Meaning-making, literacy, classroom discourse
Dr. Aukerman’s research focuses on the relationship between talk, child agency, and literacy learning among children/youth and their teachers. She is particularly interested in how teachers engage with children’s non-standard interpretations of text, and how children’s meaning-making can become more honored and valued as a resource within classrooms. Dr. Aukerman’s additional areas of inquiry include sociocultural conceptualizations of reading comprehension; how second-language learners make sense of text through classroom dialogue; the affordances of various genres and modes for shared textual inquiry by child and adolescent readers; and documenting change over time in children’s participation in classroom talk about text.