She teaches courses in language and literacy and children’s literature at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her 12 years of elementary and middle school teaching experience inform her university teaching and research program. Her research has explored the development of students’ narrative competence, literary understanding, comprehension and interpretation, and visual meaning-making skills through the reading and discussing of sophisticated picturebooks. Recently, the texts used in her case study research have also included graphic novels. She is author of Exploring Student Response to Contemporary Picturebooks (2008), co-editor of Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality (Sipe & Pantaleo, 2008), and co-author of Learning with Literature in the Canadian Classroom (Bainbridge & Pantaleo, 1999).