Research Interests
I am generally interested in thinking and learning and the various methods we use to study, foster, and write about them. This interest plays out in six different, but not unrelated, ways:
1. The study of the factors -- cognitive, linguistic, socio-historical, and cultural -- that enhance or limit people's engagement with written language.
2. The development of pedagogies and materials to enhance critical reading and writing, particularly at the secondary and post-secondary level, and particularly with "underprepared" or "at risk" populations.
3. I'm interested in helping graduate students become more reflective about the uses of writing in social research: understanding writing as methodology, its relation to the conceptualization of their projects, and the effects various rhetorical choices have on their readers.
4. The study of effective teaching, primarily from a cognitive or socio-cognitive perspective.
5. The study of the cognition involved in various kinds of work, especially the blue-collar and service work -- the problem-solving, trouble-shooting, "informal" reasoning of novice and expert carpenters, plumbers, waitresses, welders, etc. -- and the interrelation of cognition, skill, and identity.
6. I'm interested in ways to bridge or combine modes of inquiry. How can we in principled ways rethink the barriers that often exist among disciplines, among methodologies, and among scholarly and non-scholarly languages? What sorts of institutional niches, courses, and opportunities can facilitate this rethinking? What does it mean to be systematic and rigorous when one moves outside of the tradition of a discipline or a scholarly mode of communication? How do we bridge the significant rhetorical and political gap between disciplinary inquiry and the public conversation about educational issues?
Selected Publications within the last five years:
- Possible Lives: The Promis of Public Education in America. Penguin, 1995, issued with a new preface, 2008.
- Grand Visions and Possible Lives: Finding the Public Good through the Details of Classroom Life. Education Week, Oct 11, 2006.
- An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity. Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, 2006.
- The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. Viking, 2004; Penguin, 2005.
- Widening the Lens on Standardized Patient Assessment: What the Encounter Can Reveal about the Development of Clinical Competence (with L. Wilkerson). Academic Medicine, 76 (8), August, 2001.
- A Call for the Teaching of Writing in Graduate Education (with K. McClafferty). Educational Researcher, 30 (2), March, 2001.
- Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook (with E. Cushman, E. Kintgen, B. Kroll). Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, 2001.
- The Working Life of A Waitress. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 8 (1), 2001.
Recent Courses
Education 233 Professional Writing in Education
Education 226 Special Topics in Writing, Rhetoric, and Educational Methodology: Writing for General Audiences
Education 299B Research Practicum in Education
Education 118 Literacy in American Life
