She received her Ph.D. from the Reading/Writing/Literacy program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. She has worked with youth both in and out of school, as a teacher and as a researcher, and is interested in how youth craft stories and produce knowledge using different literacies, technologies, and media. Currently Lalitha is studying media, literacy, and education in the lives of court-involved youth using a multimodal storytelling methodology. Her research has been published in E-Learning, English Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Review of Research in Education, and she is co-editor of the volume titled, Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility (2008, Peter Lang). Lalitha is working on a forthcoming book tentatively titled, "Literacies, embodied multimodality, and new educational geographies."