Teachers, Students, and Families Together: Nurturing Literate Communities
The 22nd WLU Summer Institute extends an invitation to teachers, families, and students to share their stories of the experiences they have had within and beyond the classroom to nurture the literate identities of the communities in which they live.
Ernest Morrell
Ernest Morrell is the incoming director of Teachers College’s Institute for Urban Minority Education (IUME) at Columbia University. He is a nationally prominent scholar in literacy, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, urban education and ethnic studies as well as a writer of poems, plays, essays, novels, academic books, book chapters, articles, and encyclopedia entries. Ernest is the author of Linking Literacy and Popular Culture: Finding Connections for Lifelong Learning and Becoming Critical Researchers: Literacy and Empowerment for Urban Youth. For more than a decade he has worked with adolescents, drawing on their involvement with popular culture to promote academic literacy development.
Ernest has recently been elected to the office of NCTE vice president and will take office during the NCTE Annual Convention in Chicago this November. He was been a member of the NCTE CEE Executive Committee (2003-07) and has served on several NCTE committees.
Visit Ernest's website at http://www.ernestmorrell.com
Join Ernest on Thursday evening, July 21 from 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Mariana Souto-Manning
Mariana Souto-Manning, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education in Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. From a critical perspective, she examines the sociocultural and historical foundations of early schooling, language development, and literacy practices. She studies how children, families, and teachers from diverse backgrounds shape and are shaped by discursive practices, employing a methodology that combines discourse analysis with ethnographic investigation. Her work can be found in journals such as Early Child Development and Care, Early Childhood Education Journal, Journal of Early Childhood Research, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, and Teachers College Record. She is the Assistant Chair of the Early Childhood Education Assembly of NCTE.
Join Mariana on Friday morning, July 22 from 8:30-9:45 a.m.
Kadir Nelson
Kadir Nelson began drawing at the age of three, and painting at age ten. Nelson experimented with several different media and began painting in oils at sixteen. He would later submit his paintings to art competitions and win an art scholarship to study at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Upon graduating with honors, Nelson began his professional career as an artist, publishing his work and receiving commissions from publishers and production studios such as Dreamworks, where he served as a the lead conceptual artist for Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad” and “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” Sports Illustrated, Coca-Cola, The United States Postal Service and Major League Baseball, among others.
In 1999, Nelson began to collaborate with several notable authors on a series of picture books. Presently, almost twenty illustrated books are in print, including Debbie Allen's Dancing in the Wings, Ntozake Shange’s Coretta Scott King Award-winning book, Ellington Was Not A Street, Deloris and Roslyn Jordan's best-seller Salt in His Shoes, Spike and Tonya Lee’s Please, Baby, Please, and Carol Boston Weatherford’s Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led her People to Freedom, for which Nelson won a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, a Caldecott Honor and an NAACP Image Award.
Most recently, Nelson released his authorial debut, We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball (Jump at the Sun/Disney), a New York Times best-selling tribute to the Negro Baseball Leagues which Nelson crafted over a period of almost eight years. It was named a 2009 NCTE Orbis Pictus Honor Book.
Visit Kadir's website at http://www.kadirnelson.com
Join Kadir on Saturday morning, July 22 from 8:30-9:45 a.m.
Linda Christensen
Linda Christensen is the Director of the Oregon Writing Project (OWP), located in the Graduate School of Education at Lewis & Clark College. The OWP is part of the National Writing Project network, the oldest and largest professional development project in the United States. For the last thirty years, she has taught high school Language Arts and worked as Language Arts Curriculum Specialist in Portland, Oregon. Linda is the author of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word and co-editor of Rethinking School Reform: Views from the Classroom and Rethinking Our Classrooms. Her articles about literacy and social justice have appeared in numerous journals.
Read more about Linda at http://www.lclark.edu/graduate/faculty/members/linda_christensen
Join Linda on Sunday morning, July 24 from 10:30-Noon