Statement of Research
I engage in critical scholarship across the fields of literacy education, media and cultural studies, ethnic studies, and urban schooling. I examine discourses of power and resistance in popular culture. I examine the relationship between literacy and cultural production. I seek to theorize the pedagogy of universal critical literacy through grounding theories of praxis; by studying instantiations of theoretically informed practice. I see my work as occurring at the nexus of these various fields as I envision the pedagogical practices and spaces that are needed to bring about a universal critical literacy, particularly among the ethnic-minority and dispossessed populations of the world. I operate under a theory of literacy pedagogy that encompasses the traditional pedagogical terrain of urban schools, but also includes non-traditional channels of popular media and community-based organizations.
Research
My work intends to help scholars and educators to envision and enact radical and revolutionary pedagogies of popular culture; pedagogies that occur in traditional school and non-school (community based organizations; non-mainstream media outlets) settings; pedagogies that empower citizens as consumers, producers, and distributors of popular culture; pedagogies aimed at improving the academic and critical literacy development among ethnically, linguistically, and economically marginalized adolescents throughout the Americas; pedagogies that increase academic achievement and the production and distribution of traditional and new media texts; pedagogies that facilitate engaged civic participation; and pedagogies that contribute toward an ultimate goal of universal critical literacy.
Toward these ends, I examine the discourses of power and resistance in popular culture; I also examine the language and literacy practices of ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups inside and outside of schools, particularly as they relate to popular cultural and textual consumption and production. I also theorize and investigate transformative literacy pedagogies across these various contexts. My work is conceptual, historical, and empirical and draws from philosophy and the social sciences. I see literacy as fundamentally tied to history and memory; but literacy is also cultural practice. As scholars, we cannot study literacy without dealing with essential questions about who we have been and who we are becoming as cultured and culture producing beings and we cannot theorize literacy education outside of larger questions of knowledge production and the role of citizens in society.
My primary sites of inquiry are urban schools and communities and the popular media. I am particularly interested in the potential connections between the ways that urban students learn and use literacy via their participation in popular culture and the ways that they might learn and utilize language and literacies of power (academic literacies, civic literacies, critical literacies, and technological literacies) in school and society. My work conceptualizes critical literacy practices as encompassing the consumption (reading), production, and distribution of language and texts that are created to illuminate and ultimately destabilize existing power relations.
Additionally, I am interested in the possibilities of critical inquiry as a form of literacy developing civic engagement; a radical civic participation intended to transform the inequitable material conditions in economically impoverished and socially and culturally marginalized communities, to transform classroom instruction, to redefine the nature of parent involvement in urban contexts, and to create meaningful spaces and activities that facilitate urban teacher learning and empowerment. I see media production and literacy education as occurring in tandem; as students, teachers, and parents learn to become civic participants, they also consume and produce traditional and new media texts and engage in complex analyses of dominant discourses while using their own inquiry to develop empowering and affirming counter-discourses. I have and continue to perform empirical studies of the multiple forms of learning (i.e. changing participation) that occur as subjects join and become increasingly involved in these communities of practice.
Finally, I am interested in analyzing theoretically informed research to develop grounded theories of the disciplines (critical pan-ethnic studies, cultural studies) and methods (critical discourse analysis, ethnography, critical educational research) that surround this work.
My research has been sponsored and awarded on several occasions including receiving the outstanding dissertation award from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education being awarded a postdoctoral research grant from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and receiving funding from the WIDE (Writing | Information | Design in E-Space) Center at Michigan State University. I am also one of the core principle investigators for Michigan State’s Literacy Achievement Research Center (LARC), a university funded center that operates a $400,000 annual budget. LARC’s mission is to promote and coordinate research efforts to increase literacy and academic achievement of children and adolescents. Additionally I have been invited to give numerous keynote addresses on the research to universities such as the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, DePaul University, Barnard University, Simmons University, Columbia University, and New York University; research organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research, the National Reading Conference, the Black Education Alliance of Massachusetts, the Michigan Reading Association, and the Michigan Council of teachers of English, private foundations such as the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation; and local school districts and schools throughout the nation. Finally, the research has been (or will be) published in five sole or co-authored books, 22 refereed journal articles, 10 book chapters, 10 encyclopedia entries, and over 40 refereed national and international conference proceedings.
I will now talk about my research across four major areas: Literacy Education; Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Studies; Urban Teacher Development; and Qualitative Research Methodologies.
Literacy Education: My practice draws upon the fundamental assumptions of new literacy studies and critical theory as I explore discourses of empowerment and marginalization as well as language and literacy practices in sociocultural contexts. I believe, along with cultural psychologists and activity theorists, that all people are learners and learn language and literacy as they participate in everyday, sociocultural activity. I also believe, however, that certain literacy practices have a greater proximity to the dominant ways of reading and representing texts that have been cast as the only ways of being literate. When looking at explanations for the failure of marginalized populations to develop essential academic literacies, it is important to move beyond deficit explanations to consider sociological theories of the role that schools play in reproducing social inequality. These exclusive literacy practices, which are tied to power and access, are one way that the system of education works to reproduce this social inequality. I believe that language and literacy learning are political acts, that literacy is tied to power relations in society, and that literacy educators are political agents capable of developing skills which enable academic transformation and social change. I examine the inherent logic and intellect of how people are literate in the world as they participate in everyday sociocultural activity. I explore potential connections between these literate behaviors and the types of literacies promoted in schools.
My work also seeks to develop among urban educators the ability to understand and build upon local, situated literacies to facilitate empowered and empowering ways of decoding existing dominant texts and producing new texts. I employ theories and methods from ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and the humanities to brainstorm ways to engage marginalized populations so that they can empower themselves through their decoding of old and producing of new texts. In this way, I believe that sociocultural theory can be used not only to investigate non-school literacy practices, but also to create learning environments that facilitate the acquisition of academic literacy skills. Finally, I have an explicit interest in academic and critical literacy development being tools within a revolutionary process intended to challenge existing norms and disrupt existing power relations.
I have conducted a series of studies that looked at the possible connections between popular culture and the development of academic and critical literacies. My work also seeks to develop a grounded theory of critical K-12 English teaching that is rooted in the systematic inquiry of classroom practice. I believe the teaching of language and literacy to be a provocative forum for humanizing students to the logic of alternate representations of the world. It can also sensitize them to the arbitrary forms of oppression that largely stem from ignorance and lack of tolerance while also allowing for students to become empowered over their own stories as they recognize the humanity in themselves and as they come to better understand themselves and the world through their readings and sharing of readings with others. Given the rapidly changing demographics of America’s classrooms, teachers of language and literacy are uniquely poised to facilitate critical dialogue, reading and writing about diversity, tolerance, self expression, and social change.
I have pursued an ambitious publishing agenda in literacy education capped by two books that were published 2004; Becoming Critical Researchers: Literacy and Empowerment for Urban Youth (Peter Lang) and Literacy and Popular Culture: Making Connections for Lifelong Learning (Christopher-Gordon). Additionally, I have another two books under contract entitled Critical Literacy and Urban Youth (Lawrence-Earlbaum, 2005) and Critical Approaches to the High School Canon (co-authored with a team of graduate students, Christopher-Gordon, 2005). I also have a number of articles that have been published in: The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, English Journal, California English, the Arizona English Bulletin, Indiana English English Education, Journal of Russian and Eastern European Psychology, the Journal of Hip-Hop, the Annual Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, and the Journal of School Leadership that deal with language and literacy education. Finally, I also have several book chapters out in titles such as: Students in the City, Teaching and Researching Across Research Lines: Literacy, Pedagogies, and the Politics of Difference (Rowan and Littlefield), Literacy Research Methods (Guilford), What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (Peter Lang), and Youth, Communities, and Social Justice (Teachers College Press).
I have delivered keynote addresses to the National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research (NCTE-AR), the National Reading Conference’s series of Literacy Research Methodologies, the Michigan Reading Association’s pre-conference on critical literacy, the Black Educators Association of Massachusetts, and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation. I have also delivered countless lectures to university faculties and K-12 teachers related to my interests in literacy education. I have also delivered addresses for the Race, Culture and Achievement series in Boston and the Barnard Speaker series on issues in urban education in New York. Finally, I have delivered a keynote address on Participatory Action Research and Ethnic Minority Literacy Achievement as the annual Review of Research address for convention of the National Reading Conference which makes two keynote addresses in two years at the most research-focused of the professional literacy organizations (in 2004 I delivered an invited address at NRC on Critical Discourse Analysis in Literacy Research and Education).
Urban Teacher Development: A related line of inquiry explores strategies that teacher educators can employ to prepare preservice and in-service urban teachers who are able to create classroom communities of practice that incorporate non-school literacies and critical approaches into traditional curricula to facilitate academic achievement and “empowered identities” among urban youth. One example of this inquiry is a study I conducted along with a colleague at UCLA that investigated the potential of employing urban teens as teacher educators. These teens had been apprenticed as social theorists and critical researchers. Our article appeared in Social Justice in spring 2003. I also authored a piece that examined the critical research seminar I direct as a form of professional development. This piece appeared in Teacher Education Quarterly in the spring of 2003. I have recently completed a piece, forthcoming in the University of West Indies sponsored New World Quarterly, that draws from empirical research to theorize a model of decolonizing teacher development. Two books, Linking Literacy and Popular Culture, Critical Pedagogy in Urban Contexts, and Critical Literacy and Urban Youth have been written or will be written with a population of urban pre-service teachers and teacher educators in mind. I have also worked with the Urban Teacher Educator Network (UTEN), a national consortium of urban teacher educators, to think about changes that can be made at a structural level that allow for the effective preparation of urban teachers for social justice.
Additionally, I have been involved in a project sponsored by the Boston Plan for Excellence that works with urban teachers and students interested in using critical research to increase literacy achievement and critical consciousness.
Critical Pedagogy and Ethnic and Cultural Studies: In my research I have endeavored to contemplate the significance of critical pedagogy and cultural studies on my research questions, methods of research, and relations with researched [and often marginalized] populations. I have worked with urban students and teachers as collaborators on critical research projects. My book Becoming Critical Researchers: Literacy and Empowerment for Urban Youth reports the findings of a two-year ethnographic study of the impact, on the development of academic and critical literacies, of apprenticing urban youth as critical researchers of popular culture. My postdoctoral study explores the possibilities for teacher transformation and academic literacy development when authentic dialogue and collaborative research projects between teachers and students are placed at the core of teacher development and teacher training. I currently have a contract for co-authored book- Critical Pedagogy in Urban Contexts (2005, Peter Lang), which examines the potential of critical pedagogy in urban schools. I have written numerous shorter pieces…Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, and books such as Critical Voices, and Youth, Communities and Social Justice…
I am also interested in the consumption and production of ethnic minorities as they relate to participation in popular culture. My book Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning examines the rich literacy practices that accompany participation in popular culture and the possible connections that can be made to academic instruction. My next sole authored book, Critical Literacy and Urban Youth will explore popular cultural production as an empowering literacy practice. After the completion of this manuscript I will be sending a manuscript for a book entitled Critical Media Production: Literacy and Civic Engagement Among Urban Youth as an invited piece to a series editor for Routledge.
Ethnic studies is a disciplinary field where I can simultaneously think about the ethnic/cultural, the literary, literacy, and the pedagogical; all within an explicit framework of social justice. Who in ethnic studies does not engage in research that advocates for social change, for equity, for liberation? Ethnic studies, as a field of inquiry, is rooted in the acknowledgement of colonial and neocolonial hegemonic discourses and institutions of state repression that constrain the opportunities of ethnic peoples around the world to practice freedom. Ethnic studies is also a discipline that acknowledges the power and agency of ethnic peoples to subvert and disrupt these discourses and relations. It is the counter-discourse of the academy; its foundation and its potential are counter-hegemonic.
I have incorporated ethnic studies and postcolonial studies into a slate of papers that were presented at three international conferences: The Caribbean Studies Association, the Centre for Caribbean Thought, and the International Conference on Learning. The Caribbean Studies paper examined the role of rebel ethnic music (I focused on critical hip-hop and roots reggae genres) in promoting universal critical literacy, paying particular attention to the role of hip-hop music and reggae music. This paper has been selected to appear in the inaugural issue of the Caribbean Journal of Popular Culture. The paper for the Centre for Caribbean thought examined the possible intersections between postcolonial theory and the development of critical educators in the Americas. That paper will appear in the New World Quarterly Collection…significant in showing the growing impact of my work on scholars in the Caribbean. The paper for the international conference on learning will lay the foundation for a global approach to critical literacy development that is largely a response to postcolonial theory. I have a paper on the Critical uses of hip-hop in anti-racist pedagogy that was presented at the Race in the 21st century conference and submitted to Multicultural Perspectives, I have a brief book chapter on critical hip-hop and antiracism appearing in an edited book entitled Everyday Antiracism and I have a book prospectus on Teachers Introduction to Postcolonialism that is under review at NCTE press.
I am also excited about having the opportunity to contribute eight entries for the inaugural African-American National Biography, a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press. Covering a broader range of African American lives than ever before, the African American National Biography will present history through a mosaic of the lives of 10,000 individuals, some known throughout the world and others all but forgotten, illuminating the abiding influence of African Americans on the life of this nation through the immediacy of personal experience.
Critical Qualitative Research Methodologies: Lastly, I am interested in the intersections between critical theory and qualitative research methodologies. Particularly, I am interested in how the ideals of critical theory inform and advance research in the social sciences (i.e. sociology, anthropology, linguistics). With respect to educational inquiry, I am interested in how a critical epistemology informs who does research and how that research is done. Rather than viewing critical research as the antithesis to basic traditional educational research, I envision critical research as a complementary approach that can help to realize the potential of educational inquiry. For example, I have examined what it means for teachers and urban students to position themselves as critical researchers, in terms of what this means for their own individual and collective identity development, what it means for facilitating literacy development and academic achievement, and what it means for adding to our knowledge base in the discipline. I have also examined what it means for professional, university-based educational researchers to engage in activist, interventionist research that is geared to inform knowledge and to contend for social justice.
My work on critical qualitative research in education has been widely published. In 2004 I published a book entitled Becoming Critical Researchers: Literacy and Empowerment for Urban Youth that deals with critical research as an approach to critical literacy pedagogy with urban teens. In that same year I also co-authored an article on critical discourse analysis that appeared in the co-edited book entitled Literacy Research Methodologies (2004, Gilford Press). I was an invited panelist at the National Reading Conference where I presented on Critical Discourse Analysis in Literacy Research and I submitted an article that appeared in their peer-reviewed publication The 55th Annual Yearbook of the National Reading Conference in 2005. In 2005 I was invited to deliver the Annual Review of Research Address for the National Reading Conference. My talk was entitled “Critical Action Research and the Literacy Achievement of Ethnic Minority Students.” The talk was well received and a version of the keynote address will appear as a featured article in the 56th Annual Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (Morrell, 2006), one of our most prestigious literacy journals.
Future Research
My future research projects will push upon my prior work both conceptually and methodologically. First I am interested in developing more sophisticated tools to help document and analyze adolescent discourses and literacies in popular culture. I am also interested in understanding the academic, cultural, and social outcomes associated with popular cultural pedagogies across multiple classroom contexts. For justifiable reasons, my earlier work has focused on single classroom interventions, but I now feel that there are principles built upon empirical work that can now be applied in multiple contexts. I would briefly like to describe four research projects that will form the core of the transition into my next phase of research in literacy education and cultural studies; the Literacy and Civic Engagement Project; the Popular Culture in Literacy Classrooms Project; the Youth Popular Culture Project; and the Urban Adolescent Literacies Project.
Literacy and Critical Research for Civic Engagement and College Access Project: The Los Angeles Unified School District took a dramatic step in June 2005, agreeing to make college preparatory coursework its default high school curriculum. This shift represents a victory for an array of grassroots community groups who have been calling on the district to uphold higher academic expectations for all students. Yet, changing course offerings is only a first step towards the goal of increasing the college eligibility, college attendance, and college graduation rates of students in urban school districts like Los Angeles. Conditions need to be in place inside and outside of schools that support student success in college preparatory courses—for example, access to highly qualified teachers, tutoring and counseling services, and computers. Further, teachers need new strategies for engaging a broader cross-section of the student body in academically rigorous work.
A colleague and I propose to address both of these needs through our Literacy and Critical Research for Civic Engagement and College Access project. Critical research refers to a process for engaging youth in systematic investigations into the educational opportunities in their schools and communities. Over the next five years, we will work with 20 social studies teachers in 10 high schools in East, Southeast, and South Los Angeles to create a curriculum through which more than 1000 students per year will study what conditions are needed to promote successful college-going. This project will create new curriculum and instructional strategies that will promote student engagement and the development of high-level academic literacy skills. It will enable students to participate in important civic conversations about college-going opportunities. It also will produce student-created research that will inform educational and social policymaking about college access in Los Angeles and across California. Through this research process, urban youth will forge the skills, commitment, and public identity of successful college-going students.
This project builds on our work over the last 9 years engaging urban youth in what we term ‘critical research.’ High school students in our Futures project and in our summer seminars on the sociology of education have acquired college-level research skills, developed high-level analytic and writing skills, and gained college admission at rates far higher than their peers. They have also contributed valuable research on school conditions that has informed school-level reform, civil rights lawsuits, and state education policy.[1] Significantly, many of the student researchers came to the project with weak academic preparation and limited interest in traditional high school curriculum. Critical research offered these youth a way to re-engage in school and contribute to their schools and communities through intellectual work.
The Urban Adolescent Literacies Project: Millions of urban adolescent youth throughout the country who possess and demonstrate literacies in non-school settings are failing in literacy courses in schools; this failure brings with it serious social, economic, and civic consequences for these youth and for the nation as a whole. These young people spend significant portions of their day engaged in literate behaviors that can be transferred into school literacy (writing in poetry slam books, composing short stories of urban lore and teenage romanticism, memorizing and reciting song lyrics, reading and discussing popular teen magazines, analyzing and interpreting complex gaming scenarios, and watching and discussing characters and plots from popular television shows). The investigators believe that the academic failure of these youth stems, in part, from the lack of connection between out-of-school urban literacies and secondary literacy instruction. That is, these courses often lack relevance to the lives of youth and the instruction lacks an understanding of the literate lives of these adolescents outside of schools. The investigators propose a three-part, four-year study that intends to understand and document these urban youth literacies and explore their potential incorporation into classroom practices. The study and this proposal will build on a decade of prior ethnographic and classroom-based work conducted by the principle investigators in urban classrooms, which has resulted in multiple book-length projects [Duncan-Andrade (in press); Morrell, 2004a; Morrell, 2004b, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (in press); Morrell, (in press)] in addition to numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings.
Though the initial work has been important to the field of literacy studies by advancing our understanding of various ways that young people are involved in literacy activities, the project investigators see missing links in the study between urban literacies, urban teacher development, and adolescent literacy achievement. Specifically, there are three major needs: (1) the field lacks in-depth documentation of the literacy activities of urban adolescent youth, (2) there is a need to develop a literacy curriculum in collaboration with classroom teachers that taps into the literacy activities of urban adolescent youth, and (3) there is a need for formative evaluation of the implementation of this new literacy curriculum. The investigators’ previous research suggests that these gaps in the field would be best filled by shifting from local literacy studies of small populations toward a multi-method research design that addresses far more participants. This would allow for systematic documentation of the literacy practices among different populations and the development of a curriculum with teachers that can begin to close the gap between local literacies and “literacies of power” (Delpit, 1995). Further, it will permit the investigators to document the literacy instructional practices of collaborating teachers in their own classrooms. This portion of the study is a process-evaluation; the investigators anticipate a subsequent proposal where they would perform a randomized trial to test the efficacy of this new curriculum in secondary urban literacy classrooms.
My co-investigator and I envision the project as having three phases:
Phase one: In-depth study (qualitative and quantitative) and documentation of urban literacies. This will include, a survey, grounded theory interviews, literacy surveys, and the collection of youth literacy artifacts.
Phase two: based on phase one data, and in collaboration with practicing teachers, the investigators will develop the intervention that addresses the literacy gap between urban youth and their literacy classrooms.
Phase three: Implementation and process-evaluation of the curricular intervention (going back into teachers’ classrooms to see if and how performance changes).
The Uses of Popular Culture in Twenty-first Century Literacy Classrooms Project: How are variously situated literacy teachers using popular culture in their literacy classrooms? What are the outcomes for student production, literacy achievement, and identity development?
I really should do a follow up study where I examine multiple classrooms where teachers are attempting to figure out how to do this kind of work. It can either be a comparative ethnography where I look at them separately and talk about comparisons across the board or else it could also be an edited volume where I look also as critical teacher research as a lens to examine popular cultural pedagogy in literacy classrooms.
I really want a large sample here that I can work from. One that includes urban and rural and suburban classrooms at least across the Western region if it cannot include the entire United States. I can use a number of creative strategies to gather data including: classroom visits, videotapes of classroom instruction, communication with teachers using blogs, samples of student work, examination of student achievement data, and interviews with students.
The Twenty-first Century Youth Popular Culture Study: What are the multiple ways that young people engage popular culture in the twenty-first century? What are the cognitive, social, cultural, and identity consequences and outcomes associated with these forms of engagement? What is important for educators and others who work with these youth to know and understand about youth participation in popular culture?
I think we also need to go back to the beginning to understand, all over, exactly how our young people are negotiating popular culture from the lens of literacy researchers. This type of research is also multi-method, but it seems as if this can be a major focus of work. Maybe a study on youth and popular culture that is at once cultural studies work and literacy education research. We really need to understand the myriad complex ways that young people are negotiating and creating popular culture.
The Youth and Popular Culture study will consist of ethnography, interviews, and media analysis, maybe even survey data or analysis of existing survey data. In the ethnographic portion of the study will involve following a small group of young people for an extended period along with general observations of youth engaging popular culture. The Product Analysis will involve an examination of the digital/technological products associated with popular culture that are targeted toward, or primarily used by youth. The Media Analysis will involve a Critical discourse analysis of the media that engage youth; particularly film, television, music, and news/magazines. The Artifact Analysis will involve Analysis of the artifacts that youth themselves create. Finally, the study will include extensive Interviews with young people about their participation in popular culture.
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