Lawrence R. Sipe Associate Professor Reading/Writing/Literacy Program Language in Education Division Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 Office Telephone: 215-898-1920 Fax: 215-573-2109 E-mail: lsipe@gse.upenn.edu Prof. Sipe's Home Page

Education
1971: B.A., English Language and Literature, The University of Chicago
1974: B.S., Elementary Education, Bloomsburg State College
1980: M.Ed., Psychology of Reading, Temple University
1996: Ph.D., Department of Educational Theory and Practice, The Ohio State University

Areas of Expertise
Literature written for children and adolescents
Early childhood education
Emergent literacy

Professional Biography
Dr. Sipe has been a sole-charge teacher and principal in a one-room school in Newfoundland (two years); the head of a team of four teachers in the primary unit of a private school in New Jersey (four years); an instructor in a program in reading and study skills for entering freshmen at Temple University (two years); and a program coordinator responsible for in-service and professional development, supervision, and development of programs for a school board in Newfoundland (13 years). He came to Penn GSE in 1996 as an assistant professor and was given tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2002.

Dr. Sipe has received awards and fellowships, including the 1991 Teaching Excellence Award, Department of Education, Province of Newfoundland; the 1996 Martha King Scholarship, The Ohio State University, College of Education; the 1997 Outstanding Dissertation Award, College Reading Association; the 1997 Student Outstanding Research Award, National Reading Conference; the 1998 Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award, International Reading Association; the 1998 Promising Researcher Award, National Council of Teachers of English; the 1998 Salzburg Seminar Presidential Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania; the 2001 Early Career Achievement Award from the National Reading Conference; the 2005 Teaching Excellence Award from GSE; and the University of Pennsylvania’s 2007 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Sipe’s research interests center around literature for children and adolescents. He is interested in the ways children talk about and respond to books in the classroom and in their developing literary understanding. His special interest is in picturebooks, the ways in which young children interact with them, and the use of literary theory to illuminate these interactions. Other areas of interest include assisting teachers in refining and extending their literary critical abilities; the ways in which literary understanding and aesthetic awareness merge with and support emergent literacy; how children and adults co-construct interpretive communities and form implicit definitions of literary competence; how culture, ethnicity, and gender are related to children’s literary responses; and the ways in which literature for children reflects, inscribes, or subverts cultural norms.

Dr. Sipe’s current projects include research into teachers’ varying styles of reading stories aloud to children. He is also investigating the ways in which young children display resistance to stories and the ways in which they use visual features of picturebooks to make meaning. A forthcoming book based on the body of his research will lay out a theory of the literary understanding of children in their first years of schooling, using this theory to extend and broaden the current views of what constitutes comprehension in literacy teaching and learning. In cooperation with primary-grade teachers, he is also developing a curriculum for primary-age children that links visual literacy and aesthetic development with reading and writing. Another project is a co-edited book on postmodern picturebooks.

Courses Taught
EDUC 535: Literature for Children and Adolescents
EDUC 622: Responding to Literature
EDUC 662: Picturebooks and the Practice of Literacy
EDUC 666: Young Adult Fiction

Selected Publications
Sipe, L.R. & Brightman, A. (2006) Teacher scaffolding of first-graders’ literary understanding during readalouds of fairytale variants. National Reading Conference Yearbook.

Sipe, L.R., & McGuire, C. (2006) Picturebook endpapers: Resources for literary and aesthetic interpretation. Children's Literature in Education

Sipe, L.R., & McGuire, C. (2006) Young children’s resistance to stories. The Reading Teacher.

Sipe, L.R. (in press.) Young children's visual meaning-making in response to picturebooks. In Handbook of Research in Teaching Literacy through the Visual and Communicative Arts. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Sipe, L.R., & Ghiso, M. P. (2005). Looking closely at characters: How illustrations support children’s understandings. In N. Roser & M. Martinez (Eds.), What a character! Character study as a guide to literary meaning making in Grades K–8 (pp. 134-153). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Sipe, L. R., & Ghiso, M. P. (2004). Developing conceptual categories in classroom descriptive research: Some problems and possibilities. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 35, 472-485.

Sipe, L. R. (2002). Talking back and taking over: Young children's expressive engagement during storybook readalouds. The Reading Teacher, 55 (5), 476–483.

Sipe, L. R. (2000). The construction of literary understanding by first and second graders in oral response to picture storybook readalouds. Reading Research Quarterly, 35, 252–275.