Faculty Directory

Jon M. Wargo

Assistant Professor

Department

TCS Teaching, Curriculum, and Society

Profile

Jon M. Wargo is committed to educational equity. A scholar and teacher educator who attends closely to qualitative research methods, Wargo engages in ethnographic, design-based, and arts-informed methodologies to examine how technology mediates children and youths’ social and civic education. In turn, he explores how these practices facilitate critical literacy learning as well as broader cultural change and social transformation.

Publishing extensively across literacy studies, media and technology, teacher education, and qualitative research, his scholarship can be found in the pages of academic journals such as the Journal of Literacy Research, Qualitative Inquiry, New Media & Society, Learning, Media, and Technology, Research in the Teaching of English, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, and Language Arts. His forthcoming book, Lifestreaming Queer Culture: LGBTQ+ Youth Writing with Mobile Media, explores how LGBTQ+ youth use technology to design more just social futures.

A former Denver Public Schools teacher, Wargo holds a B.A. in English and Gender Studies from Indiana University – Bloomington and a Ph.D. in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education from Michigan State University. Wargo’s scholarly profile and body of research has been both nationally and internationally recognized. Since 2017, he received the Council of Anthropology in Education’s (CAE) Concha Delgado Gaitán Presidential Fellowship, the ELATE National Technology Leadership Initiative (NTLI) award, the Divergent Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research, the NCTE Language Arts Distinguished Article Award, the Children’s Literature Assembly (CLA) Early Career Award, the 2021 LRA Early Career Achievement Award. In 2020, he was named an NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.

As a core faculty member in the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society department at the Lynch School, Wargo teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in literacy, social studies education, curriculum theory, technology, and inquiry methodologies.

GLOBAL SPOTLIGHT
  • Collaborator to Dr. Jackie Marsh's EU H2020 Grant Digital MakEY.
  • Served as a Keynote to the 2019 Digital MakEY conference at University of Manchester Serving as Keynote to the 2020 LLRC/ACCLL pre-conference (London, Ontario)
  • Presenting work at the Writing Research Across Borders conference in China