Department of Learning, Teaching and Curriculum

Dr. Damiana Gibbons Pyles is a professor of media studies in the Department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum at Appalachian State University. Her research interests focus on media production, identity, and media literacy practices in order to understand the intersections of the visual, the spoken, the written, and the performed in digital and print literacies. She created an analytic methodology called multimodal microanalysis to understand the media products young people create, and her past scholarship focused on how to think through an ethics of youth media production, especially in marginalized groups.

She currently teaches courses for preservice and practicing teachers to learn how to integrate media and technology for teaching and learning. Additionally, she teaches media studies students from across campus on how to analyze identities across media, such as race/gender/sexualities in streaming media and comics, and how to create their own media in response through games, blogs, audio documentary, and other media.

She recently published Literacy and Identity Through Streaming Media: Kids, Teens, and Representation on Netflix, which explores race and gender in streaming media for children. Her most recent projects are working to understand how identities are expressed in streaming media, AI and other generative technologies in education, and current censorship legislation and policies in the United States.

She is a member of the North Carolina Reading Association and Literacy Research Association.

Selected Publications

• Gibbons Pyles, D. (2023). Literacy and Identity through Streaming Media: Kids, Teens, and Representation on Netflix. Routledge.
• Gibbons Pyles, D., Pyles, A., & Groce, E. (2023). Image, print, and movement: Reaching readers through illustrations and flipbooks about The Last Kids on Earth: Thrilling Tales from the Treehouse. In Increasing visual literacy and critical thinking skills through graphic novels, (B. Maldonado & J.D. DeHart, Eds.). Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
• Gibbons Pyles, D. (2022). Asian Canadian representation and feminism for middle grades students in Embrace the Panda and Turning Red. In Enhancing education through multidisciplinary film teaching methodologies, (J.D. DeHart, Ed.). IGI Global.
• Gibbons Pyles, D., Rish, R., Warner, J. (2019). Negotiating place and space through digital literacies. Digital Media and Learning Series. Information Age Publishing

Dr. Gibbons Pyles' curriculum vitae.