David O’Brien’s scholarship and teaching focus on the literacy practices of adolescents. He has studied how adolescents use literacy to learn content across the disciplines and also how their teachers learn to integrate literacy practices into various disciplines in middle and high school instruction. His research is collaborative, conducted within a community of practice with the intent of improving adolescents’ literacy skills and practices concurrently with improving their teachers’ abilities to meet the needs of a range of learners. In a recent project, he collaborated with colleagues at an urban high school in Minneapolis to set up academic literacy support for struggling adolescent learners.
O’Brien has also explored how “struggling” adolescent learners become disengaged from literacy participation in school and examined ways these students can be motivated to engage in literacy tasks. Recently he has studied the use of electronically mediated literacy using computers and related technologies to engage struggling high school students while collaborating with two school-based colleagues to construct a new program for these students. Currently, he is engaged in a multi-year research project with colleague Richard Beach and doctoral students focusing on how low-achieving middle school students bridge traditional print-based practices with more progressive “new literacies” practices as they engage in purposeful activities involving a range of digital media.
