Edited Books by Ryan M Rish
Negotiating Place and Space Through Digital Literacies: Research and Practice, 2019
Table of Contents, Foreward, and Preface
Articles by Ryan M Rish
Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, 2020
This article argues for the use of critical literacy as a critical pedagogy in student affairs pr... more This article argues for the use of critical literacy as a critical pedagogy in student affairs practice. The authors describe how some currents of the student affairs literature have shifted toward a focus on student learning and critical approaches to student development and learning. Subsequently, they discuss the social turn in our understanding of literacy and a related move toward critical approaches to understanding literacy as a social practice. Finally, they present a synthesis of the literature, which results in considerations for approaching higher education student affairs contexts through a critical literacy framework, exposing gaps and areas for future theorizing and research.
Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction, 2019
This article presents two studies of students and teachers negotiating writing practices in two h... more This article presents two studies of students and teachers negotiating writing practices in two high school English classrooms in the United States. Both studies draw on a sociocultural framework of understanding writing as a social practice involving distributed, mediated, and dia-logic processes of invention. Each study presents a different approach to investigating how writing practices are negotiated and how writing is produced related to that negotiation. Across the two studies, findings illustrate how the written texts students produce are a result of negotiations among historical writing practices students bring along, the sanctioned writing practices the teacher is attempting to bring about, and a myriad of other possible related issues. Considered together, the findings of the two studies have implications for understanding student writing as a negotiated relationship among multiple writing practices, social interactions with peers and teachers, and objects and artifacts at work within the writing events.
Voices from the Middle, 2015
In this article, we present some data from a study based on the #walkmyworld project.
The ALAN Review, 42(3), 2015
SIGNAL, 37(1), 2015
In this essay, I build on Dena’s (2010) reconsideration of transmedia storytelling, which is conc... more In this essay, I build on Dena’s (2010) reconsideration of transmedia storytelling, which is concerned with how people make meaning in different ways with different types of texts, as a potential area for critical inquiry into the practice of racelifting in the adaptation and extension of stories.
Literacy, 49(1), 2015
This article addresses how mediated discourse theory (MDT) and related analytical tools can be us... more This article addresses how mediated discourse theory (MDT) and related analytical tools can be used to explore how students write together. Considered within a sociocultural framework that conceptualizes writing as involving distributed, mediated, and dialogic processes of invention, this article presents an investigation of how three high school students wrote together for a collaborative project. This article presents a writing event selected from a larger study that is used to explore the ways authorship is distributed among the students, the resources that mediate their writing, the shifting social contexts they establish when writing, and the relational and reflexive social positioning they enact. Mediated discourse theory (MDT) and its related analytical tools are introduced for heuristic and methodological purposes for analyzing how the coordination of these complexities shape students’ writing. The purpose for doing so is to gain a better understanding of how and why students write in the ways they do.
English Journal, 100(5), 2011
Josh and I wrote about forms of collaboration his students described when working on the Building... more Josh and I wrote about forms of collaboration his students described when working on the Building Worlds project in his fantasy and science fiction elective English course. After we discuss each form of collaboration, Josh describes his instructional response to the students and the project. We end the article with a series of questions for all of us to consider in regard to collaborative writing with technology.
Book Chapters by Ryan M Rish
Reimagining Literacy in the Age of AI: Theory and Practice , 2025
With greater and greater frequency, we find ourselves in conversations, meetings, and even invita... more With greater and greater frequency, we find ourselves in conversations, meetings, and even invitations for writing where the term AI literacy or AI literacies (often used interchangeably) is named as if it had a commonly shared and stable definition. In the contexts of education policy, teacher education, and research on learning we are experiencing an urgency driven by funders and popular media to solve the "AI Problem" for (not with) youth. This urgency is predicated on the assumption that artificial intelligence is transforming everything and poses a potential existential threat. AI literacy is seen as a form of power and control; providing AI literacy (to those assumed not to have it) will allow people to regain control over their lives, protect themselves from artificial intelligence, earn a living, and participate fully in society. The current wave of urgency around AI education in the United States results from the confluence of US science policy and popular excitement following the widespread availability of generative AI tools. Two of the National Science Foundation's Ten Big Ideas (2017) guiding research investment were the "Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier" and "Harnessing the Data Revolution," both of which have come to fruition in the recent progress of AI technologies. The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which guides national science priorities, released a report on AI in 2024. The National Science Foundation issued two "Dear Colleague" letters in 2023, each introducing grant funding in AI education. Meanwhile, popular awareness of AI has exploded in the last several years. Although machine learning technologies have been invisibly incorporated into our lives for decades, the
Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Theory in Literacy Studies Research: A How-To Guide, 2020
In Chapter 4, Ryan Rish explains mediated discourse analysis as both an overarching methodology f... more In Chapter 4, Ryan Rish explains mediated discourse analysis as both an overarching methodology for literacy studies research and a specific approach to analyzing data. Against the background of a succinct and carefully crafted account of the New Literacy Studies, Rish draws on his study of student collaborative writing in an elective high school English class (Rish, 2015) to walk us through an example of using mediated discourse analysis to investigate literacy practices of adolescents using digital tools. Mediated Discourse Analysis—as a methodology—brings together methods for closely examining actions people take to make inductions about how those actions aggregate into individual and shared social practices over time. Mediated Discourse Analysis also includes methods for examining the relationships among social practices within and across contexts. Rish explains how micro- and macro-level methods can help literacy researchers understand how and why people take certain social actions in a given context and how those actions may be enacted differently or be regarded differently across contexts. This approach is particularly helpful for accounting for the significance of digital tools in the enactment of literacy practices within and across multiple contexts of meaning-making and learning. Rish draws on the work of researchers and theorists instrumental in conceiving and developing Mediated Discourse Analysis to identify and explain the key concepts and research logic underlying this approach to making sense of literacy events and practices. (From Chapter 1 by Michele Knobel, Judy Kalman, and Colin Lankshear)
Mobile learning: Perspectives on practice and policy, 2018
H. Gillow-Wiles & M. Niess (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education in the Digital Age (IGI Global), 2015
In this chapter, a teacher educator and three practicing teachers consider how their experiences ... more In this chapter, a teacher educator and three practicing teachers consider how their experiences in an English education methods course that explicitly used Google Drive to support dialogic writing and learning has informed their teaching practices. The teacher educator frames the use of Google Drive in the methods course within a sociocultural perspective of writing as a distributed, mediated, and dialogic process of invention. Drawing on autoethnography as a method of inquiry, the teacher educator and the three practicing teachers consider the ways they wrote and learned in the methods course with Google Drive and how that experience is shaping the way they are supporting dialogic writing in their own teaching. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the major benefits and drawbacks of teaching writing within a sociocultural framework, including the issue of “heavy borrowing” and other tensions that arise within the institutional constraints of teaching writing within schools.
In E. Ortlieb, M.B. McVee, & L.E. Shanahan (Eds.), Video Reflection in Literacy Teacher Education and Development: Lessons from Research and Practice , 2015
Purpose: To present a cross-case analysis of two pre-service teachers who studied their own teach... more Purpose: To present a cross-case analysis of two pre-service teachers who studied their own teaching using video within a teacher inquiry project--a teacher education pedagogy we are calling video-mediated teacher inquiry.
Design: Activity theory is used to examine how inquiry groups collaboratively used video to mediate shifts in goals and tool use for the two pre-service teachers presented in the study. This chapter addresses the question of how video-mediated teacher inquiry supports the appropriation of teaching tools (i.e., classroom discussion) in a teacher education program.
Findings: The findings indicate that shifts in goals and tool use made during the teacher inquiry project suggest greater appropriation of the pedagogical tool of classroom discussion. We also consider how these shifts may be bound by the inquiry project.
Practical Implications: The use of video cases of teachers' own teaching is an emergent pedagogy that combines elements of both case study methods and practitioner inquiry. We argue that this pedagogy supports tool appropriation among pre-service teachers in ways that may help them develop as reflective practitioners.
Keywords: teacher inquiry, video, preservice teacher education, reflective practice, classroom discussion
Gerber, H.R., & Abrams, S.S. (Eds.), Bridging literacies with video games. (Sense Publishers), 2014
K. Pytash & R. Ferdig (Eds.), Preparing teachers for writing and writing instruction (pp. 1-15). (ETC Press), 2013
Do they have to be the same?" The pre-service teacher asking this question was wondering if the e... more Do they have to be the same?" The pre-service teacher asking this question was wondering if the essay she had written had to be the same, word for word, as the digital multimodal composition (DMC) she was creating. Similar to the way I used to ask my high school students, I had asked my pre-service teachers enrolled in a technology and digital media class first to write a This I Believe essay (National Public Radio) and second to create a DMC using the essay. The written essay involved writing about something in which you believe in 350-500 words and uploading it to the This I Believe website. The DMC involved combining an audio recording of the essay with moving and still images, music, video, and/or other media effects using video editing software. The purpose of writing the essay and creating the DMC was to have the pre-service teachers consider the affordances and constraints of different combinations of modes for conveying meaning to intended audiences.
Conference Proceedings by Ryan M Rish
Proceedings of the International Conference on the Learning Sciences, 2018
This study traces the learning trajectories of secondary students who conducted inquiry projects ... more This study traces the learning trajectories of secondary students who conducted inquiry projects based on their personal interests. The study conceptualizes the activities, practices, and tools associated (and not associated) with the inquiry projects within the learning lives of the student participants. The university researchers and the classroom teachers were active participants who assisted the students; shared their own learning lives; and provided resources, tools, and opportunities that helped shape the students' inquiry projects. The analysis features a co-navigation (with the researchers, the teachers, and the students) of learning trajectories across multiple contexts and social interactions. Findings reveal the agentive ways students took up and cast aside opportunities and artifacts in unexpected, yet fruitful, ways for the development of their inquiry projects. The paper concludes with implications for the design and facilitation of student inquiry across multiple contexts.
Invited by Ryan M Rish
The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy, 2019
Young adult literature as a literary genre is broadly defined as fiction featuring young adult ch... more Young adult literature as a literary genre is broadly defined as fiction featuring young adult characters with whom young adult readers can relate. As the genre of young adult literature has evolved and more titles have been published and marketed toward young adult readers, media and technology have been variously represented as elements in the lives of characters, means through which characters address problems, and focal factors of the problem presented to characters. Particular representations of media and technology in realistic, dystopic, and science fiction examples of young adult literature include, but are not limited to, digital communication, social media, and surveillance technology. These examples are often not representative of diverse young adult readers and their life experiences.
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Out-of- School Learning , 2017
Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy, Issue 67, 2014
Recently, as students gathered their belongings at the end of a graduate-level methods of literat... more Recently, as students gathered their belongings at the end of a graduate-level methods of literature instruction course that one of us teaches, a preservice teacher asked how he might respond to a series of challenges that he faced teaching Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice to a group of high school seniors in a socioeconomically diverse suburban school located in the mid-South. Several of his students were English language learners, and most planned to enter the workforce or military after graduation. Asked why the school's English department had chosen to require seniors to read that particular play, the preservice teacher explained that, like other literary works the school district adopted when it redesigned its literature curriculum in response to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the play was chosen because it appeared on a list of CCSS-approved exemplar texts said to reflect the level of text complexity that students ought to encounter in their senior year of high school.
This was an essay Joshua Caton and I were invited to write for the Ohio Resource Center's magazin... more This was an essay Joshua Caton and I were invited to write for the Ohio Resource Center's magazine Adolescent Literacies in Perspective. In brief, we make an argument based on our teaching experiences for shifting our focus to the social/literacy practices within which technology use is embedded rather than focusing on the transformative affordances of the technology itself. Though this is not a new argument, it is one Josh and I feel we don't read/hear enough in discussions with English teachers about new literacies, digital literacies, and/or 21st century literacies.
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Edited Books by Ryan M Rish
Articles by Ryan M Rish
Book Chapters by Ryan M Rish
Design: Activity theory is used to examine how inquiry groups collaboratively used video to mediate shifts in goals and tool use for the two pre-service teachers presented in the study. This chapter addresses the question of how video-mediated teacher inquiry supports the appropriation of teaching tools (i.e., classroom discussion) in a teacher education program.
Findings: The findings indicate that shifts in goals and tool use made during the teacher inquiry project suggest greater appropriation of the pedagogical tool of classroom discussion. We also consider how these shifts may be bound by the inquiry project.
Practical Implications: The use of video cases of teachers' own teaching is an emergent pedagogy that combines elements of both case study methods and practitioner inquiry. We argue that this pedagogy supports tool appropriation among pre-service teachers in ways that may help them develop as reflective practitioners.
Keywords: teacher inquiry, video, preservice teacher education, reflective practice, classroom discussion
Conference Proceedings by Ryan M Rish
Invited by Ryan M Rish
Design: Activity theory is used to examine how inquiry groups collaboratively used video to mediate shifts in goals and tool use for the two pre-service teachers presented in the study. This chapter addresses the question of how video-mediated teacher inquiry supports the appropriation of teaching tools (i.e., classroom discussion) in a teacher education program.
Findings: The findings indicate that shifts in goals and tool use made during the teacher inquiry project suggest greater appropriation of the pedagogical tool of classroom discussion. We also consider how these shifts may be bound by the inquiry project.
Practical Implications: The use of video cases of teachers' own teaching is an emergent pedagogy that combines elements of both case study methods and practitioner inquiry. We argue that this pedagogy supports tool appropriation among pre-service teachers in ways that may help them develop as reflective practitioners.
Keywords: teacher inquiry, video, preservice teacher education, reflective practice, classroom discussion
We are interested in connecting with and collaborating with others–within and outside of academia–who share these interests. We seek to create spaces for our projects and work to be made more visible, both to ourselves and to others.
As we work together, we will address ways to:
Collaboratively document and discuss our work and our communit(ies) of practice,
Fairly represent the participants and the spaces and places implicated in our work, and
Initiate further conversations that will shape the direction of our emerging collaborative.
This study is situated at the intersection of three areas of research: understanding relationships among students’ in- and out-of-school literacy practices, understanding how students accomplish collaborative forms of writing with online digital tools, and understanding how students’ positional identities are related to authorship. The study draws on three complementary theoretical frames that align with these three areas: New Literacy Studies, mediated discourse theory, and positioning theory. The methodology used is grounded in mediated discourse theory and includes two levels of analysis: at the macro level, nexus analysis is employed to understand what discursive and non- discursive social practices are constructed and enacted and what relationships among those social practices support or thwart the collaborative writing; at the micro level, mediated discourse analysis is employed to understand how students take up available mediational means to take social action in order to accomplish the collaborative writing and how students position themselves and one another as authors, animators, and principals of the wiki pages that constitute the Building Worlds Project.
Findings indicate that the students’ histories with writing shaped what social practices they did and did not enact related to the writing of the project. The students demonstrated a concern for the ownership of their own and each other’s wiki pages. This concern for ownership was directly related to the most durable social practice of ‘posting writing to own wiki page’ which was commensurate with school-based social practices related to writing that the students reported in interviews. Findings also indicate that students’ social interaction, social relationships, and positional identities of authorship shaped how and why they took up mediational means in the ways they did when taking social action related to the writing of the project.
This study has implications for the field of literacy studies and writing research by demonstrating how students took up a digital tool, i.e., a wiki, to write collaboratively in ways that are commensurate and incommensurate with new literacies. This study also provides insight into how writing histories shape how writing is accomplished and how students negotiate authorship within social interaction and existing relationships."