Faculty
LCS Faculty
Gail Boldt (University of Hawai'i Manoa) has varied research interests which include constructions of identities in school settings, digital and new literacies, emotional aspects of reading and reading resistance, child and adolescent popular culture, gender and sexuality, early childhood and narrative inquiry. She is on the affiliated faculty of the Women's Studies program. She is a theorist working from post-structural and psychoanalytic perspectives. Her most recent book is the edited volume Love's Return: Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching and Learning. She spent seven warm and blissful years as an elementary teacher in an inquiry-based school in Honolulu, Hawai'i. Gail is Program Coordinator of LCS.
Kathleen Collins' (University of Michigan - Ann Arbor) program of research is designed to build to our understanding of the contextual factors, literacies, and interactional processes that contribute to the construction of school success and school failure. Her work explores what counts as “ability” and “disability” in specific instructional contexts and argues against deficit notions of ability. She has presented this work at national and international conferences, and her work has appeared in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, Learning Disabilities Quarterly, and English Journal. Her most recent book is Ability Profiling and School Failure: One Child's Struggle to be Seen as Competent. Her current research uses a multiple literacies framework to investigate the role of the arts in supporting children's acquisition of academic and content area literacies.
Jacqueline Edmondson (Penn State University) is currently Associate Dean for Teacher Education and Undergraduate Programs and Associate Professor of Education in Curriculum and Instruction (Language & Literacy Education). Her research focuses on reading education policy, critical theory, teacher education, rural schools and communities, and biography for adolescent readers.
Daniel Hade (Ohio State University) has taught in elementary schools and junior high schools, colleges and universities in Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. His research and teaching is focused on the study of children's literature, particularly on the nature and quality of the experiences readers have with children's literature, the social contexts in which readers read and interpret literature, and the interpretive stances children and teachers assume towards a piece of literature. Recent work has examined how children's reading is shaped by the manners in which writers produce, scholars critique, and teachers mediate children's literature and the assumptions about children as readers held by these adults. Dr. Hade is also the director of the World Campus Children's Literature Master's Degree program.
Elisa Hopkins (Penn State University) works in Children's Literature, primarily with the World Campus master's program.
Mark Kissling (Michigan State University) teaching and research interests include ecological citizenship and sustainability, place-based education (with respect to local communities and the nation-state), and the experiences of learners and teachers in the past, present, and future places that they inhabit (i.e., their “living curricula”). He has taught in a number of different contexts, including as a social studies teacher in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Scott Alan Metzger (Michigan State University) taught high school social studies in Michigan, specializing in world history. During these years he designed new Military History and History through Popular Culture courses, was an extracurricular quiz bowl and the theater director, served as social studies department chair, and was on the editorial board of the Michigan Council for the Social Studies teacher's journal. In 2006 he completed his doctoral research on educational uses of history feature films at Michigan State University. His research interests today include history teaching and learning, history-oriented media and uses of the past in popular culture, science fiction as "public pedagogy" social education, social studies curriculum and policies, as well as the history, sociology, and politics of education. Dr. Metzger's writing has appeared in the National Council for the Social Studies publications Social Education and Theory and Research in Social Education, the American Educational Research Association's Review of Educational Research, Military History Quarterly (MHQ), The Social Studies, The History Teacher, Journal of Social Studies Research, and Educational Policy. He also is co-author of Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies Classrooms (Routledge, 2010). Scott Metzger is a member of the American Educational Research Association (for which he served as Program Chair for the Teaching History group) as well as the College & University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies.
Jamie Myers (Indiana University, Bloomington) has been a literacy teacher since 1977. He has taught secondary school English and reading, as well as university undergraduate and graduate courses in language across the curriculum, reading remediation, ethnographic research, and English education. His scholarship explores the social contexts of classroom literacy events with particular attention to the cognitive, social, and political consequences of culturally valued curricular designs. His research confirms the problematic nature of individualistic, competitive, knowledge/skill transmission, and print only classrooms, especially in a world which has become less monolithic and formulaic, and more multicultural, multiliterate, and locally situated. His teaching seeks to construct curricular theories and practices for a more critical democratic citezenry.
Matthew E. Poehner (Penn State University) has worked as a language educator in private, secondary school, and university settings. His research interest is in understanding processes of second language development from a Vygotskian theoretical position and the implications of these insights for language teaching, learning, and assessment. His current work focuses on the integration of classroom-based assessment with teaching and learning. Recent publications include Dynamic Assessment: A Vygotskian Approach to Understanding and Promoting Second Language Development (Springer, 2008) and Sociocultural Theory and the Teaching of Second Languages (co-edited with James P. Lantolf, Equinox Publishing, 2008).
Kimberly Powell (Stanford University) has a joint appointment in Art Education. Focusing primarily on the arts as a form of multimodal literacy, her research and publications reflect a concern for the production of cultural meaning via the theoretical and methodological lenses of embodied learning, sociocultural learning theory, anthropology and cultural studies, aesthetics, and performance, particularly as these relate to diversity and identity. As an educational anthropologist, she pursues multi-sensory ethnographic research, and her publications reflect a concern with the visual, aural and bodily encounters and the ways in which they configure experience and meaning. Her sites of study include both schools and nonformal learning environments. She is the recipient of the Council on Anthropology and Education's 2007 Outstanding Dissertation Award for exemplary scholarship in the field of anthropology and education. Her dissertation is entitled "Learning together: Practice, pleasure, and identity in a Taiko drumming world."
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh's (McGill University) research interests include historical children's literature and culture, children's and youth popular culture, comparative media literacy and girlhood studies. A literary historian working with theoretical lenses drawn from cultural studies, children's studies, book history and feminist studies, she has written numerous articles and book chapters and co-edited and co-authored several books. These include Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia (2008). She is a founding editor of an award winning journal called Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2008--). She has a joint appointment with the Department of Women's Studies.
Stephanie C. Serriere (Indiana University, Bloomington) was an elementary classroom teacher and curriculum designer in both Italy and India. She has conducted international research in Macedonia and Japan, focusing especially on children's identity constructions of self and others and the possibilities creating a caring, yet critical democracy in the early elementary years. She is also interested in global perspectives and gender equality in classrooms, especially in the social studies.
Patrick Shannon's (University of Minnesota) teaching and research interests include literacy policy and its effects on teachers, students and society, the politics of reading, and critical literacy.
Elizabeth Smolcic specializes in English as a Second Language.
Jeanine Staples' (University of Pennsylvania) research program includes critical explorations of the ways media, popular culture, language, and technology intersect adolescent literacies in multiple teaching/learning contexts. As a new literacy theorist and practitioner, her work functions primarily from post-structural ethnographic standpoints. She is committed to affecting meaningful change in the preparation and education of literacy teachers both in- and outside-of-schools, particularly as they relate to disengaged students of color in urban areas. Jeanine is the recipient of the 2005 Ralph C. Preston Award for Scholarship in Teaching and Literacy Research in the Service of Social Justice. In 2007 she was named a Distinguished Educator in the State of Pennsylvania by Dr. Gerald L. Zahorchack, the Secretary of Education under Governor Edward G. Rendell. Most recently she was named a GATE Fellow in Teacher Preparation and Research. Jeanine's latest research is forthcoming in Educational Action Research, English Journal, and English Leadership Quarterly. Her current projects include a focus on the growing importance of assessing adolescents' (new) literacies, young adults' urban fiction texts, post 9/11-literacies, and linguistic violence.
Anne Whitney (University of California Santa Barbara) is a former high school English teacher. Her research and teaching addresses written composition, the teaching of writing, and professional development in language arts. This work has included studies in elementary, secondary, college and professional development settings, all sharing a particular focus on relationships between writing and learning.
Vivian Yenika-Agbaw (Penn State University), associate professor of literacy/children’s literature teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in children’s and adolescent literature. She has taught high school English, English language arts, and a variety of literature and composition courses in the departments of English and Education both in Cameroon and in the United States. Her research focuses on contemporary African and African Diasporic children’s/young adult literature, cultural and postcolonial studies, and adolescent/critical literacy. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and has served, or is currently serving on the editorial review boards of Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Language Arts, & several children’s books awards committees including IRA’s Notable Book for a Global Society, ChLA’s Phoenix Awards committee, ASA’s Children’s Africana Book Awards committee, and IRA’s Poetry and Prose Awards committee. In addition, she is an assistant editor of Sankofa: Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Her most recent book on literary criticism is Representing Africa in Children’s Literature: Old and New Ways of Seeing published by Routledge. She is also an affiliate faculty in the department of African, & African American Studies.
