Language Artistry
A Laboring for Meaning
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Welcome!
I am an Assistant Professor of Literacy at the University of Maryland College Park. For the 10 years prior to pursuing my PhD, I was a fourth grade English Language Arts teacher in the Austin Independent School District. As a classroom literacy teacher, I aimed to put learners’ identity-safety at the center of my practice. Through critical, multimodal, and inquiry-based pedagogies––the same practices I engage today as a university instructor and researcher––I teach through a perspective I call Language Artistry, or the relational, multimodal and material meaning-making involved in designing for a more inclusive world.
My research directly engages elementary reading and writing development and instruction in culturally and linguistically diverse schooling communities. I work with both preservice and inservice literacy teachers to conduct community-centered inquiry, analyze systems (cultures) of instruction, and design context-attentive, humanizing pedagogies and practices with children and families. Language Artistry attends to the heart of education; it is responsive, restorative, and transformative. As an artist and writer myself, I draw from the materialties and modalities of everyday classroom experiences to make sense of, and design for, social and instructional change.
Writer’s Notebooks