Alex P. Corbitt joined the School of Education as Assistant Professor of Literacy Education in 2025. An expert in literacy and learning, especially through play and gaming, Corbitt’s research focuses on how youths and adults represent their identities, communities, and civic lives through processes of play and co-authorship. Oriented by participatory and ethnographic methods, Corbitt engages in long-term partnerships with schools and organizations to analyze their learning ecologies and to co-design justice-oriented programming. His recent scholarship examines how gamers collaboratively build worlds and compose narratives across digital role-playing communities and online video game platforms.
Corbitt’s teaching is grounded in constructivist, inquiry-based approaches to K-12 education. As a former English Language Arts teacher, his instruction emphasizes critical explorations of multimodal literacies across content areas and centers interactive activities that engage learners in the collaborative design and implementation of dynamic pedagogies.
As a principal and co-principal investigator, Corbitt has researched equitable instruction; Roblox, the virtual playground; analog and digital storytelling; and game rooms. His publication credits include articles in Learning, Media, and Technology; Pedagogies; Linguistics and Education; the Journal of Literacy Research; and Digital Culture and Education, as well as chapters in Digital Worldbuilding (Bloomsbury) and Teen Activists: Designing Curricula Today, Shaping the World Tomorrow (NCTE). He is the recipient of a 2024 NCTE Promising Researcher Award.
Most recently, Corbitt was Assistant Professor of Literacy at the State University of New York at Cortland. Prior to working in higher education, Corbitt was a seventh-grade English Language Arts teacher in the Bronx, NY.Corbitt holds a Ph.D. in Teaching, Curriculum, and Society from Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development (2023). His M.S. in Teaching is from Fordham Graduate School of Education (2013) and his B.A. in English is from Fordham College at Rose Hill (2012).