Lori Norton-Meier, Ph.D.
Director, Jacobson Center for Comprehensive Literacy
Dr. Lori Norton-Meier is the Director of the Jacobson Center for Comprehensive Literacy and a Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Northern Iowa. Her research examines the role of play and inquiry in teaching and learning, particularly related to language and literacy practices of teachers, children, youth and family members. She studies the role of play in understanding media literacy, how family inquiry fuels learning in and out of school settings, and argument-based inquiry in teaching and learning particularly related to science. She has multiple publications including 30 journal publications, 20 book chapters and five books, with two of these books focusing on the voices of teachers who describe their process of learning as teacher researchers in their own classrooms.
Brief Background
Dr. Lori Norton-Meier has long been fascinated by the ways young children play with language. She began her “kidwatching” as a kindergarten teacher in an urban school district with as many as seven different languages represented, including American Sign Language. She grew curious about kids’ ability to easily and naturally explore new words and new meanings, and simultaneously frustrated that school systems didn’t value giving young children the time to play with language. She found her way to graduate school to further explore literacy, beginning with family literacy and sociocultural and transactional literacy theories. Her scholarship would soon include media literacy, integrated curriculum (particularly with math and science), portraiture as a research method, mixed methodologies and argument-based inquiry. The ongoing theme of her research in language and literacy practices (children, adolescents, teachers, and families) is the act of inquiry.
Disrupting the deficit narrative
One of Norton-Meier’s underlying goals has been to disrupt the deficit narrative regarding language development and use by children and students from historically marginalized backgrounds. According to this narrative, some children have a “word gap” when compared to their White middle-class peers, and all students should develop “academic language” to engage in rigorous content learning. Her research examines discourse patterns and pedagogical moves that cause pre-service and practicing teachers to question deficit assumptions and transform their teaching decisions related to children & youth, language & literacy, texts & technology, families & teachers. She has sought ways to disrupt the deficit narrative in three major ways:
- Science and literacy. Investigating Argument-Based Inquiry. Norton-Meier, with collaborator Dr. Brian Hand (professor of science education at The University of Iowa) tracked teachers’ use of argument-based inquiry in elementary and early childhood classrooms, where the content areas of science and literacy were combined. This innovative approach to science learning, “The International Science Literacy Project,” has been applied throughout the U.S., expanded to six international locations (Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Australia), and has been supported by over $2 million dollars in external research funding.
- Media Literacy. Intrigued by emerging social media uses among young women, Norton Meier studied a small group of adolescents as they discussed popular culture in internet chat rooms. The “new literacies” exhibited by these young women--language practices that have been disparaged by educators-- laid bare the role of non-print texts in the lives of students, and the ways digital technology and popular culture shape reading, writing, and responding to text. Norton-Meier’s research has added to a new (and disruptive) way to think about uses of social media and new technologies by adolescents and to imagine spaces for these literacies in classrooms. Her research also demonstrated how literacy and identity are interconnected and shape daily literacy practices.
- Family Literacy. Dr. Norton-Meier’s dissertation work focused on a five-year endeavor to create a family literacy experience that built on the strengths that exist in families called the “Parent-Kid-Teacher Investigators (PKTI). This work expanded to a research and teaching partnership with Dr. Corey Drake (Iowa State University; now a Professor in Mathematics Education at Michigan State University) to help pre-service teachers learn about incorporating family and community resources into elementary mathematics and literacy. This research framework locates this pre-service teacher learning as happening concurrently in an elementary school, in the community in which the elementary school is located, and in university classrooms. The ongoing research is especially interested in understanding the “third spaces” and overlaps that are created and highlighted by this framework for investigating teacher learning.
Dr. Norton-Meier has worked and taught in professional development schools for over 25 years at four different institutions and delights in the continued research and scholarship that informs the profession’s continued efforts across the nation to improve teacher education. With collaboration essential and critical to all aspects of her work, she has published and presented extensively about all three strands of scholarship with colleagues, graduate students, teachers and children in the project. Hearing the voices of teachers, parents, children and youth as active researchers is critical to any K-12 reform efforts; she has found their insights and perspective essential to challenging current assumptions and creating the provocative questions that we need to transform K-12 learning spaces.
Administrative Experience
Before coming to the University of Northern Iowa, Dr. Norton-Meier served as Director of the Interdisciplinary Early Childhood Research Center at the University of Louisville (2018-2020). In just two years, she expanded the Center from one graduate student, one ongoing grant, and a budget of approximately $150,000 to a staff of five, a group of affiliated interdisciplinary scholars, and over $3,000,000 in committed funding in both grants and contracts. Her strength as an administrator is in building research-practice partnerships with community organizations, school leaders, and early childhood professionals. At JCCL, Dr. Norton-Meier is continuing this strategy: generating knowledge and the study of practice with community partners as equal participants.