Research Studies

Transnational Writing Program Administration

2019 - 2021

For “Transnational Writing Program Administrators,” I traveled to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to meet with participants in person and learn how they make sense of and perform their roles while grappling with outsider identities. We discussed the consequences and limitations of us/them or local/global binaries, traced pedagogical commitments and policies across time and space, then accounted for and described the labor required to resist stable notions of difference in teaching and tutoring work. My findings articulate more nuanced terms like “discursive work” and “relative mobility” to help us better understand the intellectual labor they described. The broader outcome of this research articulates the complex knowledge-making that drives global writing studies intersections of linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and other forms of difference. New epistemological and methodological tools, grounded in everyday work, are especially necessary to address ongoing changes in the field and to learn from new writing programs worldwide. I described similar considerations of mobility while working in England in my 2019 article for WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.

Exchange Student Experiences

2018

This was a pilot study doing interviews with participants from a summer exchange program I worked on during my MA. I asked them how they conceptualized and adapted their assumptions about cultural exchange through the experiences they had as part of their programs in order to understand the complexity and surprises they might articulate as well as whether current discussions of intercultural exchange can capture what they experienced.

Writing Center Assessment/
Student Experiences With Writing Support

2015 - 2017

At the University of Southampton, I established an ERGO approved survey asking students about their experiences working with the writing centre as well as more broad questions about their overall experiences with writing support throughout the institution. The real joy in this research came through working collaboratively with undergraduate tutors on the staff to code and report the findings of this assessment.

International/Multilingual Student Experience

2014 - 2015

This was the study for my MA thesis, which asked international students to take a survey assessing their experiences learning to write among "native speakers" and the ways teachers were able to accommodate different linguistic backgrounds in the same classrooms. Follow-up interviews with interested students discussed in more detail the experiences and ideas for pedagogical practices that did not lean on a deficit model of language difference yet were attuned to differing student needs or preferences.