Language, Literacy, and Culture

We offer a Ph.D. in Education with an emphasis in Language, Literacy, and Culture (LLC). LLC interests are guided by questions such as:

Distinguishing features of LLC are its attention to the past as a powerful influence on the present, and its deconstruction of knowledge, identity, and power dynamics as central to the work of reimagining schools and society for a socially just future. As a land grant university, Iowa State University is uniquely positioned to use its resources to be in service to and in partnership with communities. We therefore are invested in research that not only advances scholarly understanding of the pressing educational issues of our moment, but how we also work toward enacting transformative change.

LLC is interdisciplinary in nature, allowing students to apply a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches in their scholarly inquiry. Current faculty expertise includes:  

Meet Our Faculty

Dr. Richardson Bruna uses the tools of educational anthropology to explore the cultural and linguistic practices of communities of learning and their members, particularly in science.   She teaches courses on multicultural and bilingual education and interpretive research methods. Her research and teaching activities emphasize community-based approaches to education and center youth discovery, voice, and agency.   She was PI of the NIH-funded Urban Ecosystems Project and is the Willie and Kathleen Robinson ISU 4U Promise Professor and the program’s Founding Director.

Dr. Constance Beecher is an Early Intervention researcher and educator emphasizing language and literacy development. She has a dual appointment with Human Sciences Extension and Outreach as a Family Wellbeing Specialist.  Her research is centered on community engagement and involves developing, evaluating, and disseminating language and literacy education for parents, teachers, and caregivers in community settings. Dr. Beecher applies a public health approach to early literacy, including prevention and intervention frameworks. This often involves the use of technology to deliver, monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention.  Her methodology expertise is in quantitative group and longitudinal approaches such as multi-level modeling, but also human-centered design approaches using multiple cycles of testing and improvement with qualitative methods.

Dr. Jeanne Dyches researches the ways in which disciplinary bodies reflect and perpetuate systems of power. Specifically, she works to understand how teachers and students resist limitations of their English language arts canonical curriculum in order to engage antiracist, emancipatory, and joyful secondary literacy instruction. A former high school English teacher and literacy coach, Dr. Dyches has won awards for her teaching on both the secondary and post-secondary levels. The American Educational Research Association, American Reading Forum, Society of Professors of Education, and Iowa Academy of Education have recognized Dr. Dyches’ research and scholarly contributions to the field of education. She is author of Power Tools: 30 Critical Disciplinary Literacy Strategies for 6-12 Classrooms; editor of Acts of Resistance: Subversive Teaching in the English Language Arts Classroom (in its second edition); and the editor of the English Journal column, Critical Approaches to Literature.