Research

As an educator, my expertise lies in elementary literacy with an emphasis in literary interpretation.  In this statement I will address the past accomplishments and future directions of my research through four strands:  (a) children's engagement in literature, (b) the teaching of literature, (c) children's writing and writing assessment, and (d) interpretation of text through the arts.  All four of these strands carry a central theme of connecting children's lives with narrative text. 

 This was my first book about books.  My second is Interpreting Literature with Children (Wolf, 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum) (PDF).  In this text I've moved far beyond the lives of two very mainstream children as well as lives so closely connected to my own, to the many and varied lives of children engaging in literature in the classrooms of the master teachers I've taught at CU, Boulder.  Standing on the edges of two textbook genres—the survey of literature text and the literary criticism text—I leaned out beyond these foundations to explore how children respond to text in everyday classroom situations, especially when they are given opportunities to express their literary interpretation through talk, through culture, class, and gender, and through creative modes of expression including writing, the visual arts, and drama.  The early feedback on the book has been excellent.  Dr. Patricia Enciso, a well-known scholar of children's literary engagement wrote:  "To me the key to the book is interpretation.  That's the piece of children's literature instruction that's difficult to teach well.  Shelby hands it to the reader on a delicious platter.  Its strength is the expression and the description of teaching strategies coupled with Shelby's deep knowledge of literary forms.  It promises to be a powerhouse book."  Interpreting Literature with Children is the lead volume in Lawrence Erlbaum's new Literacy Teaching Series.

The Teaching of Literature
Yet texts standing twelve years apart have only book-ended my career thus far, and while the learning involved in writing my most recent book centered on my CU master's students, I have spent even more time researching how CU preservice teachers grow in their understandings of literacy in a diverse society.  Using my Children's Literature class for preservice and post-BA students as a research site, I first began to collect data in 1993, to understand the effects of using case studies of young children to prepare teachers to be more knowledgeable and skilled in supporting young children's engagement in literature.  I invited two of the undergraduates in my class, Angela Carey and Erikka Mieras, to join me in the analysis and write up of the work, and we were able to publish our research in three refereed journals:  Reading Research Quarterly (1996, lead article), The Journal of Literacy Research (1996, lead article), and The National Reading Conference Yearbook (1996).

Building from this work, and after redesigning my course in children's literature to increase its emphasis on diversity, I won a National Academy of Education Spencer Fellowship (1996-1998), an award which is given to only 30 scholars in the United States a year.  The grant supported my study of how immersion experiences with children enable preservice teachers to change in their perceptions of diversity, literature, and learning as well as how teacher educators themselves come to view the need for reflection about their teaching.  Following the pattern of working with student colleagues, I asked two of the preservice teachers in the study, Lisa Hill and Darcy Ballentine, to join me in the analysis and write up of the work, which appeared in four separate refereed articles: Theory into Practice (2001), The Journal of Literacy Research (2000), Research in the Teaching of English (1999), and The National Reading Conference Yearbook (1999).

Children's Writing and Writing Assessment
In addition to my work in literary engagement and the teaching of teachers, I've spent much time exploring the impact of state and national assessment initiatives on children's writing.  I worked for the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST), which is funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education.  In my first CRESST project, I worked with teachers on the power of literary criticism, for young writers will be more effective if they are given multiple opportunities to read and to talk analytically about text.  One of the articles stemming from this work was published in Language Arts (Wolf & Gearhart, 1994), and sections from the program we developed— "Writing What You Read"—have been reprinted in a number of textbooks.  In my second project, I focused on how young writers want to engage readers with refreshing and surprising language, yet few are provided the guidance for how to do it.  My doctoral student colleague, Dr. Kathy Davinroy, and I wrote a piece for the refereed journal Written Communication (1998, lead article) arguing that writing revolves around criticism, but if the assessment stays on the surface and encourages word substitution over content revision, then the criticism may be not be helpful in pushing the generative aspect of writing: the work of language.

My interest in language and writing assessment continued in my final CRESST project.  Here I joined Dr. Hilda Borko to study literacy assessment in Kentucky and Washington over a five-year period.  We followed master teachers of writing, and I wrote a variety of pieces focusing on the impact of large-scale writing assessment.  The first was a policy piece I wrote with my doctoral student colleague, Dr. Monette McIver, for Phi Delta Kappan (1999).  Together Dr. McIver and I wrote another piece for Language Arts (1999), where we followed the questioning strategies of an exemplary teacher of writing as she conferenced with her students.  In addition to the strong focus on writing instruction, I was the lead author for a CRESST-team piece for the American Educational Research Journal (2000).  Entitled "That Dog Won't Hunt:  Exemplary School Change Efforts Within the Kentucky Reform," our research presented case studies of four exemplary schools, arguing that teachers' responses to large-scale reform efforts exist in a larger web of connection and are dependent on their collaborative and consistently positive stance towards learning as well as their principal's leadership.  Thus human capital, the knowledge and willingness to learn on the part of individuals, is inextricably linked to social capital, the relationships of trust and willingness to risk among school personnel.  This article has garnered a number of positive comments from the research community, and it will be reprinted in an upcoming book entitled Deep Change: Reforming Schools for Significance AND Test Success, edited by Dr. Gerald Ponder and Dr. David Straham.  Furthermore, my CRESST work on writing instruction and its interrelationship to leadership and community in schools led to three additional co-authored pieces in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (2003), Educational Leadership (2002), and Language Arts (2002). 

Finally, my work on writing and writing assessment captured the attention of a major textbook publisher who asked me to serve as a senior author of Houghton Mifflin English (2001) and its Spanish edition Houghton Mifflin Lenguaje (2001).  This Kindergarten through eighth grade textbook series is designed to aid children in becoming accomplished writers with emphasis on a variety of writing genres (including writing to express an opinion, to persuade, to compare and contrast, to report on research, to share a personal narrative, and to tell a story) as well as on the conventions of grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  A new edition of this textbook series was released in 2004.

Interpretation of Text Through the Arts
My dissertation at Stanford University concerned how children dramatize written text.  Since that piece of research, I have been intrigued with how children express their interpretations of literature through the arts, especially through writing, drama, and the visual arts.  My early work in drama resulted in four articles in refereed journals from my dissertation:  The Reading Teacher (1993), Research in the Teaching of English (1994, lead article), The Journal of Curriculum Studies (1995, lead article), and Reading Research Quarterly (1998, lead article).  The second and fourth publications (RTE and RRQ) are two of the top journals in the field of literacy research.  In addition to working on these pieces, I wrote a refereed article (with Pat Enciso) on drama for the National Reading Conference Yearbook (1994), which stemmed from a session that Dr. Enciso and I conducted at the conference.  I also wrote a chapter on drama (with Dr. Enciso and Dr. Brian Edmiston) for the Handbook for Literacy Educators:  Research on Teaching the Communicative and Visual Arts (1997), which provides an overview of research on drama in education.  While my work in drama has been the most productive, I have also published refereed pieces on children's literary interpretations though the visual arts in The New Advocate (2001) and through writing in the Colorado Reading Council Journal (2003, lead article).

Most recently, I've joined a team of senior researchers, headed by Dr. Shirley Brice Heath, to examine how high-level linguistic forms are acquired and used habitually by young people involved in the arts, particularly drama and the visual arts.  Our International Enquiry Network team is working with Creative Partnerships, which "provides school children across England with the opportunity to develop creativity in learning and to take part in cultural activities of the highest quality."  Designed to be the most important cultural and creative program in a generation, Creative Partnerships is working to provide "a powerful, focused, high profile and inspirational tool of change, genuinely capturing the imagination of children, parents and carers, teachers and communities" (see http://www.creative-partnerships.com/aboutcp/).  Currently I'm conducting research in Bexhill Primary School, which is dedicated to drama, as well as with Hythe Community School, which is devoted to children's study of the visual arts.  In both sites, I have been working to link drama and art to literary interpretation.  Two sets of booklets have emerged from the work so far:  Visual Learning in the Community School (Creative Partnerships, 2004) (PDF) and Dramatic Learning in the Primary School (Creative Partnerships, 2005) (PDF).