Books, 2011-present

Gibbons Pyles, D. (2023). Literacy and identity through streaming media: Kids, teens, and representation on Netflix. Expanding Literacies. Routledge.

Gibbons Pyles, D., Rish, R., Warner, J. (2019). Negotiating place and space through digital literacies. Digital Media and Learning Series. Information Age Publishing.

Peer-Reviewed Articles, 2011-present

Buchholz, B. & Gibbons Pyles, D. (2018). Scientific Literacy in the Wild: Using Multimodal Texts In & Out of School. Reading Teacher, 0 (0): 1-10. doi:10.1002/trtr.1678.

Gibbons Pyles, D. (2016). Rural Media Literacy: Rural Youth Filmmaking as a Media Literacy Practice. Journal of Research on Rural Education, 31(7): 1-15.

Through an analysis of a corpus of youth-produced documentary video data collected at a youth media arts organization in rural Appalachia, I explore how these rural youth engaged in media literacy practices through creating documentary videos about themselves and their community. Using a theoretical foundation in literacies research, especially rural literacies, I conducted a modal analysis of a set of documentaries produced by rural youth through which I develop a working definition of rural media literacy, a literacy practice that respects the knowledge, identities, and values of local, rural areas and people expressed through rural youths’ media literacy productions.

Gibbons Pyles, D. (2015). A multimodal mapping of voice in youth media: The pitch in youth video production. Learning, Media, & Technology. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1095209.

An ethics of youth media production is the interplay of identities, media literacy, and modality that shape the environment within which young people produce media, yet how ‘voice’ is fostered and/or constrained in these environments could still be explored more fully. This paper stems from a larger qualitative study of how youth created films about their lives and communities in four non-school spaces that strove to give voice to underrepresented youth across the USA. This detailed semiotic analysis illustrates the nuances in the discussion between young people and youth media arts educators in two of these organizations during the pitch, the key moment in the filmmaking process in which the youth presented their ideas for their videos for adult approval before they moved on to the next stages, for example, filming. This analysis illustrates how young people negotiated their voice, tracing the negotiation and the inherent power dynamics that occurred.

Gibbons, D. (2014). Rural places meet media literacy: Representing truth and self in rural social space. Journal on Images and Culture, 6. Retrieved from http://vjic.org/vjic2/?page_id=3057.

This article builds on past work on developing an ethics framework (Gibbons, 2012), developing a theoretical understanding of what I call rural media literacy (Gibbons, Under Review), and using an analytic method that I developed called multimodal microanalysis (Gibbons, 2010; see also the analysis and findings sections of Curwood & Gibbons, 2010). In this piece, I examine how one can see how rural people "show one's place" in their films by analyzing a documentary created by a rural filmmaker about her local community.

Gibbons, D. & Redmond, T. (2014). Investigating cultural models of technology and literacy integration in pre-service teacher education. In: Literacy Enrichment and Technology Integration in Pre-Service Teacher Education. Keengwe, J., Onchwari, G., & Hucks, D. (Eds.) Hershey, PA: IGI Global. 75-90. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-4924-8.

This chapter reports research from a larger study that investigates the complexities of preparing digital native students to become digital native teachers in a teacher education program at a large, southern university. Specifically, this chapter examines faculty instructors’ beliefs regarding technology and literacy integration in a required pre-service teacher education course. The authors address the challenges of teaching and learning in the twenty-first century with particular attention to issues of multiliteracies and technology integration in pre-service preparation. Using New Literacy Studies and discourse analysis, the authors analyze instructors’ discourse finding a culture of pedagogical beliefs that embodies an expansion of what media, technology, and literacy integration means in pre-service teacher education settings in the twenty-first century.

Gibbons, D. (2012). Developing an ethics of youth media production using media literacy, identity, & modality. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 4(3): 256-265.

This critical, theoretical paper conceptualizes what determines an ethics for youth media production. Through discussions of media literacy, identity, and multimodality, I attempt to shift the question away from “What are the ethical ways in which youth use media?” toward the question “What are the ethics we have created as media literacy educators within which youth create media?” I assert that we must widen our lens to revision ethics as a complex interplay of definitions of media literacy, representations of youth identities, and understandings of modality as we move toward envisioning what constitutes an ethics of youth media production.

Halverson, E.R., Gibbons, D., Bass, M., Copeland, S., Andrews, A., and Hernando Llorens, B. (2012). What makes a youth-produced film good? The youth audience perspective. Learning, Media, and Technology, 1(1): 1-18. DOI:10.1080/17439884.2012.706222.

In this article, we explore how youth audiences evaluate the quality of youth-produced ﬁlms. Our interest stems from a dearth of ways to measure the quality of what youth produce in artistic production processes. As a result, making art in formal learning settings devolves into either romanticized creativity or instrumental work to improve skills in core content areas. We conducted focus groups with 38 youth participants where they viewed four different ﬁlms produced by the same youth media arts organization that works with young people to produce short-form, autobiographical documentaries. We found that youth focused their evaluations on identifying the ﬁlms’ genre and content and on assessing how well the ﬁlmmakers’ creative decisions ﬁt with identiﬁcations of genre and content. Evaluations were mediated by audiences’ expectations and seemed to inform judgments of quality and creativity. We hope that our work can inform the design of formal learning people are producing narrative art.

Gibbons, D., Drift, T., & Drift, D. (2011). Whose story is it? Being Native and American: Crossing borders, hyphenated selves. International Perspectives on Youth Media: Cultures of Production & Education. Ed. Fisherkeller, JoEllen. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, Inc. 172-191.

This is a book chapter that I co-wrote with my youth participant and her mother in order to provide them a voice in academic writing. For my part of this chapter, I used multimodal microanalysis, a way of analyzing films that I created that examines how different modes are used in youth produced media, and found that Téa, the youth participant, upholds her Native American traditions in how she chooses to make her media. Also, I found that she shows two different identities of a Cultural Preservationist and a Fancy Shawl Dancer throughout different versions of her youth-produced films. In it, I examine how one young person who might be bound by particular ways of being defined, in actuality, defines herself through her media production as well as through her writing for this scholarly piece.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters, 2011-present

Hege, A., Presnell, D., Ashcraft, K.R., Caldwell, K., Pyles, D., Bouldin, E., Warren, J. (2020). Advocacy and action in Appalachia aimed at Adverse Childhood Experiences: The Watauga Compassionate Community Initiative. Handbook of Research on Leadership and Advocacy for Children and Families in Rural Poverty.

Groce, E., Gibbons Pyles, D., & Min, M. (2020). Pilgrim’s progress?: A critical juncture in Native American history. Hollywood or history: An inquiry-based strategy for using film to teach World History.

Gibbons Pyles, D., Buchholz, B., Hash, P., Hagaman, K. (2020; online 2019). Teacher Curatorship: Fostering Literacies with Kindergartners Using YouTube Videos. In: Handbook of Research on Integrating Digital Technology With Literacy Pedagogies. Sullivan, P.M., Lantz, J.L., Sullivan, B.A. (Eds.). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-0246-4.ch013

Creative Scholarly Products, 2011-present

Murphy, J. (Director), Goodman, J. (Co-Director), Stewart, T. (Editor), & Gibbons, D. (Editor). (2011). 100 Miles for Swisher: A Story of Community and Commitment. [Digital Film]. United States: Front Porch Productions, Inc. Retrieved from: https://vimeo.com/42500028.

This documentary chronicles a group of Marines as they run 100 miles in 24 hours to raise money and awareness for the families of veterans who have lost their lives in wars.