I am an Assistant Professor of Literacy at the State University of New York at Cortland. Prior to working in higher education, I was a seventh-grade English Language Arts teacher in the Bronx, New York.

 

My research focuses on how youths and adults represent their identities, communities, and civic lives through processes of play and co-authorship. Oriented by participatory and ethnographic methods, I engage in long-term partnerships with schools and organizations to understand their learning ecologies, reflexively analyze their pedagogical practices, and co-design justice-oriented programming. My recent scholarship examines how gamers collaboratively build worlds and compose narratives across digital role-playing communities and online video game platforms.

 

My teaching is grounded in constructivist, inquiry-based approaches to K-12 education. As a former English Language Arts teacher, my work with undergraduate and graduate students emphasizes critical explorations of multimodal literacies across the content areas. With a particular interest in play and co-authorship, my instruction centers interactive activities that engage learners in the collaborative design, critique, and implementation of dynamic pedagogies.