LIVE Learning Innovation Incubator

Prior to arriving at Vanderbilt, Amanda Shimizu was a teacher for 10 years, including international teaching with the Peace Corps in the Republic of Moldova, first grade on a U.S. military base in South Korea, and a founding literacy teacher across grades two, three, and four at charter schools in Rhode Island. 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 also has the potential to theoretically expand what counts as writing participation as well as a place to pedagogically support practitioners hoping to incorporate collaboration, multimodality, and digital writing tools into their classroom instruction.