
Fleming Building, Room 400D
University of Colorado Boulder
249 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
Elizabeth Dutro is a professor of education, specializing in the area of literacy. Her research has investigated literacy education from children’s experiences in high-poverty classrooms to the accountability policies in reading and writing that impact those experiences. These research studies are linked by a commitment to educational equity, particularly for those children who have been least well served by public schools.
The primary strand of Dr. Dutro’s research grew from her encounters with children, curriculum, and educational policy in her own teaching in a high-poverty elementary school and is driven by questions about the intersections of literacy, identity, life experiences, and children’s and youth’s opportunities for positive, sustained, and productive relationships with schooling. Through close collaborations with children and teacher colleagues, her current studies include critical and affective framings of what trauma means and how trauma functions in classrooms; teachers' opportunities to learn together in the context of their daily work and relationships with children; and critical-affective pedagogies in teacher education and classroom literacies.
Elizabeth has received several awards for her scholarship and teaching, including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Promising Researcher Award and the Alan C. Purves Award (both from the National Council of Teachers of English), the Provost Faculty Achievement Award, and the Best Should Teach gold award and Boulder Faculty Assembly Teaching Excellence Award. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including American Educational Research Journal, Review of Research in Education, Teachers College Record, Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Teaching and Teacher Education, Urban Education, English Education, and Language Arts, Reading and Writing Quarterly, and Theory Into Practice. Her book "The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy" was published in 2019 by Teachers College Press.
Education
PhD Educational Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2000