Professional Biography
Jen McLaughlin Cahill’s dissertation research was a practitioner study examining her queer-inclusive teaching, culturally relevant pedagogy, and LGBTQIA+-themed young adult (YA) book club curriculum. This work has been presented at NCTE and AERA conferences and published in The English Journal. During her doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, Jen taught the Seminar in the Teaching of English (A&HE 4557) and Adolescents and Literature (A&HE 4052) courses for in-service and pre-service teachers in the English Education program in the Department of Arts and Humanities. While at TC, she was a facilitator at the Student Press Initiative Summer Institute, a cooperating teacher mentoring student teachers, and a co-presenter with TC faculty and colleagues at NCTE conferences.
During Jen’s doctoral studies, she was employed by the New York City Department of Education where she taught for over 22 years at a Grade 6–12 Title I public school within the New York Performance Standards Consortium. Jen authored literacy curricula and performance-based assessments, primarily in English Language Arts, at every grade level. She was devoted to a collaborative community of practice and professional development, spending several summers learning at the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, and gathering colleagues to present their innovative literacy work at numerous NCTE Annual Conventions. Jen cultivated loving and intellectually rigorous classrooms and hosted visitors from local, national, and international schools. She published a co-authored essay in the Harvard Educational Review about the impact of Barack Obama’s historic election and what it meant to her students.
Jen is a former member of GLSEN’s Educator Advisory Committee and is an Educator for Hope with Hope in a Box, a nonprofit organization that sends LGBTQIA+-themed books to rural and Title I schools. She is a member of NCTEAR, ELATE, NCTE, Literacy Research Association (LRA), and AERA’s Division K and Queer Studies Special Interest Group. Her recently published essay, “Blurring Ethnographic and Practitioner Research Methodologies and Affirming Queer and Trans Youth” appears in Bridging the Rainbow Gap: Possibilities and Tensions in Queer and Trans Studies in Education.
Jen is committed to equitable, anti-racist education, and reimagining schools as ethical spaces of creativity, inquiry, and growth for all students inclusive of race, ethnicity, culture, ability, socioeconomic status, gender identity, sexual orientation, language, and beyond. Her research interests include sociocultural approaches to literacy development, the potentialities of inquiry-driven, project-based learning, and asset-based approaches to teaching through critical literacy and culturally relevant, queer pedagogies.
