NCRLL Leadership, Executive Board

NCRLL Executive Board Member, President: Dr. Nicole Mirra

Dr. Nicole Mirra is an Associate Professor of Urban Teacher Education at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. Her research utilizes participatory design methods in classroom, community, and digital spaces to create civic literacy collaboratives with youth and educators that disrupt discourses and structures of injustice and creatively compose liberatory social futures. Her books include Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom (Norton, 2023), Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement (Teachers College Press, 2018), and Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students (Routledge, 2015).

NCRLL Executive Board Member, Membership: Dr. Melissa L. García Vega

Dr. Melissa L. García Vega is an assistant professor of Early Childhood and Childhood Education at Lehman College, the City University of New York (CUNY). Melissa’s research centers on storytelling traditions rooted in the Caribbean region and diasporas. Her research explores how locality, multilingualism, and transnational experiences inform language identities and development. Her work on Caribbean literature appears in Multicultural books for prek-grade three (Rowman Littlefield, 2023). She has also published in journals such as Voices from the Middle and the Journal of West Indian Literature. She is co-editor of the two-volume anthology on Caribbean children’s literature: Caribbean children’s literature: (Vol.1) History, pedagogy, and publishing and (Vol. 2) Critical approaches (University of Mississippi Press, 2023). She currently is involved in expanding how pre- and in-service teachers use children’s literature collections within the College library as part of their teacher preparation program.

NCRLL Executive Board Member, Communication: Dr. Stephanie Toliver

Dr. Stephanie R. Toliver is an assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Informed by her love of science fiction and fantasy texts as well as her experience as a 9th and 10th grade English teacher, Toliver’s scholarship centers the freedom dreams of Black youth and honors the historical legacy that Black imaginations have had and will have on activism and social change. Specifically, her research centers three, interrelated areas: (1) the examination of how Black youth engage in the reading and writing of speculative fiction to discuss and challenge their experiences with social injustice; (2) the consideration of how intersecting oppressions infiltrate the field of education and how educators must use their imaginations to dream of ways to challenge injustice in schools; and (3) the demonstration of how Black people use speculative storytelling to metaphorically describe modern and historical antiblackness and to dream of worlds and futures in which Black people are free from the burdens of societal injustice. She is the author of Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork, and her academic work has been published in several journals, including Equity, Excellence, & Education; Journal of Literacy Research; and Research in the Teaching of English.

NCRLL Executive Board Member, Elections and Awards: Dr. Tran Templeton

Dr. Tran Templeton is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood and a Faculty Co-Director of the Rita Gold Early Childhood Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. A multidisciplinary scholar, Tran’s research is concerned with the aesthetics of childhood—from photographs of and by children to children’s play and literacies. She has published her work in journals such as Harvard Ed Review, Children’s Geographies, and Language Arts. She is an Associate Editor of Exceptional Children and has served in various capacities within AERA, the Literacy Research Association, and the National Council of Teachers of English.

NCRLL Executive Board Member, Treasurer: Dr. Kelly C. Johnston

Dr. Kelly C. Johnston, an associate professor at Baylor University, examines how children and youth engage with literacy across contexts and the implications for literacy development and wellbeing in underserved communities. Her research seeks to produce more equitable opportunities for children and youth whose cultural, linguistic, racial-ethnic, and neurodiverse identities have been marginalized through formal education. Dr. Johnston serves on the Board of Directors for the Texas Association of Literacy Education and for the Christian Women’s Job Corps of McLennan County (CWJC), where she also serves on the finance committee to provide leadership for the financial wellbeing of the organization.