NCRLL Executive Board Member, President: Dr. Elizabeth Dutro

Dr. Elizabeth Dutro is a professor of education, specializing in the area of literacy. The primary strand of Dr. Dutro’s research grew from her encounters with children, curriculum, and educational policy in her own teaching in a poverty-impacted elementary school and is driven by questions about the intersections of literacy, identity, life experiences, and children’s and youth’s opportunities for positive, sustained, and productive relationships with schooling. Through close collaborations with children and teacher colleagues, her current studies include critical and affective framings of what trauma means and how trauma functions in classrooms; teachers’ opportunities to learn together in the context of their daily work and relationships with children; and critical-affective pedagogies in teacher education and classroom literacies. Elizabeth’s leadership roles include having served on the Board of Directors for the Literacy Research Association, as secretary of Division G of the American Educational Research Association, Director of the Committee for Composition for the National Council of Teachers of English, and section editor for Language Arts. She has received several awards for her scholarship and teaching and her work has appeared in numerous national and international journals. Her book The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy was published in 2019 by Teachers College Press.

NCRLL Executive Board Member, Membership: Dr. Grace Enriquez

Dr. Grace Enriquez teaches a variety of courses for the Language & Literacy programs. A former English Language Arts teacher and literacy staff developer, she bridges her work with teachers and students with ethnographic and critical research in high-needs urban populations to examine their responses to literacy instruction in school contexts. Specifically, her scholarship focuses on children’s literature for social justice; critical literacies; reader response; intersections of literacies, identities, and embodiment; and the teaching of writing.

Grace’s work has been published in a variety of national and international refereed journals. She also serves on national literacy committees and editorial review boards. She is the Children’s Literature Department Editor for the children’s literature review column of Language Arts, as well as co-author of The Classroom Bookshelf, a blog published weekly by the School Library Journal.

NCRLL Executive Board Member, Communication: Dr. Anna Smith

Dr. Anna Smith is an Associate Professor at Illinois State University, following an Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship in Writing and New Learning Ecologies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the co-author of Developing Writers: Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age (Open University Press) and a co-editor of the Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures (Routledge). Her research on writing development, transliteracies, contemporary composition and technologies, and the intersection of teaching and learning can be found in Pedagogies: An International Journal, Learning, Culture & Social Interaction, Theory Into Practice, Journal of Literacy Research, and Literacy. She is currently Past Chair of the Writing and Literacies SIG of AERA. Her scholarly work is buttressed with 20 years of work in public schools as a teacher, district-level teaching specialist, and teacher educator. Her work can be found on her website, Developing Writers.

NCRLL Executive Board Member, Treasurer: Dr. Vaughn Watson

Dr. Vaughn W. M. Watson is an Assistant Professor of English Education in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His community-engaged literacy research and teaching involves building with the already-present knowledge and lived experiences of youth and communities of color as emerging forms of civic engagement. Vaughn is currently an elected member of the Secondary Section Steering Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English, and was a 2012-2014 NCTE Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color fellow. He has published research findings in journals including the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, the Review of Research in Education, Research in the Teaching of English, English Journal, Literacy, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and Urban Education. From 2003 – 2015, Vaughn taught English at a public performing-and-visual arts secondary school in Brooklyn, New York.

Past NCRLL Executive Board Member, President: Dr. H. Gerald Campano

Dr. H. Gerald Campano is a Professor and Chair of the Reading/Writing/Literacy Division at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. He is the current convener of Practitioner Inquiry Day at Penn’s Ethnography in Education Forum, which emerged as a response to a growing interest in teachers’ involvement in critical action and participatory research. Participants include K-12 teachers, college and university scholars, and community members who share a commitment to expanding educational research to include a wider variety of voices and ideas.

Throughout his career, Dr. Campano has been committed to creating opportunities for students to mobilize their identities and cultural resources in the literacy curriculum. He previously worked as a full-time classroom teacher in Texas, Puerto Rico, and California, and with adult English Language Learners in Philadelphia. Dr. Campano serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Educational Researcher, Equity and Excellence in Education, and Literacy in Composition Studies.

Dr. Campano has earned numerous teaching awards at the elementary and university level, and has over 50 academic publications. He is a Carnegie Scholar and recipient of the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research from the National Council for the Teachers of English for his book Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering, and received the Phi Delta Kappa Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in 2004.

Past President: Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly

Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly is the John C. Hungerpiller Professor at the University of South Carolina. As a professor in the College of Education, Dr. Compton-Lilly teaches courses in literacy studies and works with local educators. Among the books she has edited or authored are: Reading Families: The Literate Lives of Urban Children (2003), Rereading Families (2007), Reading Time: The literate lives of urban secondary students and their families (2012), and Reading students’ lives: Literacy learning across time (2016). In these books, she describes her experiences in following eight of her former first grade students through high school. Dr. Compton-Lilly has authored articles in several major educational journals including the Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, The Reading Teacher, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Written Communication, Journal of Literacy Research and Language Arts.