Literacy as Social Practice

I approach literacy as a cultural-historical practice. Literacy is mediated by tools, relationships, institutions, and the ideologies sedimented within 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. Normative constructions of literacy are rooted in colonial and ableist logics. They have long 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.

The projects in this line of inquiry take up that work from three directions. My dissertation excavates the historical and cultural schemas through which teachers come to understand literacy learning for students with disabilities. It traces how critical reflection can unsettle the colonial logics embedded in teacher identity and praxis. My practitioner scholarship translates these commitments into pedagogy. It makes critical literacy concrete for educators as a culturally sustaining practice, one that helps students critique deficit narratives and author their identities. My current study extends the inquiry into the present moment by examining how teachers design literacy instruction for students with disabilities in activity systems newly mediated by artificial intelligence.

How Teachers Engage with AI for Literacy Instruction · Data collection underway, 2025–2026

Artificial intelligence is entering classrooms as a new mediational tool. It is reshaping the activity systems in which teachers design literacy instruction. 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? And how does AI, in turn, mediate those understandings?

The stakes are significant. Cultural schemas about disability and literacy are already sedimented in curricula, assessments, and institutional routines. AI systems trained on normative data threaten to encode and amplify those logics 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 who work with students with disabilities for this qualitative study.

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. Colonial discourses and cultural schemas are sedimented in teacher identity and praxis. They constrain what teachers are able to imagine for their students.

The study drew on critical disability studies, decolonial theory, and cultural-historical activity theory. I partnered with teachers of students with disabilities in a semester-long qualitative study examining the potential of critical reflection to disrupt these normative ideologies. The study traced how engagement with critical historical knowledge shifted teachers' identities. It described the dialogic practices that fostered reflective critique. It also identified the moderators shaping teachers' reflection. Findings suggest that critical reflection unsettles colonial logics embedded in teacher identity and praxis when it is grounded in historical knowledge and sustained through dialogue. That unsettling opens new possibilities for literacy instruction.

This project anchors my line of inquiry. It is the theoretical and historical excavation of how understandings of literacy and disability are produced. It is also the empirical demonstration that they can be remade.

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.