Jodene Morrell

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame Center for Literacy Education, Associate Director

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JODENE MORRELL is a Teaching Professor, the Associate Director of the Notre Dame Center for Literacy Education, and advisor in the Education, Schooling and Society program. She taught 3rd and 4th grade in public schools in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose, CA and was a middle school literacy specialist in Lansing, Michigan before earning a doctorate in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy with an emphasis in Literacy at Michigan State University. Prior to joining the University of Notre Dame, Jodene was a senior researcher and senior lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University where she taught and advised students in the Elementary Inclusive Education program and the Literacy Specialist Masters program. Her research focuses on literacy pedagogy in K-8 classrooms, the role of multicultural and diverse children’s literature for making literacy engaging and accessible for all students, and teachers as scholars and researchers.

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Books by Jodene Morrell

The Young Writers Group: Increasing struggling elementary students’ literacy achievement through dialogue and technology.

This resource guide looks at new classroom-based literacy research that supports all learners, in... more This resource guide looks at new classroom-based literacy research that supports all learners, including culturally and linguistically diverse students. The authors demonstrate how teachers and researchers develop instructional practices based on multiple languages and the literacy contexts of their schools. They describe classrooms where literacy and learning is encouraged and respected, highlighting best practices for classrooms that include English language learners. This valuable book will inform all educators interested in classroom literacy research and how it supports achievement for diverse students. It features contributions from authors at the forefront of teacher research that hold the most promise for initiating change.

Standing for Literacy: Teaching in the Context of Change

Papers by Jodene Morrell

Promoting Multicultural Readings of Children's and Young Adult Literature

by Ernest Morrell and Jodene Morrell

Savvas Learning Company, 2021

There is often a conversation in English Language Arts about the selection of children’s and youn... more There is often a conversation in English Language Arts about the selection of children’s and young adult literature with an eye toward adding what we call diverse or multicultural texts. We translate that to mean that we want authors
from the past and present who represent a wide range of lived experiences, cultural and linguistic heritages. While we would stop at classifying some authors as multicultural and others as “mainstream” we do agree that diversity and difference, as they cohere across a group of authors is important. And underrepresentation and misrepresentation of certain authors and groups need to be addressed in the ELA classroom. The purpose of this article, though, is to ask a different question about the texts we choose to teach to children and adolescents. It isn’t what we teach, but how we teach the texts we choose to teach. More specifically, how should we read all children’s and young adult literature multiculturally?

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Linking the Word to the World: Connecting Multicultural Children's Literature to the Lives of 21st Century Youth

by Ernest Morrell and Jodene Morrell

Linking the Word and the World through Multicultural Literature The idea of linking the world of ... more Linking the Word and the World through Multicultural Literature The idea of linking the world of the classroom to the worlds of our students is nothing new in education. More than a hundred years ago educational pioneer John Dewey (1901) highlighted the importance of centering learning in the worlds of children. Throughout the 20th century scholars such as Paulo Freire of Brazil and Gloria Ladson-Billings in the United States encouraged educators to embed pedagogical practices in the existential experiences of students (Freire, 1970) and to create lessons that increased cultural competence amongst historically marginalized students (Ladson-Billings, 1994). When we are able to link the world of the classroom to the lives of students we increase motivation, engagement, achievement, and relevance and we promote active learning that stimulates curiosity, creativity, mutual understanding, and the social awareness needed to foster empathy, tolerance, and engaged citizenship. However, it isn't always so easy to translate these ideas into practice in the multi-faceted America of the 21st century. A world filled with languages and cultures and constantly changing demographics in our schools, but also a world filled with new technologies, new ways of acquiring and transmitting language that have radically changed the way we live. While it may seem intuitive to us in our everyday lives that the world is rapidly changing, we must also acknowledge that our discipline can often be resistant to these changes. That presents a tension between our ideas and our instincts and the mandates and standards that we live and work within. In this brief essay, we play out some of these contradictions and tensions as they relate to the teaching of multicultural literature as we play out what it has meant for us in our forty collective years of teaching and working with literacy teachers to link the teaching of literature to the worlds of our students. We talk about what this means in terms of the selection of the texts that we teach, the theory of reading that we promote, the writing we ask students to do, and finally how we link the lessons learned inside of the classroom to action in the world around us. How We Choose the Texts We Read We need a broader array of stories in our classrooms because children need to see themselves in the stories they read. As Henry Louis Gates said, we write ourselves into being (Gates, 1992). Through the stories we share we affirm ourselves and our existence as unique and varied as our existences may be. So, when we say that children need to see themselves in the stories that they read we mean that literally and figuratively. In a diverse selection students will see others who come from similar frames of reference culturally, geographically, ethnically, etc. But students should be able to identify across these simple markers to see those with whom they would have

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Introduction: Freirian Approaches to Teaching Children’s Literature: Joy, Voice, Agency, Responsiveness, and Love

Freire and Children’s Literature

Preparing Preservice Teachers to Develop Productive and Positive Relationships with Families through Family Literacy Nights

Teacher Preparation and Diversity: When American Pre-service Teachers Aren’t White and Middle Class

International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2010

The majority of American educators are White, middle class, and female. Most textbooks and articl... more The majority of American educators are White, middle class, and female. Most textbooks and articles for pre-service teachers assume their readers reflect these characteristics. However, as the K-12 student population becomes increasingly diverse, so do the pre-service teacher candidates at our Southern California public university. This article describes a prerequisite education course on diversity, showing how its original assumption that students needed to be convinced of the importance of diversity changed to a focus on improving the academic achievement and opportunities for linguistically and culturally diverse K-12 students.

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Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power ed. by Victoria Purcell-Gates

Community Literacy Journal, 2014

In Cultural Practices of Literacy Victoria Purcell-Gates argues that school-based literacy instru... more In Cultural Practices of Literacy Victoria Purcell-Gates argues that school-based literacy instruction does not necessarily transfer into the literacy practices in individuals' everyday lives. Drawing from a theoretical framework that reveals how literacy is a social practice, Purcell-Gates constructs an edited collection where contributors to this volume are part of the Cultural Practices of the Literacy Studies (CPLS) team. The collection disrupts an assumed correlation between direct English-based literacy instruction in schools and the literacies practiced by members of traditionally marginalized groups in everyday contexts. Contributors to this collection employ ethnographic methodologies to provide a careful and detailed account of participants' uses of literacy within and outside of the classroom. They present complex accounts of individuals' literacy practices, indicating how power is always embedded in the use of reading, writing, and speaking, as many scholars invested in "non-traditional" literacies have long explored (See Albright, Ball; Cushman; Barton and Hamilton; Brandt; Brodkey; Gee). The first chapter affords readers with the theoretical and methodological basis for the Cultural Practices of Literacy Studies (CPLS) study. In "Complicating the Complex, " Purcell-Gates discusses how each chapter follows a standard protocol that explicitly reveals contributors' locations and relationships to participants. This move serves as a general introduction to each chapter, which is followed by a description of the historical and/or cultural contexts where literacy practices emerge. The framework informs all studies in the collection; Purcell-Gates intends to encourage readers to identify patterns across studies and make more generalized claims about the relationships amongst schooling, literacy, and literacy development. To that end, Purcell-Gates gathers information about the material conditions through which individuals participate in literacy events-emphasizing the extent to which literacy is a social practice-while presenting substantial evidence for an understanding of how hegemony, power, and domination affect the uses and representations of literacies (15-17).

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Why's Everyone White? Moving Toward Critical Pedagogy in an Elementary Classroom

Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research

On February 24, Hector askad a question that reflected six. months of pnifdund progression toward... more

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Challenges and Solutions: Children's Literature in Today's K-12 Classrooms

LANGUAGE ARTS, 2008

Teachers have included children's litera-ture in elementary curricula for years. Recently, h... more

Literacy and Choice: Urban Elementary Students’ Perceptions of Links Between Home, School, and Community Literacy Practices

&amp;amp;amp;quot;This chapter discusses the types of literacy events that occur in home, com... more &amp;amp;amp;quot;This chapter discusses the types of literacy events that occur in home, community and school as well as the connections and disconnects between these three locations for nine fifth grade students in a low achieving, urban elementary school. Under the guidance of the researcher, who volunteered in an after school program, the students became ethnographic researchers of their own literacy practices and used this new knowledge to create social action projects. Data was collected during weekly meetings, informal discussion during recess and after school, and formal interviews during scheduled times. The participants, who called themselves “university researchers”, contributed data to the study with photographs of text found in their homes, communities and schools, research notes, and artifacts. Through extensive conversation with the students and analysis of data, it was evident that the participants engaged in abundant reading and writing in their personal lives in a variety of domains, including church, “playing school”, shopping for food and clothing, and consuming and producing their own text. The paper begins with Dewey’s (1902) discussion of the disconnect between the child and curriculum, progresses through an in depth discussion of the various literacy practices of the participants in their homes, school and communities, and concludes with a discussion of current research arguing that students engage in rich literacy lives outside of school (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines, 1988; Purcell-Gates, 1996) to which this research may be added. &amp;amp;amp;quot;

Finessing and Hybridizing: Innovative Literacy Practices in Reading First Classrooms

The Reading Teacher, 2007

Through the ethnographic methodological tools of formal and informal interviews, observations, pa... more Through the ethnographic methodological tools of formal and informal interviews, observations, participation in coplanning sessions, and analysis of literacy curricula, the researchers of this study found that effective teachers are finding ways to work successfully within the current political climate influenced by No Child Left Behind and the focus on Adequate Yearly Progress. Based on their findings, the authors suggest ways that educators and elementary schools can continue to successfully meet the literacy needs and interests of an increasingly diverse student population despite standardization in the form of basal reading programs and one‐size‐fits‐all conditions outlined in curricula guides and programs such as Reading First.

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Hybridization, Resistance, and Compliance: Negotiating Policies to Support Literacy Achievement

The New Educator, 2006

This article discusses a veteran teacher's literacy pedagogy in response to policies at the ... more

Exploring the Role of Children's Literature in the 21st-Century Classroom

Language Arts, 2007

Literacy educators face increasing pres-sure to produce high test scores, to prepare multiliterat... more

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Freire and Children’s Literature

Critical literacies and social justice

Elsevier eBooks, 2023

Multicultural Readings of Multicultural Literature and the Promotion of Social Awareness in ELA Classrooms

First Opinion: Stepping through Genres and Into a Dialogue on Liberty and Freedom

During my initial read of Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers (author) and Shawn Harris (artist), I rec... more During my initial read of Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers (author) and Shawn Harris (artist), I recalled an article by Robert Sutherland about political ideologies in children's literature. He states, "Like other types of literature, works written especially for children are informed and shaped by the authors' respective value systems, their notions of how the world is or ought to be" (143). Indeed, in this multi-genre picture book about a 450,000-pound, 150-foot woman wearing a size 879 shoe, readers are engaged through conversational prose, invited to question what we think we know about the Statue of Liberty and encouraged to consider views on immigration, liberty, and freedom with suggestions from the author of how the world ought to be. The inside flap of the book jacket describes Her Right Foot as a "fascinating, fun take on nonfiction. " The first half of the book provides historical background with a slew of intriguing facts. Readers are transported from a conversation in France between Édouard de Laboulaye, who conceptualized the idea for the statue, and Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who designed the statue, to Bedloe's Island where 214 boxes of pieces were assembled over 17 months to reconstruct the statue. We learn how the statue turned from brown to blue-green in 35 years, due to oxidation, and the significance of the seven spikes on her crown representing "the seven seas on Earth, and the seven continents, and the sun's rays, too" (unpaged). Eggers includes lesser known tidbits of information such as Thomas Edison's proposal to install a giant record player inside the statue. The first half and even the end of the book with lists of "Further Reading" and

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Finessing and Hybridizing: Innovative Literacy Practices in Reading First Classrooms

This article discusses the literacy practices of two elementary classroom teachers as they naviga... more This article discusses the literacy practices of two elementary classroom teachers as they navigated and negotiated their teaching context, at times resisting policy, and at other times creating instructional hybridizations in response to federal, state, and local level policies. Through the ethnographic methodological tools of formal and informal interviews, observations, participation in co-planning sessions, and analysis of literacy curricula the researchers found that effective teachers are finding ways to work successfully within the current political climate influenced by No Child Left Behind and the focus on adequate yearly progress (AYP). Based on their findings, the authors suggest ways that educators and elementary schools can continue to successfully meet the literacy needs and interests of an increasingly diverse student population despite standardization in the form of basal reading programs and one-size-fits-all conditions outlined in curricula guides and programs such...

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Teacher Preparation and Diversity: When American Pre-service Teachers Aren’t White and Middle Class

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Jodene Morrell

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