My research interests are in the area of child development and early primary education. My research primarily explores the negotiated balance between academic learning and developmentally appropriate practices in classrooms. Within this area I focus on the role of teacher curricular stance in pedagogical decision-making, how children develop critical literacy skills through play-based learning, and how teachers' assessment practices support and extend children's learning in play-based contexts. As part of this research stream, I'm interested in methods for including young children's voices in research about their learning so I explore methods that are developmentally appropriate for researching with kindergarten-aged children.
