Dissertation Research

Transcontextual Writing Development among Urban Adolescent Males

For two years, I worked with a small group of urban adolescent males, investigating the development of their writing practices across school and non-school contexts. Urban adolescent males consistently score poorly on school-based literacy assessments; however, research on their writing practices outside of school (often digitally based) often paint a different picture, one of skilled, articulate and proficient male writers. And though adolescents participate in multiple discourse communities, studies that look at transfer across varied contexts to capture nuances of written literacy practices are quite limited. In focusing on males’ writing practices, I explore the concept of development, a concept that informs every aspect of our educational system from curriculum guides and state and national standards to autonomous, in-the-moment decisions at the classroom level. The popular conception of development in education—that youth learn content and skills in a linear, chronological fashion—contributes to the deficit model of education. It is also not representative of how we actually learn and grow as humans. Development not only progresses, but stalls and regresses–and these last two ways we grow, the participants in my study have demonstrated, are not necessarily negative, but essential for further growth.

My work has been supported along the way in several venues, one being the Dean’s Grant for Graduate Student Research. My presentation on my early theoretical work is below. I totally geeked out: