Currently, I study the ways that we can use digital pedagogies to engage pre-service and in-service teachers to most effectively help them to teach literacy in their current and future classroom contexts. Within this area, I am interested in socially distributed knowledge sharing that takes place online, distributed cognition, and video-mediated (e.g., YouTube) discussion and dialogue. I have won two awards related to distance learning. Most recently, I was awarded the prestigious 2013 USDLA Best Practices Platinum Award for Excellence in Distance Learning Teaching [platinum is the highest level honored in this category]. In 2010 I was awarded the President’s Award for Excellence in Distance Education Teaching at UT Arlington. My active research agenda also includes projects that focus on my primary research interest of students who face challenges in literacy learning. I am interested in the concept of social-collaborative literacy learning models (Rogoff, 1991; Gregory, 2001) and studying literacy sponsors, social supports, and networks that take place in families and communities (Brandt, 2001) as well as teacher professional development programs that support teachers as they develop knowledge to help students whoh face challenges in reading in in-school and out-of-school learning contexts. I primarily draw on narrative research and naturalistic inquiry traditions within qualitiative research. I am also interested in methods of discourse analysis. Related to this line of inquiry of interest in students who face challenges in reading, I am also examining the historical contexts of literacy learning for students who face challenges in reading, e.g., the work of seminal scholars like Jeanne Chall. In 2009 I was a visiting scholar at Harvard University to study the works of Chall in the Jeanne S. Chall collection at the Gutman Library. The historical and social contexts of struggling readers represent the main focus and line of inquiry.

• 2008 - PhD in Curriculum and Instruction: Language and Literacy Studies, University of Texas at Austin
• 2004 - MEd in Reading Education, Texas State University, San Marcos
• 1996 - BA in Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara