Allison Skerrett is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Director of Teacher Education in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. A former secondary English teacher in Boston Public Schools, Allison continues her commitment to secondary English teachers, students, and ELA curriculum and instructional practices through her teaching and research at the University level. Dr. Skerrett works with secondary English pre-service and in-service teachers as a teacher educator. Additionally, her research focuses on diverse adolescents’ literacy practices and the design and implementation of secondary English curriculum and instructional practices that reflect the strengths and needs of diverse student populations.
Allison writes for teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in secondary-English education focused journals such as English Education and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Her award-winning book, Teaching Transnational Youth: Literacy and Education in a Changing World (Teachers College Press 2015), is the first to examine the educational opportunities and challenges arising from increasing numbers of students living and attending school across different countries. Dr. Skerrett has received College- and University- level awards for her teaching at The University of Texas at Austin. She has also received awards for her research, such as from the Literacy Research Association. Dr. Skerrett also lends her expertise in secondary literacy/reading to national and international education advisory boards including the US National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading (NAEPR) and Scotland’s International Council of Education Advisers (ICEA).
Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at The University of Georgia, emeritus; and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. From 2012-2020 he served as the faculty advisor to the student-edited Journal of Language and Literacy Education at UGA; and from 1996-2003 he coedited, with Michael W. Smith, Research in the Teaching of English. Recent awards include the 2020 Horace Mann League Outstanding Public Educator Award, 2018 International Federation for the Teaching of English Award, and 2018 Distinguished Scholar recognition by the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy. His research and teaching take a sociocultural approach to issues of literacy education, literacy teacher education, and related social concerns. These interests have produced two 2020 books from Bloomsbury: Learning to Teach English and Language Arts: A Vygotskian Perspective on Beginning Teachers’ Pedagogical Concept Development; and coedited with Yolanda Gayol and Patricia Rosas, Developing Culturally and Historical Sensitive Teacher Education: Global Lessons from a Literacy Education Program. His interest in neurodiversity has produced two recent edited collections: Creativity and Community among Autism-Spectrum Youth: Creating Positive Social Updrafts through Play and Performance from Palgrave Macmillan; and, coedited with Joe Tobin and Kyunghwa Lee, Dismantling the Disabling Environments of Education: Creating New Cultures and Contexts for Accommodating Difference from Peter Lang.