Ewa McGrail
Associate Professor - Language and Literacy Middle and Secondary Education- Education
Ph.D., Syracuse University
M.A., Jagiellonian University
B.A., Jagiellonian University
- Specializations
Digital writing and new media composition; copyright and media literacy; social representations of outgroups in media and literature; multiliteracies and multimodal assessment; and technology use in teaching and learning.
- Biography
Ewa McGrail is a leader in literacy research whose publications and work reflect ground-breaking research in literacy and technology in teaching and learning. Her work has appeared in a variety of top-ranking journals, including English Education, Teachers College Record, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, Assessing Writing, Journal of Academic Ethics, Innovate, Action in Teacher Education, Kappa Delta Pi Record, The Reading Teacher and Educational Leadership.
McGrail is the winner (with Anne Davis) of the Journal of Research in Childhood Education Distinguished Education Research Article Award, the GATE Distinguished Research Award (with J. P. McGrail) and the recipient of the National Leadership Fellowship Award Program from the Conference on English Education (CEE), National Council of Teachers of English, and the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). Her recent publication (with Anne Davis) is a book on online digital dialogic writing with an authentic audience and how it can transform the elementary classroom. She is a co-founder of a multi-disciplinary international multimodal online journal, Ubiquity: The Journal of Literature, Literacy and the Arts that publishes thought-provoking research, analyses of practice and creative work from urban, rural and international perspectives and contexts.
In her research, McGrail examines digital writing and new media composition; copyright and media literacy; multiliteracies and multimodal assessment; and technology use in teaching and learning. She also explores the experiences of students and educators from outgroups or who are otherwise not in the mainstream. McGrail teaches masters and doctoral- level courses in the areas of writing, new media composition, reading, content area reading and literacy, media literacy, literacy and technology, and English education methods.
- Publications
Book
Davis, A., & McGrail, E. (2017). Student blogs: How online writing can transform your classroom. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield.
Articles and Book Chapters
Alvermann, D., Young, C., McGrail, E., Damico, N.,& Zucker, L. (2019). “Beliefs for Integrating Technology into the English Language Arts Classroom”: Reflections from scholars in the field. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 19(3).
Rybakova, K., Rice, M., Moran, C., Zucker, L., McDermott, M., McGrail, E., Loomis, S., Piotrowski, A., Garcia, M., Gerber, H., Gibbins, T., & Marlatt, R. (2019). A long arc bending towards equity: Tracing almost 20 years of ELA teaching trends in CITE. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 19(4).
McGrail, J.P., & McGrail, E. (2018). Blurred lines and shifting boundaries: Copyright and transformation in the multimodal compositions of teachers, teacher educators, and future media professionals. In R. Hobbs (Ed.), The Routledge handbook on media education, copyright and fair use (pp.129-142). New York, NY: Routledge.
McGrail, E., Tinker Sachs, G., Lewis Ellison, T., Dukes, N., D., & Zackery, K. (2018). Homeless adults, technology and literacy practices. Journal of Literacy and Technology, 19(2), 50-98.
McGrail, E., Rieger, A., Doepker, G. M., & McGeorge, S. M. (2018). Pre-service teachers’ perspectives on how the use of TOON comic books during guided reading influenced learning by struggling readers. SANE Journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education, 2 (3), 1-28. Available at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/vol2/iss3/1.
Tinker Sachs, G.., McGrail, E., Lewis Ellison, T., Dukes, N. D, & Zackery, K. (2018). Literacy scholars coming to know the people in the parks, their literacy practices and support systems. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 1 21. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15427587.2017.1351880
McGrail, J. P., McGrail, E., & Rieger, A., (2018). A teacher goes Gothic: Walter White, Heisenberg and the dark revenge of science. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 20(4), 486-506.
McGrail, E., McGrail, J. P., Rieger, A., Fraser, A. (2018). Friday Night disability: The portrayal of parent-child interactions on television’s Friday Night Lights. Journal of Human Development Disability and Social Change, 24(1), 121-140.
McGrail, E., & Behizadeh, N. (2017). K-12 multimodal assessment and interactive audiences: An exploratory analysis of existing frameworks. Assessing Writing, 31, 24-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2016.06.005 [Available online July 2016]
McGrail, E., McGrail, J.P., & Rieger, A. (2017). Exploring young writers’ authentic writing and language learning experiences. In E. Ortlieb, E. H. Cheek, Jr., & W. Verlaan (Eds.). Writing instruction to support literacy success: Literacy, research, practice and evaluation, vol. 7 (pp. 117-135). Bingley, United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing.