简介

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. She has conducted intensive qualitative investigations of classrooms in four state contexts, centrally examining issues of gender and sexual diversity, race, and class in children’s reading and writing practices. Through close collaborations with children, youth, and teachers, her current study engages the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies to consider how difficult life experiences enter schools, the role and consequence of responses to students’ lives, and the relationships and critical stances necessary if classrooms are to be supportive, productive spaces for learning. She is also investigating how critical-emotional and relational practices can be enfolded into core practices of literacy instruction in practice-based teacher education. Across her studies, Elizabeth’s findings emphasize the consequences of children’s encounters with school literacy practices for their social and academic positioning in classrooms. She argues that we need to better understand both how to provide access to opportunities to achieve success in the ways that officially count in US schools and how to expand what counts to include the knowledge and learning that cannot be captured in the high stakes assessments that are the primary focus of current accountability policies. Elizabeth has received several awards for her scholarship, including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Walgreen Award for Outstanding Literacy Scholarship from the University of Michigan, the Promising Researcher Award and the Alan C. Purves Award (both from the National Council of Teachers of English) and the Frank Pajares award from Theory Into Practice. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including Review of Research in Education, Teachers College Record, Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Urban Education, English Education, Language Arts, Reading and Writing Quarterly, and Theory Into Practice.