JoBeth Allen
Language and Literacy Education (Faculty)
Professor
309T Aderhold
Phone: 706.542.4526
Email: jobethal@uga.edu
Professor
JoBeth Allen conducts critical action research with teachers who are exploring issues of educational equity and social justice in relation to literacy teaching and learning at home, in schools, and in the community. She teaches courses on writing pedagogy, poetry, family-school partnerships, and critical pedagogies, and leads a qualitative research writing retreat each May. JoBeth also co-directs the Red Clay Writing Project. Her books in collaboration with teacher researchers include the following:
Engaging Children: Community and Chaos in the Lives of Young Literacy Learners; and Engaging Families: Connecting Home and School Literacy Communities with elementary teachers Betty (Shockley) Bisplinghoff and Barbara Michalove.
Exploring Blue Highways: Literacy Reform, School Change, and the Creation of Learning Communities with the Kingsbridge Road Research Team.
Class Action: Teaching for Social Justice in Elementary and Middle School with K-8 teachers in the research team Literacy Educators for a Democratic Society.
Two recent books highlight the work of teachers and focus on family-school partnerships: Creating Welcoming Schools: A Practical Guide to Home-School Partnerships with Diverse Families and Literacy in the Welcoming Classroom: Creating Family-School Partnerships that Support Student Learning. The books are written for study groups – teachers, family members, teacher educators, and community members – to read together and discuss ways in which they can become partners in supporting learning in grades K-12.
JoBeth has had the great good fortune to participate in several study groups with K-12 teachers in the Red Clay Writing Project. Red Clay’s K-12 Project Outreach action research team studied how teachers and students co-constructing critical pedagogies that employ the United Nations Rights of the Child as a critical content framework. A Critical Inquiry Framework for K-12 Teachers: Lessons and Resources From the U.N. Rights of the Child, written by the teacher researchers and co-edited with Lois Alexander, is in press (Fall 2012) with Teachers College Press.
Red Clay Writing Project’s Family Dialogue Journal action research team studied how teachers, students, and families from kindergarten to AP English classrooms dialogue weekly about what students are learning and what families contribute through their funds of knowledge related to that learning. We are co-authoring a book on family dialogue journals.