Ideas That Changed Literacy Practices: First Person Accounts from Leading Voices

Dennis Sumara is Dean Emeritus and Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Calgary. His areas of research and teaching include literacy education, queer studies in education, curriculum theory, and teacher education. His scholarly work has critiqued problematics associated with normativity in literacy education, curriculum studies, and teacher education. It also has informed creating productive ways to make schooling more inviting to the many individuals and groups who have in the past found themselves excluded. In so doing, he has been able to demonstrate how critically analyzing conceptions of normal and normativity in teaching and learning can create more inclusive and productive situations for everyone. Sumara wasco-founder of the Journal for the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, former Editor of Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and currently is Editor of Teaching Education Journal. He was awarded the 2003 Ed Fry Book Award by the National Reading Conference for his book Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters and the 2019 Canadian Association for Teacher Education Award for Distinguished Research Contributions. Donna E. Alvermann is the Omer Clyde and Elizabeth Parr Aderhold Professor in Education and Distinguished Research Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. Her interests include developing historical-autobiographical methods for uncovering silences that keep literacy research and scholarly writing from masking more than they disclose. Alvermann's research focuses on young people's critical digital literacies, their uses of popular culture, and a Foucauldian approach to genealogy involving historical texts. She is lead editor on the 7th edition of Theoretical Models and Processes of Literacy, and has published in the field's leading research journals, including, Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, and the American Educational Research Journal. She is the recipient of numerous awards and was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 1999. From 1992-1997, Alvermann directed the National Reading Research Center at the University of Georgia (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6881-0657).