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Nearly a decade into full time professing, it shouldn\u2019t be much of a surprise that my work revolves around familiar themes year in and year out. The writing I published in 2021 speaks to an emphasis on civic innovation, youth ingenuity, and political outrage that have been fueling my career since before starting grad school. And so, my time working this year felt somewhat transitional. Much of my work this year was spillover from research projects that have been rolling forward for several years and a few projects emerged with a publication or two this year with much more to come in 2022 (and beyond).<\/p>\n
In any case, below are the key themes on which I published in 2021. Rather than generic headers, I\u2019ve organized these around institutional changes this work calls for. (There are a handful of publications this year that don\u2019t fit easily in these categories \u2013 feel free to peruse the obnoxious Google Scholar page<\/a> for a more mundane, chronological rundown of my work.) As should go without saying, none of this work happens in a vacuum. I rely heavily on collaboration\u2014usually with other researchers, with teachers, and with students\u2014and this work reflects my ongoing partnerships with some of the people I am most lucky to get to work with. (My roundup of work from previous years can be found here: 2020<\/a>,\u00a02019<\/a>,\u00a02018<\/a>.)*<\/p>\n Our research and teaching practices are often complicit in the harm experienced in schooling systems today.<\/strong><\/p>\n Much of my writing this year\u2014including this op-ed<\/a> with Nicole Mirra and this English Journal<\/em> essay<\/a>\u2014focus on the ways our work as educators and educational researchers is hampering healing and growth in light of an ongoing pandemic and the multiple forms of violence students and teachers witness daily.<\/p>\n It does not fit within the traditional boundaries of typical peer reviewed scholarship, but the article I learned the most through writing was this Teachers College Record<\/em> commentary<\/a> about sense-making during the pandemic. It summarizes some of my research about school buses (which I hope to talk about much more in 2022) as well as the contexts of empathy, fatherhood, and racial politics today. It\u2019s a messy confluence of ideas that doesn\u2019t quite<\/em> work on the page but, genuinely, has more heart in it than what passes muster for Reviewer 2 these days. Honestly, if you\u2019re not much of an academic reader (e.g. you weren\u2019t assigned any of these articles for a graduate class), that commentary and this blog post<\/a> about tamales are probably the two most interesting things I wrote this year.<\/p>\n Related, that TCR article references this work<\/a> on school buses. Because this work had to halt as a result of the pandemic, my research team and I have continued to work with these families and partnering school districts in order to understand what learning opportunities have looked like for various school stakeholders throughout the nearly two years of the pandemic. Research from this work will be available soon.<\/p>\n Our approaches to teaching and educational research must (continue to) turn toward the speculative.<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the main ideas that Nicole Mirra and I have focused on over the past couple years has been the idea that the \u201cspeculative\u201d must orient how we go about teaching and researching. We\u2019ve written about this in literacy and civic-focused contexts, including this 2021 article<\/a> (co-written with a group of amazing classroom teachers). Broadly, this is work about moving our field, our research methods, and our pedagogies closer toward the kind of radical hope and imagination necessary for collective joy and liberation.<\/p>\n This year, Nicole and I were privileged to host the second Speculative Education Colloquium<\/a> and to convene the first half of a smaller gathering of scholars through work funded by the Spencer Foundation<\/a>. We plan to disseminate this work (as well as related editing work) in 2022 and 2023. A date for the third annual Speculative Education Colloquium will be announced soon.<\/p>\n Youth civic ingenuity must be acknowledged and embraced.<\/strong><\/p>\n Continuing from research related to the Letters to the Next President project, I\u2019ve continued to explore youth civic writing practices. Research on youth perspectives of climate change led by Lynne Zummo and Emma Gargroetzi came out here<\/a> and Emma and I have focused on public dissemination of the findings from our work. Particularly during the first half of 2021, Emma and I were able to convene some amazing ELA and math educators to explore what civic reasoning could look like across<\/em> these two subject areas. We released a guide<\/a> for educators on quantitative civic reasoning and I encourage educators to take a look and share it with their colleagues.<\/p>\n Remi Kalir and I have also continued to explore the possibilities of annotation and civic literacies (e.g. this book<\/a> that came out at the beginning of the year). This post<\/a> on #SharpieActivism and this iAnnotate keynote<\/a> are extensions of this ongoing work.<\/p>\n Platforms are drastically changing where and how education transpires today.<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve talked a bit about platforms in some of my previous research. However, this article<\/a> with Roberto Santiago de Roock and this article<\/a> with Philip Nichols point to a larger, ongoing focus on the ways we must center platform studies in educational research. This is something I\u2019ll be talking about much more in work arriving in the coming months. (Somewhat related, I still spend a bit of time thinking about analog gaming literacies, such as this TCR yearbook chapter<\/a> on race and gender in D&D and this article<\/a> with Jon Wargo on escape rooms and literacies.)<\/p>\n *I confess it feels strange to tally the work I do in journals that take too long to publish during a period where–even in the midst of a pandemic–we averaged nearly two mass shootings in this country every day<\/a>. The ongoing rise of gun violence, of anti-immigrant racism, of anti-Black oppression, and the many other daily atrocities we bear witness to are devastating. My focus on the speculative and on participatory research methodologies are an intentional stance to engage in research that is solely and actively working toward freedom.<\/p>\nTell people this is awesome:<\/h3>