OISE faculty Moore, Tucker, and Krishnamoorthy, among 2026 winners of prestigious Connaught New Researcher Award
Three Assistant Professors, based in OISE’s Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning, have been bestowed a Connaught New Researcher Award for the 2025-26 academic year.
The award, a part of the Connaught Fund program at the University of Toronto, helps new tenure-stream faculty establish competitive research programs – increasing the faculty member’s competitiveness for external funding.
Dr. Ashley R. Moore has been cited for his project “Establishing a New Field of Inquiry in the Language Sciences: Refining and Expanding Our Understanding of Linguistic Disassociation.” Dr. Shawna-Kaye Tucker has been cited for “Generative AI in Second Language Writing: The Role of Motivation, Self-Efficacy, Grit, and Proficiency.” Dr. Rishi Krishnamoorthy (they/them) was cited for their study “Examining barriers to science education among minoritized South Asian youth.”
Winners of the honour are full-time tenure stream faculty at the Assistant Professor level who are within five years of their tenure stream appointment and within ten years of having completed a PhD or equivalent. According to U of T, up to $1.5M will be awarded in the 2026-27 competition.
“Professors Moore, Krishnamoorthy, and Tucker's outstanding research projects are indicative of OISE's broad and deep expertise, and reflective of OISE's academic mission,” said Professor Becky Chen, OISE's Associate Dean, Research, Partnership and Innovation.
“At OISE, we are proud of their thoughtful work. On behalf of the OISE community, I congratulate them for their Connaught New Researcher Award win.”
Tucker’s deep look at generative AI
Tucker, an assistant professor of Applied Linguistics who joined OISE faculty in 2022, researches language and literacy development among second language speakers.
Her Connaught-cited study focuses on how variation in student characteristics, what Tucker calls individual differences – like motivation, self-efficacy, grit, and language proficiency – shape how students engage with generative AI for academic writing in their second language.
“A large body of research shows that these individual differences are strong predictors of language learning processes and outcomes, particularly in writing,” she says.
This work is particularly important in the current moment, she says, where GenAI has really changed the shape of academic writing – which has allowed particular affordances for students navigating the complex demands of academic writing in an additional language. It has also raised concerns about the outsourcing of the very productive struggle involved in learning and academic writing specifically.
“While we still don’t know the full long-term impact of GenAI use on second language development across language skills such as writing, we do know that not all patterns of usage are equal in terms of promoting students’ long-term academic and linguistic development,” says Tucker.
This study will use a sample of undergraduate and graduate students to explore the nature of engagement with GenAI for academic writing, and how this engagement interacts with and is shaped by learner characteristics.
Receiving this award will help extend Tucker’s existing research program in second language development to respond to a very current and pressing question in higher education: how students engage with and benefit from GenAI in academic writing.
“It also creates space for graduate student training in quantitative methods for students in CTL, which is an important part of developing this research,” says Tucker, who is grateful to be bestowed the award. “While this is a pressing theme across higher education, it is quite immediate for me because I teach courses in second language learning and second language writing, and the majority of my students are learning and writing in English—their second/additional language.
“The findings will hopefully deepen my understanding of how to support students’ disciplinary learning in this technological moment. Although my research focuses on students writing in an additional language, these questions are relevant to university students more broadly as they navigate academic writing in a GenAI-mediated world.”
Moore’s exploration of linguistic dissociation
Moore, who joined OISE faculty in 2025, is a critical applied linguist whose scholarship broadly aims at grasping the effects of power on the linguistic trajectories of plurilingual people, especially those belonging to equity-deserving groups.
“For me, [the award is] a form of recognition that sustains me as I try to introduce new theory to the field,” he said.
Through his doctoral research, he developed a new concept: linguistic dissociation. The concept describes a process through which some people experience a strong compulsion to distance themselves from parts of their linguistic repertoire because they have become entangled with negative social experiences.
“For example, in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainians who grew up with Russian as their first language felt compelled to distance themselves from Russian and invested in becoming speakers of Ukrainian,” Moore explained.
Different forms of linguistic dissociation have been observed for years, but we lacked a term for it, Moore added. “Since I introduced the concept of linguistic dissociation, people have reached out to share that it's helped them understand the complex relationship they have with certain parts of their linguistic repertoire.”
While its importance has been understood by many in the field, Moore says academia can be quite resistant to new ideas. But, this Connaught-funded study will help Moore further refine the theory – by testing it against a more diverse pool of participants, expand it by generating data about how it is experienced in an embodied sense, and start exploring its causal relationships with other phenomena like language attrition and second language investment.
“As the acceptance letter said, the Connaught New Researcher award represents a strong vote of confidence in my research program,” said Moore. “It's a shot in the arm as I move to the next phase of this work and establish linguistic dissociation as a new subfield across the language sciences.”
Dr. Rishi Krishnamoorthy (they/them), an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, was also recognized for their study “Examining barriers to science education among minoritized South Asian youth.”
Krishnamoorthy joined OISE faculty in 2024. They are currently on sabbatical until Spring/Summer 2027.
They are a science educator and learning scientist and their scholarship broadly examines the sociopolitical dimensions of youths’ learning – as shaped by race, gender, sexuality, class, and caste, as well as how ideologies (like post and settler colonialism, ethno-nationalism, and homophobia) shape knowledge creation in science education.
Their research questions examine how we might decolonize science education from a diasporic South Asian positionality by considering the many precolonial histories that shape classroom science teaching and learning.
This has involved collaboratively developing justice-oriented curricula with youth and teachers that desettles Eurocentric science and values multiple knowledge systems, and where science learning is aimed at our collective liberation.