Teaching

I began my teaching career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia, where I taught English as a second language to teenagers and adults. Then, after receiving my teacher's license, I was an elementary school teacher for eight years in the United States, Bolivia, and Saudi Arabia. When I began my doctoral work, my first university teaching position was in the Stanford Teacher Education Program, where I helped prepare master's students for positions as secondary teachers. Since 1992, I have been a teacher at the School of Education and have taught a range of students—preservice teachers (undergraduates and post-BA students working towards elementary licensure), master's students (practicing K-12 public school teachers), as well as doctoral students who ultimately want to teach teachers. In 1999, I won the Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Courses frequently taught:

EDUC 4311: Children's Literature & Literary Engagement in Elementary Schools
This course prepares teacher education candidates for teaching children's literature in a social context.  Participants will understand (a) theoretical and developmental processes associated with literary learning, (b) methods for teaching literature in a diverse society, and (c) the integration of classroom instruction with the Colorado Model Content Standards that foster such processes

A generous portion of the course concentrates on five kinds of criticism that are most appropriate for elementary children: (a) genetic criticism with a focus on the author, (b) formal criticism with highly specific attention to the text itself, (c) text-to-text criticism with an emphasis on how one written text fits within the larger body of literature, (d) transactional criticism with an eye on the reader's interaction with the text, and (e) sociocultural criticism with an emphasis on cultural, political, and social-historical perspectives.  The central textbook, Children's Books in Children's Hands, provides teacher education candidates with a thorough explanation of the history of children's literature, the narrative components essential to excellent literature, as well as numerous examples of quality tradebooks and the authors and illustrators who create them.  In short, this course is designed to heighten teacher education candidates' abilities to interpret literature with children.

EDUC 4311 is restricted to students admitted to the elementary teacher education program. Students must have completed the prerequisite (EDUC 3013) prior to registering for EDUC 4311.

EDUC 5255: Processes in Literary Interpretation
This course stresses curiosity, observation, challenge, and insight into how children and adolescents learn to become literate. These processes have much to do with the work and play of literary interpretation, for it is through analytic reading, substantive discussion, reflective writing, visual representation, and dramatic enactment that readers learn to take the words from the page to inform and transform their worlds. The purpose of the class is to expand students' understanding of literary engagement. The conceptual frame builds on theory and research in literary criticism, with a generous portion devoted to genre and its impact on the other narrative components of character, setting, plot, theme, point of view, style, and tone. Each of these components shifts and changes depending on the critical perspective. But the study of literary forms, even with the added zest of the various types of criticism, would make a poor formula for the classroom if children's transactions with text weren't invited into the mix, especially their views of culture, class, and gender. Indeed, who children are is inextricably blended with how they will engage in literature, and it will affect their talk, their writing, their drama, and even their art as they construct meaning from text.

This course is restricted to students admitted to the Master's in Literacy Program. Students must have completed the prerequisite—EDUC 5245—prior to registering for EDUC 5255.

EDUC 5165: Children's Literature—The Art of the Picture Book
This course is designed to engage students in the world of the picture book—the words, art, symbols, and stories (both on and off the page) that are constructed to extend children's perceptions of narrative. Although some treat the picture book as a genre in itself, children's book illustration spreads across multiple genres of prose and poetry. As children's literature expert Perry Nodelman explains: "Not only is the picture book story the most common form of children's literature, but it's a form of storytelling almost exclusively reserved for children."