

This article translates cultural-historical and critical commitments into concrete pedagogy for practitioners. Transition planning has too often operated as a culture-free practice. It has privileged normative values while denying the material, linguistic, and historical contexts that shape learning. Grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy, the article shows educators how critical literacy instruction can anchor transition planning in students' multilingual and multicultural wealth. This work supports identity exploration, critique of societally imposed deficit narratives, and personally meaningful postsecondary goals. The article includes a full example unit plan for using critical literacy with high school students as a practice for exploring transition-related identity.

This piece reflects a core commitment of my scholarship: making complex cultural and historical concepts usable in the daily work of teaching.

How Teachers Engage with AI for Literacy Instruction · In data collection

Artificial intelligence is entering classrooms as a new mediational tool. This study asks what happens when teachers of students with disabilities take up that tool. How do their existing understandings of literacy and disability shape the instruction they design with AI? Do they notice the deficit views built into what the tool produces, and do they revise them?

The stakes are significant. Schemas about disability and literacy are already built into curricula, assessments, and institutional routines. AI systems trained on normative data threaten to encode and amplify them at scale. But design moments are also openings. Teachers reason with these tools. They accept some things, adapt others, and resist others still. Studying that reasoning makes visible the tacit understandings that organize literacy instruction for students with disabilities, and it reveals where those understandings might be transformed. I am partnering with educators across the United States for this qualitative study.