Anne DiPardo
Professor Emerita

Anne DiPardo is Professor Emerita of Education specializing in Literacy Studies. She was previously on the faculty of the University of Iowa, where she worked with pre-service English language arts teachers and taught graduate courses in qualitative methods, “English education” as a disciplinary field, and social-cultural perspectives on literacy. From 2003 to 2008, she was coeditor (along with Melanie Sperling) of the empirical journal of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Research in the Teaching of English. She has served NCTE in a number of other capacities, including co-chairing its Assembly for Research and serving on its Standing Committee for Research and Research Forum; currently, she is a member of the Executive Committee of the NCTE Conference on English Education (CEE) and of the NCTE College Forum.

Dr. DiPardo’s research has focused on the social, cultural, and political nature of literacy teaching and learning. Along with many articles and chapters, she is the author of two award-winning books—A Kind of Passport (NCTE, 1993), which explored a traditionally Euro-American campus’s efforts to recruit and retain students from diverse backgrounds; and Teaching in Common (NCTE/Teachers College Press, 1998), which presented ethnographic case studies of teachers engaged in joint work at four Midwestern public schools. Several years ago, she partnered with middle-school teacher Pat Schnack to complete a study of senior-citizen volunteers and middle-school students reading books together and corresponding in response journals (detailed in articles in Educational Leadership, the Quarterly of the National Writing Project, and Reading Research Quarterly). In collaboration with colleagues from around the country, she has more recently taken up the question of how research comes to inform classroom practice, work represented in two co-authored writing projects—an English Education article that endeavors to expand conceptions of “evidence-based” teaching, and a Review of Research in Education chapter that explores the emergence and development of research intended to guide the work of secondary-level English language arts teachers. She is currently working on a project that involves interviewing classroom teachers concerning how research has informed their work over time.

Education

EdD Language & Literacy Education, University of California, Berkeley, 1991
MA English, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977
BA English, California State University, Northridge, 1975