Penn GSE-King’s College Collaborative

Penn GSE-King's College Collaborative Faculty Exchanges

Kings College faculty at GSE:
Every other year, Brian Street, chair of the King's College Language in Education division and an adjunct professor at Penn GSE, teaches two summer-session courses at GSE titled "Literacy: Social and Historical Perspectives" and "Language and Power." Dr. Street has joined King's College Professor of Applied and Socio-linguistics Ben Rampton in a number of conference sessions on linguistic ethnography organized by Penn GSE Professor Stanton Wortham. In addition, Professor of Educational Linguistics Constant Leung has visited Penn GSE for academic presentations.

Penn GSE faculty at Kings College:
Penn GSE Professor Nancy Hornberger has given seminars at Kings College on a number of occasions. Other GSE faculty members who have presented at Kings College are Susan Lytle, Kathleen Hall and Stanton Wortham. Plans for a visit by Associate Professor Larry Sipe are in the works for the 2009 academic year.

Joint Symposia:
Building on a history of collaborative presentations at the Ethnography in Education Forum, the American Educational Research Association, and the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages conference, the Collaborative organizes joint symposia at these and other venues.

At the 2008 Ethnography Forum at Penn GSE, the Collaborative organized several events, including a pre-Forum meeting for faculty and students from both institutions. In addition, Collaborative participants presented a featured session at the Forum, "New Initiatives in Ethnographic Research with English Language Learners: Penn-King's Collaborations." Presenters were Drs. Hornberger, Lytle, Street, and Leung. Penn GSE Associate Professor Betsy Rymes served as discussant.

Ongoing plans include face-to-face and virtual presentations and further joint sessions at key conferences in the field.

Initiatives for Students:
Students at both institutions participate in exchanges and other joint programs, among them, post-graduate exchanges, independent fieldwork, research projects, and student-hosted visits.

In addition, the Collaborative arranges videoconferences for King's weekly seminar and Penn GSE's Language and Literacy in Education doctoral proseminar. Designed to enrich the intellectual discourse for graduate students, these conferences focus on topics such as academic literacies and the Penn Language and Literacy Project.