Rabani Garg is a Ph.D. researcher at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on youth participation in digitally mediated social environments. She designs and studies networked environments for learning and literacy across formal and informal, cross-cultural contexts in collaboration with diverse learning communities, with a commitment to creating transformational and equitable, technology-rich learning spaces.
Her research interests include the role of informal spaces in shaping literacy practices, critical perspectives on literacy education, children’s and young adult literature, and multimodal and participatory research methods. Rabani has over a decade of experience in informal education, designing and leading literacy programs for schools, libraries, and communities across India. She has also worked in the field of children’s literature as an editor, storyteller, and publisher of a children’s magazine.
Rabani’s scholarship engages fields such as global media studies, youth studies, critical digital literacies, and critical platform studies. Her research into youth and educators’ practices with emergent technologies is responsive to the current sociotechnical moment, and she has worked across several interdisciplinary research projects to examine these dynamics.
She is currently the project manager for Writing with AI, a design-based research study on generative artificial intelligence (AI) led by Dr. Amy Stornaiuolo and a team of high school, undergraduate, and graduate researchers. Funded by Penn’s University Research Foundation, the project investigates how young people use AI tools in their writing and how they develop ethical, rhetorical, and critical AI literacies.
Writing with AI builds on Write4Change, a multi-year NSF-funded participatory design project that created and studied a transnational, online youth writing community. Rabani has played a lead role in this project, guiding the evolution of a school-based writing platform into a youth-led, collaborative, and networked space for global writing and connection.
Her third ongoing project, Digital Discourse, is part of a five-year research-practice partnership between Penn and the National Writing Project, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. In this project, she works with a team of researchers examining how secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teachers facilitate meaningful online discussions about literature and develop critical orientations to platforms, including the integration of AI in classroom settings.
Across these projects, Rabani’s work is shaped by deep commitments to youth voice, educator collaboration, and equitable design in digital learning environments.e contexts and build critical orientations to platforms.
Digital Literacies 