Lawrence Sipe, In Memoriam

March 14, 2011 - Dr. Lawrence R. Sipe, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and chair of the school’s program in Language and Literacy in Education, died unexpectedly March 11 at his home in Philadelphia.

A scholar of education and literature, Dr. Sipe deepened our knowledge of how children engage with literature. He was particularly interested in how young children talk about and respond to picture books in the classroom and how those activities enhance their literary understanding. 

Born in 1949 in York, Pennsylvania, Dr. Sipe graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in English. For two years, he taught in a one-room school in Newfoundland, Canada, then returned to earn his second bachelor’s degree, this one in Elementary Education, at Bloomsburg State College in Pennsylvania. 

After graduating from Temple University with a master’s degree in Psychology of Reading in 1980, he returned to Newfoundland, where he was a coordinator for in-service and professional development for a local school board for 13 years. 

In 1996, after receiving his Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Practice from The Ohio State University, Dr. Sipe came to Penn GSE as an assistant professor; he rose to the rank of professor in 2009. He received numerous University, national and international awards and fellowships, including the 1998 Salzburg Seminar Presidential Fellowship of the University of Pennsylvania, the 2001 Early Career Achievement Award from the National Reading Conference and Penn’s 2007 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2008, his book Storytime: Young Children's Literary Understanding in the Classroom won the Edward B. Fry Book Award for Outstanding Contributions to Literacy Research and Practice from the National Reading Conference. He was also North American editor-in-chief of the journal Children’s Literature in Education.  

Geoff Fox, the former editor of Children’s Literature in Education, said that Dr. Sipe’s experience as a classroom teacher deeply affected his scholarship, which centered around “real children as readers” rather than dry academic theorizing. Indeed, at the heart of Dr. Sipe’s work was a determination to learn from young children’s own thinking about literature. Children, he wrote in Storytime, have a “sophisticated and critical literary insight” from a very young age, and he took that insight seriously. 

Dr. Sipe, said Margaret Mackey, a University of Alberta professor who preceded Dr. Sipe as North American editor at Children’s Literature, “did the best job anybody has ever done of gathering, respecting and letting people hear the voices of children.”

To Dr. Sipe, children’s picture books, with their complex interweaving of text and visual elements, are in many ways more sophisticated than the text-heavy “chapter books” that are often seen as the next stage for young readers. Picture books, he said late last year, “invite all sorts of higher-level thinking skills,” and he objected to the recent trend among parents of pushing children to read chapter books at earlier and earlier ages. “Let children be children for a while,” he said. 

In a similar vein, Dr. Sipe was a strong advocate of reading books aloud and discussing them with children in the classroom, and he was opposed to scripted, “teacher-proof” curricula that reduce or eliminate the opportunity to do so. 

At Penn GSE, where everyone called him Larry, Dr. Sipe was a beloved colleague, teacher and mentor. Penn GSE Professor Vivian Gadsden recalled Dr. Sipe’s “generosity, support and deep commitment to helping grad students become scholars.” When Dr. Sipe received Penn GSE’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2005, the students who nominated him cited “his rigor, clarity, sensitivity, and thoroughness” and described him as the “model of a scholar who challenged students to think more deeply and broadly.” 

In addition to his academic career, Dr. Sipe was called to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. During the 1980s, he studied for the priesthood at McGill University’s Montreal Diocesan College. He was ordained in 1989. He served as an honorary assistant priest at St. James’ Anglican Church in Newfoundland and later at St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia. 

Dr. Sipe is survived by his mother, Dorcas Sipe Transeau; his sister and brother-in-law Judy and Steven Steinke, of Glenville, Pennsylvania, niece Emily Steinke, and niece Katherine Steinke Morris with her husband Ben.

Condolences for the family can be send to Judy Sipe Steinke, 3579 Hobart Rd., Glenville, PA 17329, or blackrock3@comcast.net.