Technology has transformed our world, however; it has yet to revolutionize our schools. When teachers integrate technology effectively into their classroom practice, they provide students with the ability to access a tremendous amount of information, communicate with others both near and far, and demonstrate their learning in innovative ways. The literature indicates that teachers who utilize more constructivist approaches, that incorporate students’ interest into the classroom, provide time for students to collaborate and construct meaning and demonstrate understanding, are better able to integrate technology in meaningful ways. Many secondary teachers are constrained by the isolation inherent in the schools, which perpetuates their use of traditional, didactic teaching approaches and maintains teachers’ low sense of efficacy with the use of technology. The theory of action that underpins this research is based on the assumption that teachers who are provided with a professional learning experience allowing them to experiment with technology and to develop their pedagogical and technological confidence in the use of the technology will be more likely to integrate technology into their teaching in meaningful ways.

This design development study aimed to provide teachers with a collaborative professional learning experience to support the integration of technology, specifically their use of a learning-management system, Google Classroom, and student mobile devices. Eight secondary teachers participated in the professional learning experience, which included five workshop sessions (two full-day sessions and three after-school two-hour sessions). The workshop series provided teachers with open-ended work time to create curricula in the Google Classroom as well as time to reflect on their students’ experiences in their classrooms. Two kinds of data were collected and analyzed through the courses of this study; process and impact data. The process data provided insight into how the professional learning experience unfolded and the impact data illuminated how the experience influenced the teachers’ classroom practice.

The professional learning experience was designed to impact two dimensions of the teachers’ practice. First, through modeling and structured work time, the teachers were encouraged to develop student-centered instructional practices, routines, norms, and procedures that support technology integration. The second dimension related to teachers’ increased use of technology-enabled instructional strategies, norms, and organization. Overall, the teachers increased their effective use and integration of technology. They also showed more willingness to consider possible ways of incorporating student-centered instructional strategies into their practice, although the influence of the design development study on this aspect of the teachers’ practice was less pronounced. Finally, the data indicated that professional development designed to increase teachers’ effective use of and sense of confidence with technology requires that teachers have time to collaborate with like-minded colleagues, experiment with the technology in the context of their curriculum, and be provided appropriate levels of technical support.

In recent times, recess has become threatened by the press for more academic instruction time and by fears of violent behavior. A dramatic indicator of this trend is seen in the increasing number of schools and school districts which have done away with or significantly reduced recess time (BBC news, 2007; Coughlan, 2007; Jarrett, 2002; Pressler, 2006; Sindelar, 2004). Underlying these actions is a belief that free play time is separate, and might even detract, from the work of school. This dissertation study, examines youth's communicative practices in the common playground game four square, providing evidence that important types of learning occur during recess time play. Furthermore, the findings of this study provide direction for curricular and classroom practice innovation.

Ethnographic in nature, this dissertation draws from over thirty five hours of audio/video recording gathered during lunch recess, collected during the 2007-2008 school year, at a small inner city elementary school playground, in a high needs area, of a large costal United States city. Utilizing methods common to linguistic anthropology, this study employs carefully composed transcripts as the primary data source, supported by extensive field notes and other analytic writings.

The study is situated in three broad areas of inquiry: semiotic and language development, literacy theory and practice, and the study of peer cultures. The findings indicate that playground games are a unique part of physical culture and, furthermore, provide particular semiotic affordances which contribute to youth's language learning. A model for understanding the different semiotic affordances of activities during recess is proposed. In their play youth are shown to use gesture and posture as a way of scaffolding talk and building complex utterances. Specifically, in this study, the playing of four square is shown to provide youth with an opportunity to develop a semiotic awareness, that is, an awareness of how words, bodily expressions and objects can stand for other things and actions. As such this study has implications for a notion of literacy theory that engages with meaning making on a broad level. The study makes the argument for an embodied notion of literacy to be developed that accounts for the unique ways youth use their bodies as expressive mediums. Recess is shown to be much more than simply a time for "blowing off steam". Far from a "cognitive rest" as recess has been hypothesized to function as, important work happens when youth are engaged with each other, in creative and physically interactive ways. It is shown that the information gathered from studying youth engagement with games and each other during recess time can be used to inform classroom practices, and suggestions for curriculum are presented.

This dissertation tells the story of how an experiment in university-based teacher learning blossomed into a rigorous and deeply meaningful learning experience for teachers and a teacher-centered partnership between a university-based institute and a group of justice-oriented K-12 teachers. This ethnographic study followed a group of California Bay Area-based, K-12 justice-oriented teachers as they 1) learned about the racialized histories of housing in the Bay Area as well as restitution work through a university-based summer institute, and 2) as teachers implemented this content in their respective communities—both in and outside of school. As a way to highlight universities' roles in supporting justice-oriented teachers, particularly around the foundational racial justice issue of housing, this dissertation narrates the experiences of these teachers and the university-based staff involved in the university-teacher partnership. Through examining these phenomena, I make the case for supporting justice-oriented teachers' learning, and for learning from teachers in order to inform this support.

Using critical theoretical frameworks that focus on social/racial justice and transformation, this study illuminates significant topics, theoretical framings, and programmatic components that afforded powerful professional learning for teachers around issues of racial and social justice. More specifically, it provides insight into the potency of engaging teachers in what Freire (1970) calls “generative themes,” pertinent to participants’ personal and sociopolitical contexts. This dissertation brings forward the importance of addressing the generative theme of housing within teacher learning spaces, particularly as relevant to teachers’ personal lives, and as an understudied topic within such spaces. Notably, the framing of racial capitalism was resonant for teachers, pointing to the need for a racial capitalism framing in teacher learning spaces and engaging teachers in the explicit study of this theory.

The study 1) revealed teachers as expert pedagogues who benefit from rigorous content over a blueprint for teaching this content, 2) demonstrated the dynamism of teachers' creativity, and 3) showed the activist nature of justice-oriented teachers. Teachers' implementations provided insight into how they work, which furthers the field's understanding of their professional learning needs. As a study that examined the role that universities can play in meeting teachers' learning needs, this dissertation found a partnership approach to be key to such an endeavor, where core components of this work include respecting teachers’ expertise, taking an iterative approach, providing rigorous content and focusing on the experience of teachers rather than their curricular outputs, and involving former teachers as key participants. The study highlights the role that research/policy/interdisciplinary university-based institutes can play in supporting justice-oriented teachers, and the potential of these entities to positively impact and enrich teachers’ work as “transformative intellectuals” (Giroux, 1988). This study contributes to empirical research on teacher learning by offering a glimpse into one model for supporting and sustaining teachers, and, more specifically, highlights the role that universities can play in the work of supporting teachers who teach for racial and social justice.

At a time when widespread education reform is greatly affecting teachers' daily work, this study explores the potential of social-justice focused teacher inquiry to assist educators in improving their teaching practice. The culmination of one year of data collection with a group of K-12 teachers, this study investigated: (1) the effects of a group inquiry process on teachers' understandings of their own practice with regard to issues of equity; (2) the conditions under which the inquiry process translated into shifts in teaching practice; and (3) the ways in which institutional constraints of schooling and accountability affected teachers' efficacy in bringing about education for social justice, and how the inquiry process affected teachers' abilities to navigate these constraints.

This study was informed by the literatures on urban educational inequity, social reproduction theory, teacher inquiry, and multicultural pedagogy. While a significant body of scholarship has examined the outcomes of educators' attempts to enact social justice-based pedagogies, and much research has documented impacts of the teacher inquiry process, this research combined these two arenas while also incorporating a consideration of the daily demands present in the teaching profession. This framework thus integrated the lived realities of current educators' perspectives while simultaneously outlining the ways in which the inquiry process could serve to provide a space for agency and increased teacher self-efficacy.

This project utilized an ethnographic methodology, based on intensive participant observation and the analysis of inquiry group meetings and classroom observation fieldnotes, interview transcripts, teaching artifacts, and focus group and survey data. Findings demonstrated significant tensions between current policy demands and what teachers actually felt able to do within their daily classroom challenges. The study also illustrated current manifestations of teacher resistance and agency as related to equity and student needs. The research presents promising cases of educators negotiating the complex intersection of equity, social justice, test preparation, caring, and rigor. Findings also revealed the ways in which the teachers worked together to share strategies and reflectively navigate constraints through a structured professional learning community. The research demonstrates that inquiry group meetings served as a beneficial space between constraints and what could be undertaken in the midst of accountability struggles.

This work informs policy considerations related to accountability mandates and teacher practice, and contributes to the literature on educational equity and teacher inquiry. Because this study is grounded in the lived realities of educator experiences, it adds to emic understandings of current teacher challenges. Moreover, this study interrupts the ubiquitous conception of teachers as beneficiaries of academy-generated knowledge and instead views them as creators of practice-based knowledge.

Lastly, this research demonstrates significant potential benefits in the implementation of teacher inquiry processes within school-based educator professional development and intellectual learning communities. This project found that with the right type of supports, teacher inquiry can inform reflective understandings of social justice, assist teachers to collaboratively transform their practice, and ultimately result in improved student achievement.

Spatial classroom studies have attended to the context of the classroom. Specific to this inquiry is the ideological understandings pre-service teachers have of classroom space, student identities, and writing instruction. Pre-service teachers generally receive minimal instruction in the teaching of writing and less of this instruction is grounded in teachers' beliefs about writing instruction. This study examines pre-service teachers imagined context of the classroom and the resulting disbeliefs and beliefs of the possibilities of new practice in the area of writing instruction.

Technology and digital media are increasingly present in today’s classrooms, often used as tools for learning, connectivity, or even subversion. This dissertation project examines how everyday cybernetic practices–the blurring of the boundaries between human and machine, and between the physical and non-physical (Haraway, 2006)–are intentionally leveraged in the individual and collective development and enactment of expertise. Specifically, I explore how diverse undergraduate novice teachers, representing a range of majors, ethnicities, nationalities, and language practices, participated in a hybrid (online/in-person) education practicum course aimed at developing critical practices of service learning and engaged scholarship.

This study is grounded in Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 1999) which posits that learning is situated and dependent on social, historical, and cultural contexts that we navigate in our everyday. Following this theory, I examine how learning is mediated by material and psychological tools that are passed down through generations but always have the potential to be changed and transformed (Cole, 1996). Special attention is paid in this study to the way that digital tools, in the age of the cyborg (Haraway 2006; Lupton, 2012), can be transformed across timescales in ways that allow us to trace a person’s history of engagement with material and psychological tools almost instantly.

As a social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), this research project employed ethnographic and social data analytic methods to illuminate cyclical and iterative processes of collaborative inquiry and co-operation (Goodwin, 2017) when students used custom-designed, state-of-the-art digital collaboration tools, across multiple sites (digital and face-to-face) of learning. To this end, data included video recordings of classroom interactions, field notes generated by study participants and myself, digital artifacts, back-end network analytics, student surveys and semi-structured interviews. By employing analytic tools from actor-network theory (Latour, 1996) as well as participation frameworks (Goodwin, 2007), this study aimed to illuminate (a) the discursive and textual features of face-to-face and online collaboration; (b) the tools and contexts that mediate these practices; and (c) the relationship between digital and face-to-face interactions and the development and sharing of expertise.

Findings demonstrate that in tool-dense spaces learners engaged in robust collaborative inquiry that leveraged the connectivity and rhetorical affordances of digital technologies. The first iteration of the designed study, where the online aspect of the course was intentionally integrated into face-to-face interactions in our class, highlights how undergraduate novice teachers make use of their cyborg selves to openly share and develop expertise around teaching and learning. Over the course of this iteration, the following theories of collaboration and learning emerged: (1) Sustained attention to the social organization of learning in the design of a hybrid course resulted in collaboration at the intersection of the digital and in-person interactions that are characterized as meshworks marked by careful relationship building, and the creation, sharing, and remixing of syncretic (Gutiérrez, 2008) digital artifacts/texts across the digital and physical terrains; and (2) Through this collaborative meshwork of enactment of expertise, undergraduates begin to collectively develop models for teaching and learning. Further analysis of the composition and archiving practices that were fostered by the design of this course also illuminate the following: (1) When everyday practices of digital production and curation are privileged in a course, students engaged in archival processes by means of which students curated their own and their classmates’ language, images, responses, likes, and pins (cf. DeKoskink, 2016; Gutierrez, 2008) that then became salient compositional resources; (2) These multimodal, translingual, and “transmodal” (Lizárraga, Hull & Scott, 2015) archives then informed the writing of a variety academic texts; and (3) Syncretic texts that merged everyday and academic knowledge served as resources for the appropriation of socio-critical literacy perspectives.

This research has implications for both the research and design of learning environments that aim to leverage digitally-mediated collaboration and multimodal composition. Methodologically, this study highlights the need for employing a variety of analytical tools from the digital humanities and sociocultural disciplines in order to understand the complex ways that undergraduates connect and collaborate at the intersection of the digital and face-to-face. The findings of this dissertation further highlight the necessity of designing courses at the undergraduate level that recognize the fluidity with which learners navigate virtual and in-person terrains in everyday activity of meaning-making and knowledge production, and nurturing of social relationships. This work also contributes to understandings of how undergraduate novice teachers develop notions of service learning and engaged scholarship in an increasingly digitized and interconnected world.

Designing pedagogy that cultivates the critical consciousness of marginalized youth is an ongoing project for educators committed to social justice. Critical consciousness refers to the ability of marginalized people to critically analyze their social conditions and act to change them (Freire, 1973; Duncan-Andrade & Morell, 2008; Watts et. al., 2011).

Participatory Action Research (PAR) implemented with young people, referred to as yPAR, in after-school or summer institute settings, is one popular approach to developing critical consciousness (Ozer, 2008; Cammarota & Fine, 2010). PAR is a research orientation that blurs boundaries between research, pedagogy, and action (Gaventa and Cornwall, 2006). As opposed to being the objects of academic inquiry, participants are positioned as knowledge producing subjects who learn to conduct research in collaboration with researchers on a topic of their collective choosing (Maguire, 1987; Fals Borda, 1991). Knowledge produced from research then serves as the rationale to determine and take action that makes change in participants' living conditions. Scholarship includes descriptions of PAR projects in a variety of contexts that yield different forms of knowledge and action, including theatrical plays (Dominguez et. al. 2009; Francisco, 2014; Nisker, 2008; Saldana, 2008), collaborative murals (Langhout and Fernandez, 2014), and art exhibits (Clover, 2011).

However, despite this excellent work, little research closely examines the series of literacy practices that are central in generating these knowledge/action products. Literacy practices refer to the consumption, production, and dissemination of texts. As a result, scholarship ignores a significant aspect of research activity - data documentation and analysis, research findings preparation and presentation, etc.- that participants engage in. This dissertation remedies this gap by analyzing literacy practices in a youth PAR (yPAR) afterschool program for 4th and 5th grade Latinx students at an elementary school in an unincorporated area in the California Central Coast.

Drawing on a sociocultural perspective on literacy, I collected and analyzed qualitative data - ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, artifacts generated- from the program to study the social interactions with the different types of texts - genres - that are utilized to facilitate PAR processes of pedagogy and research (Street, 1984; Scribner and Cole, 1981;Lankshear and Knobel, 2006).

I draw on academic literature that conceptualizes genre as a social, cultural, and historical practice (Bakhtin, 1986; Bazerman, 2004; Briggs and Bauman, 1992; Kramsch and Thorne, 2002; Kress, 1993; Swales, 1990). From this perspective, genres are not only defined by characteristics internal to text - structure, content, and style. Rather, genres are in dialectical relationship with contextual conditions. Thus, as genres are influenced by contextual conditions, genres are also influential in actively construing and shaping contexts (Fairclough, 2003; Hanks, 2001).

After chapters introducing relevant PAR literature, the theoretical framework, and research design, findings chapters focus on two stages of the PAR process in the afterschool program: a) Lesson planning b) Literacy events (Heath, 1983). Analyzing program lesson plans, I demonstrate the ways in which the lesson plan genre has been adapted to PAR methodology in this specific context, identifying three primary activity purposes in the content: 1) Composing and Disseminating Information 2) Teaching and Learning Research and 3) Doing Research. Along with being adapted to this specific context, the writing and reading of the lesson plan genre guides activity in the program, organizing social relations among participants, scripting lines for program facilitators, and coordinating the use of texts in activities. For literacy events, I describe and analyze the interactions among participants when program facilitators attempt to implement written lesson plan activities with youth. Focused on several interactions in which the writing or reading of a text is involved, I demonstrate the key role that texts play in shaping PAR processes of pedagogy, research, and knowledge production. In the collaborative writing of scripts for presentations, youth are positioned as knowledge producers, making decisions on content, negotiating meaning, and communicating information. To teach research, program facilitators appropriate familiar literary and artistic genres, repurposing texts to familiarize youth with research concepts and practice. Doing research, participants use two genres - shot lists and poster narratives- to help scaffold the collection and analysis of data for a photovoice project at the problem definition stage of the PAR cycle. Shot lists and poster narratives mediate youth's process of making sense of and changing their worlds.

Across the study, I demonstrate the essential role that texts play in PAR to help empower participant-researchers to become critical knowledge producers capable of making change in their communities. Furthermore, along with the possibilities, literacy events are locations in which the challenges and contradictions of PAR emerge. Although invited to participate in the collective construction of knowledge, youth have to gradually become familiar with practices of participation. Although empowering youth as responsible decision makers in the knowledge production, program facilitators must also decide when to contribute their own expertise and exert authority. Finally, although posited as experts of their lived experiences and conditions, youth must gradually learn ways to communicate that expertise to others.

This project contributes to the small but growing research literature on PAR conducted with youth in afterschool programs and summer institutes (Ozer, 2008). By focusing on literacy practices, this study aims to improve processes of pedagogy and research in PAR with youth, examining important microprocesses that are enacted to induct participants into practices of making change rooted in research.

The ethnographic study presented here documents emergent behaviors that arose when two multimodal composing and production tools - Collabosphere and Tumblr - were used in three different college courses (Introductory Psychology, Education 1B, and College Writing 101). The work addresses how conceptions of writing in the college classroom and across disciplines shift, converge, and vary across courses and between disciplines. I use Engeström’s (1999) model of activity theory to show how the introduction of new tools pushed both students and teachers to think more broadly and creatively about how they compose and comport themselves in academic settings. Specifically, this work reveals instances of expansive transformation as two activity systems – academic writing and digital writing – converged in these classrooms. By documenting new approaches that students and teachers developed when using new tools in an academic setting, I hope to visualize new opportunities for university writing to expand and include new literacy practices.

This study documents how digital tools in the Academy were perceived, repurposed and used in a variety of different ways. I used a combination of interviews with faculty and students, observations, and analysis of semiotic materials to gain a holistic understanding of the dynamic activity systems at play in each setting, and across the university. Specifically, I endeavored to document the types of expectations placed on undergraduate students and faculty to use digital tools in innovative and compelling ways, and how those expectations informed how both approached composing in their courses. Here I strove to understand the new demands on college writers within different disciplinary departments, new kinds of audiences, and new kinds of texts as students collaboratively composed. This study also conceives to help educators and teaching faculty think about what kinds of methods, rubrics and assessment frameworks would help support students using new tools for writing in college classrooms.

One of the central findings of this study is that in order to make room for expansive learning and new systems of writing to emerge, teachers must make explicit the course goals and assessment models for grading and evaluating digital and multimodal pieces. Without this framework, students often default to those writing models that were successful for them in the past, which were text-heavy and often discipline-specific. Further, teachers also need to help extend student’s notions of communication to include the visual and aural in a way that is both meaningful and critical. This study showed that it was not enough for students to simply present and prioritize multimodal composing, but that students needed a conceptual frame to understand how and why composing in different modes supported their analytic reasoning, and feel confident in their ability to synthesize them into their composing work.

This qualitative case study explored the information literacy acquisition of 23 students enrolled in a learning community consisting of an advanced ESL writing class and a one unit class introducing students to research at a suburban community college library in California. As there are no other known learning communities that link an ESL course to a library course, this site afforded a unique opportunity to understand the ways in which ESL students learn to conduct library research.

Students encountered difficulties while finding, evaluating, and using information for their ESL assignments. These problems were substantial, but more noteworthy were the strategies that the students, their ESL instructor and their instructional librarian crafted in response.

The learning community structure enabled a number of important strategies. Strategies by the instructors included integration of the two courses' curricula; contextualized learning activities; cross-over teaching by the instructors; explicit instruction followed by guided workshop sessions. Some student strategies were persistence in asking questions, dictionary use, re-reading, and a resourceful disposition. Joint strategies included dialogue to clarify research strategies and to understand difficult text, student-crafted research techniques that were observed by instructors and shared with class; and an affirmation of the students' emerging research practices.

This study adds to our understanding of one particular area of academic discourse acquisition in a second language--how ESL students learn to interact with information in the context of community college. This study's findings refute the idea that ESL students must wait to become researchers until their English is college-ready. ESL students in this study discovered new language forms, new texts, new ideas, and new research practices simultaneously, in large part because of the relationships that developed over time among the students, instructor and librarian.

Delivering engaging and rigorous learning experiences in online environments has become a key priority for higher education institutions, driving prolific innovation in tools, pedagogy, and research over the last 20 years. The design and research of collaborative, networked learning experiences in particular has been fueled both by socially-turned theories of learning as well as the meteoric rise of social media and digital networks, which have introduced radical new forms of connectivity and sharing in daily life. In this dissertation, I offer three articles that each focus on one tool in the SuiteC collaborative learning system, a set of interconnected software applications designed to foster peer-to-peer sharing and collaborative, remix composing in a gamified environment. Looking across four semesters of student usage of the SuiteC tools in an online/hybrid undergraduate education course, I employ a mixed-methods approach grounded in “assemblage theory” that leverages learning analytics mined from the SuiteC database, content analysis of student artifacts, and student feedback to explore the kinds of social interactions and collaborations that emerged in the course. Findings suggest best practices and curricular strategies for the design of peer-centered online learning courses, recommendations for software tools, and the utility of assemblage concepts in studying complex sociotechnical systems.