Professor of Education
School of Education, Room 114
University of Colorado at Boulder
249 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0249
Phone: 303-492-8360
Fax: 303-492-7090
E-mail: shelby.wolf@colorado.edu

Shelby Wolf is professor of education and an award-winning teacher and educational scholar.  In 2006, she was invited to join the ranks of the University of Colorado President's Teaching Scholars —a guild of faculty from all three CU campuses who excel in teaching, scholarship, and research. Their mission is to endorse teaching excellence throughout the university. Dr. Wolf's research centers on children's language and learning through engagement in literature and collaborative as well as creative modes of expression—discussion, writing, the visual arts, and drama.  Her most recent book, Interpreting Literature with Children (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), portrays her close work with teachers as co-researchers in the study of children's literary learning.  She has worked within numerous school-change programs to validate the perspectives of teachers who undertake enquiry into how learning works in their classrooms.  She is a senior author of Houghton Mifflin English, a textbook series devoted to helping children improve as writers.  With Shirley Brice Heath, she wrote The Braid of Literature: Children's Worlds of Reading (Harvard University Press, 1992).

More recently, Dr. Wolf joined again with Shirley Brice Heath to look closely at how language, attention, inspiration, and collaboration within two schools in England changed through artistic partnership.  One set of booklets reports on Visual Learning in the Community School (Creative Partnerships, 2004) while another set concentrates on Dramatic Learning in the Primary School (Creative Partnerships, 2005). Dr. Wolf has continued this work on her own, and her latest publications are “The Mermaid's Purse: Looking Closely at Young Children's Art and Poetry” (Language Arts, 2006), “The Mysteries of Creative Partnerships” (Journal of Teacher Education, 2008) as well as a monograph entitled A Playwright's Life for Me! Young Children's Language & Learning Through Drama (Creative Partnerships, 2006). An upcoming monograph entitled From the ‘Mantle’ to Expertise: The Arc of Creative Partnerships will be published in 2008.

Dr. Wolf is now senior editor of The Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature with her editorial colleagues Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine Jenkins. The editors have assembled a group of internationally known scholars from education, English, and Library and Information Science for chapter contributions as well as a group of renowned children’s and young adult authors and illustrators to add their own perspectives on the field. The Handbook will be published by Routledge in 2010.

In 2007, Dr. Wolf began a new project with the Tate Modern Museum in London. She is following the progress of 12 children from two primary schools over a three-year period. Her work will focus on the "imaginative continuum" in young children and how that can be stretched to even greater capacity, not only through viewing the work of professional artists but through the children’s own creative endeavors. In the summer of 2008, Tate curators and artists Roy and Claire Smith showcased the children’s artwork in the exhibition “Looking for Change.”

Education:
PhD Language, Literacy, & Culture, Stanford University, 1992
MS Educational Studies, University of Utah, 1988
BA Elementary Education, University of Utah, 1977
BA Psychology, Westhampton College, University of Richmond, 1972