As a scholar my research interests travel across understandings of English Language Arts as a discipline, adolescent literacy, writing, and multilingualism.
If you would like a copy of any of these research articles or briefs, please email me.
Writing Environments
How writing happens across time has important implications for students’ opportunities to live as authors. When students have robust opportunities to write across genres and transfer composing practices, they enact complex and robust identities, something rarely allowed in ELA classes that serve working class communities and students of color (Williamson, 2019). As many teachers and students know, school writing can often be alienating—detached from meaning and produced as part of a mechanized process. This analysis (Williamson, 2023) shows how writing activities might be connected to humanity and identity and also commodified by external structures that dehumanize.
Williamson, T. (2023) Experiences of alienation and intimacy: The work of secondary writing instruction. Research in the Teaching of English, 57(3), 271-293. https://doi.org/10.58680/rte202332355
Williamson, T. (2019). Authoring selves in school: Adolescent writing identity. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 68. https://doi.org/10.1177/2381336919870291
Understanding Youth Literacy Identity
This three year design-based study documents middle school students’ self-assessed literacy strengths and areas of growth during a summer literacy enrichment program, along with their teachers’ understandings of these self-assessments. This project was the recipient of the 2018 ELATE Research Initiative Grant, from NCTE.
Results from our analysis of the first year’s student assessment data (Williamson, LeeKeenan, & Peixoto, 2020) indicated that all students were more likely to talk about surface features of language, speed, and volume than meaning-related aspects of literacy, and that younger students were overall more preoccupied with grammar, spelling, and punctuation than their older peers.
Publications
Williamson, T., LeeKeenan, K., Peixoto, S. (2020) More, faster, neater: Middle school students’ self-assessed literacy concerns. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1092
Dissertation Project
This year-long embedded case study documented the sociopolitical dimensions of secondary English Language Arts (ELA) in an urban context, with particular attention to how discourses about English and teaching circulate in professional communities and how students make sense of their work in English class.
An important finding from this work was that some teachers resisted the demands and policy discourse of standardized testing by committing to individualized and student-centered instruction (Williamson, 2017). In my dissertation, I applied Bakhtinian theories of discourse to show how teachers’ talk and practices both perpetuated traditional expectations in English instruction and also broke with tradition to better serve a linguistically and racially diverse student body.
Publications
Williamson, T. (2018) Discourses and enactments of English language arts in a secondary English department (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Texas Scholar Works. (1055162355)
Williamson, T. (2017) Avoiding the gaze of the test: Policy implementation of high-stakes standardized literacy assessment. The Texas Education Review, 5(2), 66-90.
UTeach Urban Teachers Research Project
This longitudinal study, directed by Dr. Allison Skerrett, investigates the experiences of participants' journeys in becoming secondary English teachers, following them during their teacher education program through five years of in-service teaching. I served as part of the research team from 2012 to 2019.
Publications
Skerrett, A., Williamson, T., Warrington, A., Salmerón, C., Brady, R.B. (2019) The intersections of identities and justice-oriented efforts of urban literacy educators. Literacy Research: Theory, Method and Practice, 68(1), 183-204.
Skerrett, A., Williamson, T., LeeKeenan, K., Rubin, J., Hendrix, A., Land, C., White, H., Stump, N, and Nelson Pryor, K. (2018) Transforming literacy education in urban schools. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 61(4).
Skerrett, A., Warrington, A., & Williamson, T. (2018) Generative principles for professional learning for equity-oriented urban English teachers. English Education, 50(2).