Research Interests and Projects

Research Interests:

• Literature for children and adolescents.
• The ways children talk about and respond to books in the classroom, and their developing literary understanding.
• Special interest in picture books and how young children interact with them, and the use of literary theory to illuminate these interactions.
• Assisting teachers in refining and extending their literary critical abilities.
• The ways in which literary understanding and aesthetic awareness merge with and support emergent literacy.
• How children and adults co-construct interpretive communities and form implicit definitions of literary competence.
• How culture, ethnicity, and gender are related to children’s literary responses.
• The ways in which literature for children reflects, inscribes, or subverts cultural norms.