Projects

Theresa served on the Advisory Board for the Mapping Impactful Media Literacy Project (2020-2021). This national research project explored how impact in media literacy interventions is understood, developed indicators for impactful practice, and offered engagement opportunities via a field guide of equitable media literacy practices for classrooms, communities, and organizations.

Theresa practices a/r/tography as a method of scholarly inquiry. Using visual journaling, expressive arts, and prose as tools, she engages in iterative, generative processes of reflective and recursive narrative analysis related to her teaching and research aims or experiences. Theresa’s visual journaling pages are largely unpublished scholarly works that represent stages in the research process. 

Theresa’s digital collages are reciprocal to her ongoing investigation of literacy and fluency in the digital world, connecting the communications and digital competencies comprised by media studies with the elements and principles of artistic expression. Her pieces have been published in peer-reviewed journals and art magazines.

Theresa is co-author of Snapshot 2019, the first report on media literacy education in the U.S. The purpose of this report is to inspire dialogue and create momentum to support research, training, practice, and policy efforts needed in order to grow the field of media literacy more fully. Read the full report here and join the conversation on Twitter using #stateofmedialiteracy

Theresa is a founding member of the Creativity Collaborative, which is a scholarly community of care seeking to build professional capacity and engagement for teaching, research, and service through arts-based inquiry, creative pedagogies, and critical literacies. We publish on our work in peer-reviewed venues and edited collections, along with presentations at national and regional events. Follow on Instagram.

Through her work with Antonio López (John Cabot University, Rome, Italy) and Jeff Share (UCLA, California, USA), Theresa has been involved in expanding visibility for ecomedia literacy. Related scholarship includes co-editing a special joint issue on ecomedia literacy with The Journal of Sustainability Education (JSE) and The Journal of Media Literacy (JML), along with various events— such as the “Ecomedia Literate Perspectives on Environmental and Racial Justice” Panel (August 2020) with Karen Ambrosh, president of the National Telemedia Council— and national conference papers on the topic. As part of her media literacy research, Theresa has been investigating ecomedia literacy in practice, applying the skills of participatory culture to her curriculum design in undergraduate media literacy learning.

Springing from her roots as a visual arts teacher, Theresa’s media literacy research comprises action studies and qualitative investigations into creative pedagogies, including maker literacies and remix. While remix generally refers to the recombination of existing, popular media content into new forms, Theresa invites students to create their own source texts through visual and digital journaling and other multimedia. Part of this research is designing a cross-disciplinary learning model and remix playbook for arts-based pedagogies.

This Wandering Road is a photographic survey to visualize time and observe the texture of pause. With billions of photos and videos shared in online spaces each day, this project works to divert the digital and create space for attention to observing our temporal lives. In association with each image, Theresa shares a word to signify the texture of the pause. Every ten posts, these words are collected and shared. Project followers are invited to use the words in crafting micro-poetry or other writings that facilitate their own attention to the world and wanderings through time.