Patricia Edwards, Michigan State University

Professor Teacher Education East Lansing, Michigan edwards6@msu.edu Office: (517) 432-0858

Expert In

Family literacy Literacy education Parent involvement in education

Bio/Research

Patricia Edwards is a professor of teacher education, the first African American of the Literacy Research Association (formerly the National Reading Conference), and the 2010-2011 President of the International Reading Association. She has developed two nationally acclaimed family literacy programs: Parents as Partners in Reading and Talking Your Way to Literacy. Her research focuses on issues related to families and children: engaging hard to reach families, developing a scope and sequence of parent involvement, compiling different types of demographic family profiles, parent involvement and teacher thinking, parent involvement in the reading/writing process, parent support of children's oral preparation for literacy, portfolio instructional conversations with parents during regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences, and parents' stories of literacy and teachers' reactions to these stories. Her current research focuses on a broader question - how does the world read? During her graduate student days at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she became curious about this question. Therefore, when she became the newly elected Vice-President of the International Reading Association (IRA) in May 2008, she immediately thought that she would return to this question of interest. In addition, I was motivated to ask this question because the International Reading Association has councils and affiliates in more than 100 countries and one of our popular slogans is "We teach the world to read."

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