Sarah Vander Zanden, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Literacy Education & Director, UNI Literacy Clinic

Sarah vanderzandenOffice:  Schindler Educ Ctr 107D,  Department of Curriculum and Instruction
Phone: (319) 273-7270
Email: Sarah.vanderz@uni.edu

Research Interests: Spatialized literacy practices, Critical sociocultural theory, Critical Literacy, Elementary Literacy, Teacher Preparation, Discourse Analysis

Dr. Sarah Vander Zanden creates deep, long-lasting partnerships with teachers, preservice teachers, and colleagues by immersing her literacy research inside schools. Specializing in critical literacy, elementary literacy, teacher preparation, discourse analysis, and spatial theory, she finds that “Intentionally partnering with schools is important for teacher education, and for literacy education, to see what's actually happening, and then see what we can do.”

When she came to UNI in 2011 (check) as a tenure track professor of Literacy Education and became director of the UNI Literacy Clinic, Vander Zanden’s school partnership approach aligned with the Clinic’s existing instructional practices: UNI embeds its reading clinic inside schools like Irving Elementary in Waterloo and North Cedar Elementary in Cedar Falls, and forms strong, purposeful partnerships. Vander Zanden sees great value in introducing pre-service teachers to different learning contexts, such as multilingual classrooms; or primarily white students with high special education populations. However, for her the teaching context goes beyond the classroom; it involves students’ lived experiences, the languages that travel through the learning space, the dynamics of the community, and the history of place. “It's always permeable,” Vander Zanden says. “There are all these ways in and out, and that's what's exciting. I think that's what makes classrooms beautiful and challenging, and why I want to be in them, you know?”

Background
Vander Zanden had always been around kids. Her mother was a nursery school teacher so Vander Zanden grew up around discussions about early learning and language production. She thought she might be a pediatrician, then studied international relations at the University of Wisconsin (she was interested in peace negotiation or the Foreign Service), and during college also volunteered in classrooms and for an after school program. Indeed, education became her calling. Her first work experience after college was with Head Start: the job entailed walking kids to and from school and getting to know their families; Vander Zanden became curious about how love and learning looked different in different spaces. She determined that she wanted to become a teacher, and enrolled in the George Washington University teacher education program, which was geared for people like her who had no formal teaching experience but had an interest in becoming teachers.

A Focus on Critical Literacy
Vander Zanden’s first job as a 5th grade classroom teacher in the D.C. metro area was in a large school (approximately 800 kids) that was diverse in all forms: linguistic, economic, and cultural. The school also championed peer learning groups and continued learning, that served as a precursor to graduate school. Vander Zanden joined a researchers group (approximately 20 teachers) and became familiar with the critical literacy work of Dr. Vivian Vasquez, a professor of Language and Literacy Education at American University. She also began experimenting with inclusion work, became a science Fellow at the Smithsonian, started to view how learning took place outside the classroom, and began asking important questions like “How does learning and language acquisition work?” and “How do language and discourse shape who we are and what we can do?” She and her peer teachers read literacy scholars James Gee, Hillary Janks, and Barbara Comber, and she started thinking deeply about literacy and learning. Then, her teacher group gave a conference presentation attended by well-known literacy scholar Peter Johnson (author of Choice Words, 2004, among other books), who told her group that their presentation was radical (she had no idea). This statement got her thinking how they actually were challenging prescribed ways of teaching, and pivoted Vander Zanden towards a Ph.D. After seven years at the D.C. metro school, Vander Zanden enrolled in Indiana University, a move endorsed by Vasquez (an IU alum who had been mentored by Jerry Harste), to pursue her doctorate.

Collaborative Ethnography
At IU, Vander Zanden would work closely with H. Gerald Compano, who was known for his collaborative ethnographic approach in school settings and deep relationship building between researchers and subjects. For her dissertation, she embarked on a year-long ethnography working with a fifth grade teacher team and about 80 5th-grade students who (she made sure) spanned every segmented group--low, middle and high achieving. The students had been so segmented they didn’t know each other, and she got them to create different video and performance projects around their inquiry. In creating these collective projects within these purposefully mixed level groups, Vander Zanden examined how they got along while engaging them in critical literacy practices. “Critical literacy is like a foundational kind of component of almost everything,” she said. “But I started getting more interested in language and spatial theory and how that connects to the geography of space.”  While at UNI, Vander Zanden brought this critical literacy and spatial theory mindset to a summer literacy program with EMBARC, where youth leaders, who were identified as refugees or people in need in the larger community were thrust into a new (and empowering) identity as camp counselors and literacy lesson leaders.

Working with pre-service teachers
Recently, Vander Zanden has become interested in literacy as it relates to teacher education, and asking questions like “What is the context of pre-service teacher preparation?” and “How can we do that differently or better?”  True to her immersive partnership training, Vander Zanden advocates that pre-service teachers work directly with kids at an early stage and avoid “fake teaching” with simulated lesson plans, so she embeds her classes inside real classrooms. When her students see what's happening in practice, they can come back and talk about it, and also offer something to the classroom teacher, like work directly with kids in small groups, or lead a whole group lesson so the teacher can observe the kids (something they don’t often get to do because they're always so busy teaching).

Vander Zanden brings her immersive learning, critical literacy, discourse analysis and spatial theory approach to her graduate students as well. She also publishes broadly in such journals as Language Arts and the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.