Reflections from our CLA Early Career Award Recipients

Submitted by Mary Napoli and Angela M. Wiseman, Co-chairs, Early Career Award Committee

In our rapidly evolving professional landscape, we continue to advance our collective body of research through the connections forged through CLA. It is this dynamic cycle of research combined with our networking opportunities that informs new directions and possibilities. With this in mind, we want to celebrate the contributions of our CLA Early Career Award Recipients from 2017 to the present. As you will read, they have continued to impact the field with their innovative and timely scholarship. In this blog post, we share their responses to open-ended questions that highlight their recent contributions to children’s literature and future projects on the horizon. They were also invited to reflect on how readers and educators will leverage their research in actionable and transformative ways. Finally, everyone was asked to share a photo of something that matters to them.

2023 CLA Early Career Award Recipient

JOSH COLEMAN

Assistant Professor of English Education 
Department of Teaching and Learning 
The University of Iowa

Twitter: @Josheducating 
Scholarly Website: https://uiowa.academia.edu/JamesJoshuaColeman 

Picture of myself apple picking with Dr. Saba Vlach, also a Children’s Literature expert.

My current project, entitled “Banned Childhoods,” chronicles how English Language Arts (ELA) teachers resist book-banning legislation in their local contexts—namely their classrooms, schools, and communities. This work has been funded graciously by the Children’s Literature Assembly (CLA) of NCTE, the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, and the University of Iowa. Based on this study, I have one forthcoming article intended to support educators teaching in restrictive legislative contexts to resist education policy that removes children’s literature from classrooms and libraries. Co-written with University of Iowa doctoral student Petra Lange, “A Two-Year Timeline to Anti-LGBTQ+ Book Bans in America’s Heartland” will be published this year in English Journal, and it provides actional strategies for recognizing impending book bans and resisting them through local activism. Responding to the immediate need, this article is grounded in practitioners’ lived experiences and strives for classrooms and libraries in which every young person can see themself represented in children’s literature.
 
On-going, data collection for the “Banned Childhoods” study will conclude in May of 2024, and I am currently preparing a book proposal that will expand upon the English Journal article. This book will support ELA teachers to combat draconian legislation targeting children’s literature featuring Black, Indigenous, and other children of Color as well as LGBTQ+ young people. My sincere hope is that this work will provide teachers with actionable strategies for challenging book bans and censorship in their local contexts. I am so grateful to the CLA for their support, and with it, I will champion intellectual freedom for teachers and students in every classroom and library across the United States.

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2019 CLA Early Career Award Recipient

NOREEN NASEEM RODRIGUEZ

Assistant Professor of Elementary Education and Educational Justice
College of Education
Michigan State University

Instagram and X/Twitter: @NaseemRdz
Professional website: https://naseemrdz.com/

"Something that matters to me" is learning about local histories from community members and scholar friends. This photo is from November 2023, when I was able to take a tour of Harlem with Akemi Kochiyama, whose grandmother Yuri Kochiyama is a famous Asian American activist and friend of Malcolm X. In the background is the mural painted in their honor, around the corner from her former apartment.

I am thrilled to have been part of the team behind the "Research in children’s literature" in Fisher & Lapp's recently published The Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts. My work related to children's literature tends to highlight how teachers use specific texts or focuses on critical content analyses. This was a nice shift that allowed me to look more broadly at current research and it was an honor working alongside my dear mentor Angie Zapata as well as Monica Kleekamp and Thomas Crisp, who are all brilliant. Another recent publication I am really proud of is my new book Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms.  My favorite chapter is the one on identity and stereotypes which features a wide array of recommendations to support class discussions of Asian names, food, and stereotypes like the model minority and South Asians as terrorist threats. 
 
For my Asian American-focused work, I want readers to know that what Viet Thanh Nguyen called "narrative plenitude" is so important - reading multiple Asian American stories is vital to disrupting notions that Asian Americans are a monolith, especially within cultures. For my elementary social studies work, a clear action step is pairing picturebooks about historical events and figures with primary sources that add nuance and complexity to the textual narrative. I call this going "beyond the book" to ensure that young learners engage with meaningful and contextualized social studies content.
 
I have a big announcement coming soon about a longitudinal project that examines how efforts to mandate the teaching of Asian American histories and/or Asian American studies are being implemented. I am really excited to spend time with students and teachers in classrooms again! I am also working on a second edition of my book Social Studies for a Better World  and am beginning a book tour in support of Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms. The next few years will be busy, but I am thrilled to be able to do this work in ways that impact more teachers and students.

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2017 CLA Early Career Award Recipient

ANGIE ZAPATA

Associate Professor of Language and Literacies Education
College of Education
University of Missouri

Scholarly website: https://education.missouri.edu/person/angie-zapata

This is a photo of the incredible early childhood teacher partners I have the honor of learning from as part of the Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant of which I serve as PI for the early literacies strand. These are PK and K teachers who choose to work in some of the most demanding areas of our state. They show up every day alongside the beautiful children and their families to do the work. With every interaction we have, I am inspired and energized by their commitments and excellence in the classroom under the most extraordinary schooling conditions and political climate. It is not easy to be a teacher right now, but these teachers make it happen!

I’m so pleased to share that I have recently published a book entitled Deepening Student Engagement with Diverse Picturebooks: Powerful Classroom Practices for Elementary Teachers  as part of the Principled in Practice imprint of National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Drawing on a year-long multi-site collaborative research project with classroom teachers, I braid together theories of literature response, grammar of visual design, bi/multilingual and multimodal literacies to offer what I call a Critical Literature Response Framework as a pathway for sharing books with diverse racial, linguistic, and cultural representation. This framework is guided by the ethical work of integrating diverse children’s picturebooks in the classroom, a desire to cultivate a critical literature classroom landscape that resists stereotypical representations of racialized, linguistically diverse communities in literature, and a commitment to recentering critical and aesthetic engagement of picturebooks with diverse representation.

As a way to unpack the Critical Literature Response Framework, the book features practical literature approaches and guiding principles that can be tailored to their individual contexts with a focus on the classroom commitments, conditions, practices, and collaborations needed to deepen students’ engagements with picturebooks that offer diverse racial, linguistic, and broader cultural representation. I wrote this book to contribute well theorized examples of how to launch aesthetic and critical response in classrooms through literature explorations of diverse picturebook collections. I hope readers find the book to be a foundational part of their toolkit as they develop and rethink their literature beliefs and practices. For example, I hope readers will utilize the reflection invitations to ponder their critical social educator journey as curators of children’s literature or consider the ways visual thinking strategies can support children’s critical reading of illustrations, and so much more. The book offers multiple entry points for both the beginning and most experienced teacher to make their own.

It has been exciting to reflect and see how my research has evolved over time and how past learning has directed me to next steps in my research. As an early career children’s literature researcher over a decade ago, my research inquiries began with deep explorations of bi/multilingual children’s translingual picturebook making processes. Over time, my analytic gaze shifted towards the classroom conditions and pedagogies that produced racialized children and youth responses to diverse picturebooks and the emerging text and text making processes that resulted. I am partnering more and more with teachers as a model of professional learning and my analytic gaze homes in on the ways teachers develop their beliefs and practices when sharing children’s picturebooks that feature better representation. The arc of my research life thus far and my learning from those inquiries now lead me towards continued teacher/researcher collaborative inquiries with a close eye on the ways educators come to understand and enact a Critical Literature Framework in their classrooms. I look forward to sharing our Young Scholars Program  grant funded work from Foundation of Child Development as an example of this shift through an upcoming publication with Bank Street Occasional Paper  in May 2024 and more examples of our children’s picturebook learning together in the year to come. I believe as picturebooks with diverse representation slowly find their way into our classrooms and libraries, building coalitions of solidarity through teacher/researcher partnership will be essential to not only ensuring that these picturebooks are taught well and enjoyed by children, but also a necessary way to support and advocate with/for teachers during these challenging times in education.

Mary Napoli is the former co-chair of the 2023 Early Career Award Committee. She is an associate professor of education and reading at Penn State Harrisburg.

Angela Wiseman is a former CLA Board Member and co-chair of the 2023 Early Career Award Committee. She is an associate professor of literacy education at North Carolina State University.