David O'Brien
Professor
Ph.D., University of Georgia
Literacy education
358 Peik Hall
612-625-5337
dobrien@umn.edu
Office hours: by appointment
Preferred method of contact: e-mail
My scholarship and teaching focus on the literacy practices of adolescents. I have studied how adolescents use literacy to learn content across the disciplines and also how their teachers learn to integrate literacy practices into various disciplines in middle and high school instruction. My research is collaborative, conducted within a community of practice with the intent of improving adolescents’ literacy skills and practices concurrently with improving their teachers’ abilities to meet the needs of a range of learners. In a recent project, I collaborated with colleagues at an urban high school in Minneapolis to set up academic literacy support for struggling adolescent learners.
I have also explored how “struggling” adolescent learners become disengaged from literacy participation in school and examined ways these students can be motivated to engage in literacy tasks. Recently I have studied the use of electronically mediated literacy using computers and related technologies to engage struggling high school students while collaborating with two school-based colleagues to construct a new program for these students. Currently, I am engaged in a multi-year research project with colleague Richard Beach and our doctoral students that focuses on how low-achieving middle school students bridge traditional print-based practices with more progressive “new literacies” practices as they engage in purposeful activities involving a range of digital media.
Selected publications
O’Brien, D. G. (2006). “Struggling” adolescents’ engagement in multimediating: Countering the institutional construction of incompetence. In D. E. Alvermann, K. A. Hinchman, D. W. Moore, S. F. Phelps, & D. R. Waff (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives (pp. 29-45). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Beach, R., & O’Brien, D. (2005). Playing texts against each other in the multimodal English classroom. English in Education, 39 (2), 44-59.
O’Brien, D. G., & Bauer, E. (2005). New literacies and the institution of old learning. Reading Research Quarterly. Essay Book Review, 40, 120-131.
Dillon, D.R., O’Brien, D. G., & Heilman, E. R. (2004). Literacy Research in the Next Millennium: From Paradigms to Pragmatism and Practicality In R. B. Ruddell & N. Unrau (Eds.) Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, (5th ed.) (pp. 1530-1556). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Featured research and outreach
Revised October 2006
