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PROFILE Professor Emerita
University of Michigan
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I taught junior high school and high
school English for nine years in California public schools before earning a
master's degree in Composition and teaching for ten years in the Writing
Program at the University of California in Santa Barbara. While still a high school teacher, I became a founding Fellow and Assistant Director of UCSB's National Writing Project site, and remained an active member in multiple capacities for 17 years until moving to the University of Michigan. I am now Associate Director of the Oakland Writing Project, and I sponsor the Michigan Classroom Discourse Group (MCDiG) for practitioners interested in applying discourse analysis to their own work. Prior to moving to
Michigan, I taught and supervised the English education cohort of the Teacher
Education Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara for ten
years and earned a doctorate in Education with an emphasis in Language, Culture
and Literacy.
I have dedicated my program of research to building theoretical and practical understandings of classrooms in which children who are at risk of failing or of being marginalized have successful opportunities to participate and learn. My research has focused at the micro level on what transpires over time through classroom interactions in order to address macro-social and political educational issues about equity, inclusivity, standards, and assessment. I focus mainly on high school English language arts classrooms containing students who are often not thought to fit in their particular school setting. These have been students designated as having learning disabilities, students for whom English is a second language, students from a lower or remedial track, or students whose race, class or gender differs from those with whom they learn. I have looked at how these students' social and academic identities are reshaped and included as they participate in classroom learning. I have also described the kinds of English language arts practices that provide them with opportunities to engage and improve their literacy. I have focused on what the teachers say to their students, and on how, as they talk with them over time, they build an inclusive learning environment. I have written a number of books that make use of the last 14 years of my work in this area. I have been able to
illustrate the impact of national and local political trends on classroom
practices that impact teachers and young people in counter-productive ways;
to provide a framework for studying classroom interactions when race is a
factor; to illustrate how students not classified in school as good readers
and writers can perform like those who are; and to demonstrate how the stories
teachers tell as they teach powerfully influence which of their students can
succeed. I also study how
teachers learn with and from each other in professional learning groups.
I described the power and politeness moves of one I have been working
with for ten years, to illustrate how civil cooperation and learning grew
amid continual disagreement. To do this work, I
"live" in schools, finding ways to observe and to participate as an
ethnographer and a discourse analyst using video recording. The classroom
teacher and I work as co-researchers on each classroom research project, and
become resources for the school's change efforts. Through my role as a book series editor, I promote the publication of books that forward educational equity and fairness through the study of discourse and social processes. Through my own publications, and those I write with students and colleagues, I explain important social dimensions of classroom teaching and learning in ways practitioners as well as scholars and researchers might find useful. |
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