Ph.D., Stanford University
M.Ed., University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., University of California, Santa Barbara
Before coming to Berkeley, Keane was the Director of Research and Partnerships at the Language to Literacy Research Lab at Stanford University. She also worked as a K-5th grade classroom educator and literacy coach. Her articles have appeared in Review of Educational Research; Reading Research Quarterly; and The Journal of Educational Research, among others.
Currently reading: Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls
Share with us a little bit about your research.
My research thinks a lot about how forms of reading have been expanding beyond conventional print-based texts and especially in the last several decades, to include varied types of types, including multimedia, video, and technological-based texts. That has an impact on the way that students engage with and comprehend them, and also the ways that teachers incorporate those modes into practice.
We know that literacy instruction that accounts for those shifts has and holds a lot of promise because multimodal literacy has been found to influence, engage and enhance outcomes for students. So my research really sits at that nexus and seeks to explore this timely and urgent issue to better inform teacher practices, and the reading engagement and literacy outcomes of students.
The Covid pandemic brought teachers and students further into the digital space and in a very different way. We need more research to explore multimodal literacy in this kind of critical time of a very rapidly developing technological landscape.
The market is flooded with products, and teachers are asked to integrate technology into instruction through some of our policies and frameworks. But there's a lot of room for research-practice partnerships in figuring out how to do that well so that students can leverage what a lot of them already know what to do with technology outside of school, and how to leverage that into their reading development in meaningful ways balanced with non-technologically mediated experiences.
How did you choose this area of study?
I've been preoccupied with access to quality reading instruction and the way reading is taught since I served as an America Reads tutor during a work study placement when I was an undergrad. Up to that point, I had been a voracious reader my entire life. I was a Latchkey kid and I spent a lot of time after school in public libraries reading.
For me, reading was very transportive and transformational, and my relationship to it was the reason why I pursued going to college as a first-generation student.
But I never really thought much about how relationships to reading often start with early schooling experiences until I had that opportunity to work in two very different classrooms (1st and 4th grade) with teachers teaching reading to elementary students.
Over time, I began to appreciate and view the teaching of reading as providing others with access to a fundamental human right.
I believe every child has a right to read, and every teacher has a right to learn how to do it well, and I care deeply about being a part of helping that be true.
Where did your love of reading come from?
I was very lucky at a young age to have experiences with text that helped me realize that if I kept reading, I would keep learning about being a person in this world, and even at a young age, desired to build empathy through that and to learn as much as I could about different ways of being. I also learned how to do things by checking out books to help teach me how to do things like embroidery and crochet, and to learn about different animals. I discovered books were amazing portals for me.
Is there a person who has inspired you in your work?
Sheridan Blau. He taught an English course I took as an undergrad and was the one that encouraged me to become a teacher. We had to write often about what we were noticing about ourselves as readers while we were reading, while we were also deconstructing texts. In combination with the tutoring job, I was having these sort of meta-experiences of looking at my own self as a reader, which I had never done before.
Also, I remember my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Acorn who provided such a beautiful space to be in with books. It was magical.
Then there was my own mom, who was a reader too. We didn't have a lot of money for a lot of stuff but she always made sure that I had access to books, and I had a public library card.
Why do this at Berkeley?
First of all, Berkeley is a super high-impact research institution regularly ranked as the best public university in the country concerned above all with the public good, which is something I care a lot about being a part of.
The UC system has provided me with excellent educative experiences as a first-gen, low-income student when I got started, and I knew here at Berkeley I would have the opportunity to contribute and serve the kind of an institution that provided me with so many gifts of learning.
I want to work with students who are also a little bit like me–maybe among the first in their families to go to college and to benefit from the wealth of opportunities and resources that the UC has to offer generally–but especially at Berkeley.
I am tremendously excited by the opportunity to work in the Berkeley Teacher Education Program with new teacher candidates, and help them foster practices around teaching reading, and BTEP has an explicit anti-racist, equity-centered stance. I knew it was a program I'd be honored to work in and learn from.
The same is true for the California Reading and Literature Project. I want my research to be very meaningful for practitioners and close to the classroom. Working with teachers and CRLP is an excellent way to continue to build research-practice partnerships in the Bay Area and to work with local leaders, teachers and students.
There are a lot of reasons for why Berkeley.