Dr. Turner's research projects have been funded through numerous grants, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Education Research Conference Award; the William T. Grant (Inaugural) Writing Fellowship; the Elva Knight Research Grant from the International Reading Association; the Global Awareness in Teacher Education (GATE) fellowship from the Longview Foundation/UMCP; and through the Maryland Institute for Minority and Urban Education (MIMAUE), the Graduate School, and the Qualitative Research Interest Group (QRIG)/Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland. Dr. Turner’s scholarship appears in leading academic journals, including Teachers College Record, Research in the Teaching of English, Race Ethnicity and Education, Journal of Negro Education, Action in Teacher Education, and Literacy. With a strong commitment to praxis, Dr. Turner also publishes in practitioner journals including Theory into Practice, The Reading Teacher, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Language Arts, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique. Her book, Change is Gonna Come: Transforming Literacy Education for African American Students (with Patricia A. Edwards and Gwendolyn McMillon) won the 2011 Edward Fry Book Award from the Literacy Research Association. 

Dr. Turner’s current line of research blends critical multimodal literacy and arts-based research methods to theorize and visualize the futurities of Black youth. In this work, she hosts "freedom dreaming sessions" where Black youth creatively compose drawings, digital collage, and photography to design their own futures, envisioning possible professional work, life goals, and racially-just societies. An example of a career dream drawing created by Jihanna (Pseudonym; age 10) appears below and in Dr. Turner's 2020 article "Freedom to Aspire: Black children's career dreams, aspirational supports, and Africentric values" in Race, Ethnicity, and Education.