Joanne Larson
Michael W. Scandling Professor of Education and Chair of the Teaching and Curriculum Program
Teaching & Curriculum
LeChase Hall 478
Office Phone: (585) 275-0900
Fax: 486-1159
jlarson@warner.rochester.edu
Personal Home Page
Joanne Larson joined the Warner School faculty in 1995 and currently serves as chair of teaching and curriculum and teaches master’s level literacy courses, as well as doctoral level courses on curriculum, teaching and change, and introductory and advanced qualitative research methods.
Larson serves as the director of the Genesee Valley Writing Project where she leads the Annual Summer Institute and all follow-up school year programs focused on improving the quality of student writing and learning in urban, suburban, and rural PK-16 schools across Monroe County and surrounding counties. She is finishing a three-year term as chair of the National Council of Teachers of English’s Standing Committee of Research. She serves on the editorial board of several peer-review journals, including Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and Reading Research Quarterly. Most recently, she was appointed by Kris Gutierrez to serve as AERA program chair for the 2011 conference in New Orleans.
Larson’s ethnographic research examines how language and literacy practices mediate social and power relations in literacy events in schools and communities. She is currently analyzing data from a three-year ethnography with colleague Nancy Ares. She is the editor of Literacy as Snake Oil: Beyond the Quick Fix, Second Edition (Lang, 2007) and co-editor of Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (Sage, 2003), currently in production of a second edition due fall 2011. Her book, Making Literacy Real: Theories and Practices in Learning and Teaching (2005), co-authored with Jackie Marsh, explores the breadth of the complex and important field of literacy studies, orientating literacy as a social practice grounded in social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. Larson's journal publications include research articles in Research in the Teaching of English; Written Communication: Linguistics and Education; Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and Discourse and Society.
Larson has recently branched out from traditional publication venues to collaboratively produce documentary films with filmmaker David Smith. The first was a professional development film that focused on teaching literacy in the current reductionist pedagogical context. The second, entitled A Life Outside, was a film documenting the teaching life of Lynn Astarita Gatto, 2004 New York State Teacher of the Year. She is currently working on a documentary about a local SLAM poetry team, entitled SLAM High.