Committee: Kate Anderson (chair), Elisabeth Gee, Frank Serafini
Dissertation: "What Counts as Writing? An Examination of Students’ Use of Social Media Platforms to Represent Themselves as Writers”
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Research Questions: 

• How did students design their portfolios to represent themselves as writers across each digital platform?
  
• What were the predominant uses of each of the social media platforms and what are the pedagogical implications for those uses?
  
• What types of writing did the teacher in this classroom privilege and how did students orient to this value?  

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Defended and passed: April 3, 2017

My completed and successfully defended dissertation study focuses on how students in a high school English classroom were able to represent themselves as writers across three different social media platforms while creating a digital senior portfolio. I worked with a local teacher in partnership that was designed to serve her class, the school, and the community at large. In doing so, I examine what counts as both literacy and writing and to whom, and what this means for power relations in the classroom. Through varying methodologies, I analyzed video data of the students working and interactions with the teacher, interviews with focal students and the teacher, and the complete portfolios. My findings suggest that teachers’ beliefs and experiences as well as institutional requirements affect the ways in which teachers privilege certain forms of writing, and students undoubtedly orient to this value even when working with alternative authoring paths. Additional findings explore the ways in which students took up the technological as well as the coordinating pedagogical affordances of each platform to design multimodally in an academic setting. Implications also extend to the kinds of support that teachers need for incorporating student-centered, open-ended, multimodal projects into their classrooms to enhance literacy practices/ authoring paths in ELA classrooms and beyond.