FEATURED  SPEAKERS

Kathleen Blake Yancey

Kathleen Blake Yancey is Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University, where she directs the doctoral program in rhetoric and composition.  Yancey is currently the President of NCTE.

Yancey served as the 2004 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and as Chair of the College Section of NCTE from 1998 to 2001. A Past President of The Council of Writing Program Administrators, she co-founded the journal Assessing Writing and co-edited it for 7 years, and in 2003, she co-founded the National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, which she continues to co-direct.

Yancey is the author, editor, or coeditor of over 50 chapters and articles and of eight books: Portfolios in the Writing Classroom (1992), Voices on Voice (1994), Assessing Writing Across the Curriculum (1997), Situating Portfolios (1997), Reflection in the Writing Classroom (1998), Self-Assessment and Development in Writing (2000), Electronic Portfolios (2001), and Teaching Literature as Reflective Practice (2004).  

Kylene Beers

Kylene Beers is Senior Reading Advisor to Secondary Schools, Teachers College, Columbia University, and Chair of the National Adolescent Literacy Coalition.  Beers edited NCTE's Voices from the Middle from 1999-2006, and is an inaugural member of the NCTE Middle Level Section Steering Committee.  Beers is currently the President-Elect of NCTE.

Beers has authored several books including When Kids Can't Read/What Teachers Can Do (2003), Into Focus, Understanding and Creating Middle School Readers (1998).  Beers co-edited Books for You in 2001, and Your Reading in 1996.  Beers has also contributed articles to English Journal, Voices from the Middle, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and School Library Journal.

Sandy Hayes

NCTE Middle Level Section Chair and practicing middle school teacher. Sandy Hayes has passionately used digital technologies with her 8th grade students since before computers came with delete keys. The successes of even her struggling students with technology-enhanced projects has convinced her that the current narrow definition of literacy leaves students behind in the range of skills they need, and often use outside of school, today. Her Technology Toolkit column in the NCTE middle level journal Voices from the Middle explores the use of a variety of media and technologies in the classroom. She has also compiled classroom examples of 21st Century learning for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Framework. 

William Kist

William Kist is an associate professor at Kent State University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses focused on adolescent literacy. Kist is an NCTE Consultant and has numerous published articles to his credit, including his book New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media (2005, Teachers College Press). Most recently, Kist has helped lead development of NCTE's Pathways for 21st Century Literacy, a multi modal, professional development experience that will be introduced during this Institute. In addition to his work in education, Kist has worked as a video/film producer and musician. Kist is editing one independent feature film, Summer’s Journey, and is developing his original screenplay, Field Trip, to be filmed as an independent feature in 2008.

Ernest Morrell

Ernest Morrell is Associate Professor of Urban Education and Cultural Studies and Associate Director of Youth Research at the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) at UCLA. He is a writer of poems, plays, essays, novels, and academic books, book chapters, articles, reviews, and encyclopedia entries. For more than a decade he has worked with adolescents, drawing on their involvement with popular culture to promote academic literacy development. Morrell is the author of, Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning and Becoming Critical Researchers: Literacy and Empowerment for Urban Youth. Morrell has been invited to give numerous keynote addresses for postsecondary institutions and national organizations and he consults with schools in urban areas including Boston and Los Angeles.

Fran Sharer

Fran Sharer has worked with Virginia Beach middle and high school teachers for nearly a decade to help them implement progressive curricula and pedagogy. Using a –teach-the-teacher model, Virginia Beach began its initial work in 1999 on print portfolios. Rejecting a templated portfolio model, they instead focused on supporting teachers who created outcomes-based diverse models appropriate for their students. Three years ago, Fran helped lead a new initiative: the development of a curriculum for the 21st century—one that includes work both on print texts and in electronic environments.  Critical to the success of this endeavor has been two features: (1) the development of a community of teacher learners and (2) the belief that significant sustained change comes through ongoing teacher training.

Sara Kajder

Sara Kajder is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech whose teaching has been anchored in assisting middle and high school students to connect out of school literacies with in school literacies--including helping students create webquests (in the early days of the web); use blogs and digital storytelling tools; and engage with web 2.0 tools like twitter,wikis and podcasts.  Regardless of which tool(s) we use, Sarah focuses on the uses of new literacies to produce knowledge and put that knowledge to work.  Recipient of the National Technology Leadership Fellowship, she is the author of Bringing the Outside In (2006) and The Tech Savvy English Classroom (2004).

Helen Barrett

Dr. Helen Barrett has been researching strategies and technologies for electronic portfolios since 1991, publishing a website (http://electronicportfolios.org), chapters in several books on Electronic Portfolios, and numerous articles. In the fall of 2007, she received a courtesy appointment as a Research Associate with the Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE), part of the College of Education at the University of Oregon, where she is researching emerging strategies for electronic portfolios and digital storytelling to support lifelong and life wide learning. She is currently working on several book projects on electronic portfolios. She is also an Apple Distinguished Educator and a George Lucas Educational Foundation Faculty Associate.

Elizabeth Beagle

Elizabeth Beagle, a high school teacher working with adolescents in grades 10 and 12, has focused on ways that electronic texts can engage students while helping them develop the literacies fundamental to their future. Elizabeth has introduced students to a multitude of digital media including sound recordings, blogs, and websites. She has also worked with  students on creating digital portfolios, assisting them to use appropriately and reflectively the affordances of the web.  She has written book chapters for the Tapestry book series; she is a designer of the Virginia Beach 21st century curriculum for 12th grade English; and she is a consultant on the NCTE Pathway for 21st century literacies.

Michael Neal

Michael Neal is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. In all his classes—from first-year composition to graduate classes--he emphasizes new media literacies, helping students create multi-modal  essays and literacy narratives, visual reflections, and hypertext compositions. Michael has also directed a technology-rich, first-year composition program and has served as an ePortfolio fellow, where he led university-wide faculty focus groups on instituting ePortfolios. He has also led multiple faculty workshops on writing across the curriculum and has consulted with several schools on digital composing and assessment.

Patsy M. Hall

For the past fifteen years, Patsy M. Hall has served as a lead educator in Indianapolis Public Schools as Elementary Classroom Teacher, Instructional Coach, Middle Grades Literacy Coach, and is currently the Title I, Professional Development Facilitator. In addition, she is an active member of the NCTE Professional Development Cohort and served as the NCTE Elementary-Representative-At Large (2005-2007) and on the NCTE Task Force to Advance and Support Members of Color.

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