Lifespan Literate Action Development

In the past year, I’ve taken some important steps in developing this strand of my research agenda.  I have completed a monograph—Talk, Tools, and Texts: A Logic-in-Use for Studying Lifespan Literate Action Development, is available at the University Press of Colorado / WAC Clearinghouse as part of its Practices & Possibilities series.

Talk, Tools, and Texts was originally focused on data from my dissertation, which studied a group of 12- and 13-year-olds in an English Language Arts classroom for a full academic year.  I have since expanded the text to include six other case studies of writers from ages 18-80.  These additional cases have allowed me to develop a more nuanced, foundational infrastructure for integrating future studies of lifespan literate action development.

My long-term goal with this research thread is to develop a complex, yet coherent theory of how literate develops through the lifespan.  In the process of building such a theory, I aim to develop smaller, middle-range theories that are actionable for writers in particular times and places but informed by the entirety of the lifespan.