Biography

Virginia Killian Lund is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Language Arts in the School of Education at URI. Her scholarship focuses on the literacies, learning, and identities of young people as they compose across contexts and within multiple modalities, particularly in technology-enhanced environments. Virginia’s recent research has been in interest-driven learning environments, including experience based learning with FABX in Rhode Island, a youth media lab in rural Utah, a teen space in a public library in Hartford, Connecticut, and a drop-in digital media lab in a public high school on Chicago’s West Side.

Virginia holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago, a Master’s degree in Teaching and Learning from DePaul University, and a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition to her research and university teaching, Virginia has been a classroom teacher (first, third, and seventh grades) and a teaching artist guiding people from kindergarten through high school in theater, playwriting, art making, poetry, and puppetry.

Across all of Virginia’s work, she asks the question, “How can places of learning be places of joy and justice?”