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Maren Aukerman
Assistant Professor
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Education
1992: B.A., Religion, Williams College
2000: M.A., Education (Advanced
Reading and Language Leadership Program),
University of
California, Berkeley
2004: Ph.D., Education (Language, Literacy, and Culture),
University of
California,
Berkeley
Areas of Expertise
Reading comprehension
Classroom discourse
Literacy learning and teaching
Teacher professional development
Professional
Biography
Starting as
a bilingual elementary teacher in
Phoenix
, Dr. Aukerman has taught reading to
children in a variety of contexts. She completed certification as a reading
specialist in the Collaborative Literacy Intervention Project/Lectura En
Acción, a literacy tutorial program for first-graders, and later helped direct
a five-year action research project that served more than 300 struggling
intermediate and adolescent readers in
Oakland
and
Berkeley
. This work challenged her to develop
models of narrative assessment, tutorial instruction, and dialogic small-group
discussions to build meaningfully on the existing strengths and passions of
students who had often become quite skeptical of reading and of school
generally. She prepared graduate and undergraduate students for this line of
work but also continued working directly with children for the duration of the
project.
Dr. Aukerman is deeply
involved in the professional development of reading teachers and brings
interested teachers together to investigate the relationship between the nature
of classroom talk and reading instruction. In addition to collaborating on
school reform efforts, she has provided instructional leadership for a number
of practice-based professional development academies for teachers, including
academies focused on emergent literacy, science/literacy and
mathematics/literacy integration, and academic literacies for middle and high
school students.
Dr. Aukerman joined the
faculty at Penn GSE in the fall of 2004. She is currently a member of the
editorial board of Language Arts.
Research
Interests and Current
Projects
Dr. Aukerman’s research focuses on the relationship between talk and
learning, both among child readers and their teachers. She has investigated how
children become differently accountable to each other and to the text when the
teacher deliberately steps away from a position of primary textual authority,
and she has explored what those findings might mean to teachers in professional
development settings. In a recent project, partially funded by a Penn
University Research Foundation grant, she examined teacher learning and the nature
of student textual talk in the context of two professional development
academies for middle school content area teachers.
Dr.
Aukerman’s additional areas of inquiry include the ways in which classroom talk
can reify or interrupt understandings that children and teachers hold about
ability; the affordances of various genres, including content area texts, for
shared textual inquiry by children learning to read; and documenting change over
time in children’s social and intellectual participation in classroom talk
about text.
Courses Taught
EDUC 533.001: Forming and Reforming the Elementary Reading/Writing/Literacy
Curriculum
EDUC 836.001: Issues in Instructional Leadership in
Reading and Writing
EDUC 626.001: The Discourses of Teaching Reading
EDUC 525.001: Fieldwork for Reading Specialists
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