Professional Biography
Jessica Whitelaw is a former middle school teacher and literacy coach/co-ordinator who lectures in Literacy Studies at Penn GSE. Throughout her work in schools and the university she has been committed to working with teachers and students to engage the imagination and the arts as ways of informing and transforming a critical agenda. Her research and teaching interests include arts-based inquiry, literacy, critical feminist epistemologies, teacher learning, and literature for children and youth. She received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from The American Education Association’s Arts and Learning Special Interest Group in 2015 for her dissertation examining intersections between the arts and literacy. In 2019 she published a research monograph entitled Arts-Based Literacy Teaching and Learning: Cultivating a Critical Aesthetic Practice, a book that explores an arts-based framework for centering the arts in the social and intellectual activity of everyday school life with a commitment to inquiry, joy, and justice. She received her B.A. from Mount Allison University in Canada; her M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction/Literacy Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder; and her Ph.D. in Reading/Writing/Literacy from The University of Pennsylvania.
