Amanda Yoshiko Shimizu
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Tennessee
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Digital reading, AI-assisted qualitative analysis
Amanda holds a Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching, and Diversity with a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education. As a researcher, her work focuses on elementary students’ literacy practices in digital environments. In her dissertation research, she investigates the collaborative and multimodal writing practices of culturally and linguistically diverse elementary students in online spaces with digital tools. Through the development of innovative multimodal methodologies, she explores how third graders’ collaborative writing develops across multiple online spaces, authors, and modes of interaction. The digital nature of this work provides space to develop new methodologies to study students’ interactions. In turn, it has the potential to theoretically expand what counts as writing participation, as well as pedagogically support practitioners hoping to incorporate digital tools, collaboration, and multimodality into their writing instruction.