Rebekah Willett is a lecturer on the MA in Media, Culture and Communication and the MA in ICT in Education. She has worked as a research officer on various projects at the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media. Before working in the Centre, Rebekah taught primary school whilst pursuing her MA and PhD degrees at the Institute of Education. 

Rebekah’s PhD is entitled Children’s Use of Popular Media in their Creative Writing (completed January 2002). The PhD investigates questions about children’s production of media stories within school settings. Using methods from teacher-research and ethnographic traditions, Rebekah collected data from the class she was teaching. The analysis focuses on three areas: writing process, media consumption and production, and identity work. The conclusions of the study point to a need for educators to recognise the way discursive practices of school create a very narrow definition of ‘acceptable stories’ in classrooms. The practices problematise stories which contain media, and therefore teachers overlook and misunderstand many of the things children are doing during the process of writing media-based stories.

After completing her PhD Rebekah worked on various projects examining children’s digital cultures. Rebekah just finished a 3-year AHRC funded project on amateur camcorder use, and has two current research projects: one focuses on children's playground games and the other examines young people's understandings of social networking sites. Her research interests include gender, identity, digital cultures, play, literacy and learning.