Description

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The goal of this handbook is to offer teacher educators a blue print for strengthening and extending traditional literacy field experiences to include service-learning components. As literacy teacher educators, Sulentic Dowell and Meidl demonstrate how teacher education can be transformed to include more authentic, meaningful, and preparatory field experiences. Adding service-learning components expands teacher education to more adequately prepare elementary education candidates to meet children's needs in 21st century, urban elementary classrooms. This handbook considers the need to redefine and reconfigure teacher education in regards to literacy teaching and learning.

About the Author

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Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, Ph.D. is a professor of literacy and urban education at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, where she also serves as director of the LSU Writing Project and coordinator of the Elementary Grades 1-5 Teacher Education Program. Sulentic Dowell's research agenda is focused on literacy in urban settings, specifically the complexities of literacy leadership, providing access to literature, writing, and the arts, and service-learning as a pathway to preparing pre-service teachers to teach literacy authentically in urban environs. She was editor of the Literacy and Social Responsibility ejournal from 2009-2014. Sulentic Dowell spent 15 years as an educator in the Waterloo, Iowa Community Schools and was a service-learning faculty fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg. She is also former assistant superintendent for 64 elementary schools in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System. Tynisha D. Meidl, Ph.D. is associate professor of teacher education at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI where she also serves as the co-chair of the teacher education program. She earned her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from Pennsylvania State University. Meidl teaches literacy courses aimed at assisting pre-service teachers enter the classroom as proficient literacy teachers. Her research expertise includes curriculum planning for linguistically and culturally diverse student populations, service-learning as pedagogy, as well as Freirean-based approaches in literacy classrooms. Prior to joining the faculty at St. Norbert, she taught in the Baltimore City Public Schools and in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Meidl is a Teach for America Almuni and current co-editor of the Literacy and Social Responsibility ejournal.