Welcome Our New Cooney Center Research Fellow, Dr. Becky Herr Stephenson!

The Cooney Center is thrilled to announce our new 2010-2011 Research Fellow, Dr. Becky Herr Stephenson. Becky received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include media literacy, teaching and learning with digital media and popular culture, and youth media production. Her dissertation, Kids as Cultural Producers: Consumption, Literacy, and Participation, investigates issues of access and media literacy through an ethnographic study of digital media production in two mixed-grade (6th, 7th, and 8th) special education classes.

Previously, Becky was a postdoctoral researcher with the Digital Media and Learning Hub within the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine and a member of the research team for the Digital Youth Project, a three-year ethnography of youth media practices, both funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

A life-long fan of children’s media, Becky has an encyclopedic knowledge of Sesame Street and all things having to do with the Harry Potter franchise. She is currently hard at work on the manuscript for Teaching Harry Potter: The Power of Imagination in Multicultural Classrooms, a co-authored book (with Catherine Belcher) to be published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2011.

Welcome Becky!