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My scholarship and teaching focus on the literacy
practices of adolescents. I have studied how adolescents use
literacy to learn content across the disciplines and also how their
teachers learn to integrate literacy practices into various
disciplines in middle and high school instruction. My research is
collaborative, conducted within a community of practice with the
intent of improving adolescents’ literacy skills and practices
concurrently with improving their teachers’ abilities to meet the
needs of a range of learners. In a recent project, I collaborated with colleagues at an urban high school in Minneapolis
to set up academic literacy support for struggling adolescent
learners.
I have also explored how “struggling”
adolescent learners become disengaged from literacy participation in
school and examined ways these students can be motivated to engage
in literacy tasks. Recently I have studied the use of electronically
mediated literacy using computers and related technologies to engage
struggling high school students while collaborating with two
school-based colleagues to construct a new program for these
students. Currently, I am engaged in a multi-year research project
with colleague Richard Beach and our doctoral students that focuses on
how low-achieving middle school students bridge traditional
print-based practices with more progressive “new literacies” practices as they engage
in purposeful activities involving a range of digital media.
Selected publications
O’Brien, D. G. (2006). “Struggling” adolescents’
engagement in multimediating: Countering the institutional
construction of incompetence. In D. E. Alvermann, K. A. Hinchman, D.
W. Moore, S. F. Phelps, & D. R. Waff (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the
literacies in adolescents’ lives (pp. 29-45). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum
Beach, R., & O’Brien, D. (2005). Playing texts
against each other in the multimodal English classroom. English in
Education, 39 (2), 44-59.
O’Brien, D. G., & Bauer, E. (2005). New
literacies and the institution of old learning. Reading Research
Quarterly. Essay Book Review, 40, 120-131.
Dillon, D.R., O’Brien, D. G., & Heilman, E. R.
(2004). Literacy Research in the Next Millennium: From Paradigms to
Pragmatism and Practicality In R. B. Ruddell & N. Unrau (Eds.)
Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, (5th ed.) (pp.
1530-1556). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Featured research and outreach
Revised October 2006
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