Her program of research examines the contextual factors and interactional processes that contribute to school success and school failure. She is the author of Ability Profiling and School Failure: One Child’s Struggle to be Seen as Competent (2003, Routledge) and her work has appeared in Urban Education, Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, Learning Disabilities Quarterly, and English Journal. Her most recent research uses a multiple literacies framework to investigate the role of the arts in supporting children’s acquisition of content area literacies.