TEACHER EDUCATION
I am committed to working with pre-service teachers to develop deep foundations in theories of literacy and approaches to teaching it equitably. Through personalized, dialogic instruction, I work to expand what we believe literacy education can do in students’ lives and in the world.
What Does Literacy Do?
Literacy is often thought of as the skills of reading and writing. This class takes a different approach. We engage with literacy as a socio-historic phenomenon that has spread widely, through the circulation of people and texts. In this view, literacy is more a social trend than a set of skills, although skills play a part in how it is experienced. Understanding the contours of this social trend is essential for effective literacy instruction: Whether we are cognizant of it or not, when we intervene in people’s literacy development as teachers, we are also intervening in history, aligning ourselves with particular ideologies of literacy and distancing ourselves from others. In other words, the social history of literacy profoundly matters for our work in the present. In this class, we read from fields as diverse as in fields as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, history, literary studies, education, linguistics, sociology, and psychology to answer the following questions: How has literacy been a force for both oppression and liberation? And what as teachers would we like literacy to do in our students’ lives and in the world?
Advanced Content Methods in English Education
What makes a writer a writer? And how might we nurture writers’ and readers’ development in our classrooms in equitable ways? This course, for students earning their MS in secondary English education, explores these questions. We first develop a vocabulary to understand our own and others’ writing and reading practices within larger social contexts. Then, we grapple with how to help students intervene in these contexts through their writing. To do so, we address three of the most complex tasks in the teaching of literacy: developing authentic writing assignments, responding authentically to writers’ work, and developing practices of anti-racist writing assessment. Finally, through conducting a literacy ethnography, pre-service teachers develop a deeper understanding of students’ literacy lives in and out of schools, as well as the pressures shaping their literacy practices. Grounding this class is a belief supported by decades of empirical research: Literacy is about communication. And so to teach literacy, teachers must engage with students as communicative partners with full and complex linguistic repertoires.