Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland
About
Dr. Jennifer D. Turner is an associate professor of reading education in the College of Education at the University of Maryland College Park. After working as a college access counselor at a high school in Philadelphia, she earned her doctorate degree in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Literacy from Michigan State University. She is an expert on culturally sustaining pedagogies, elementary literacy teacher preparation, Black youth literacies and futurisms, and qualitative research methods.
Dr. Turner's scholarship centers on two interrelated domains: a) Black youth futures, which amplifies the career dreams, life literacies, and trajectories that Black young people (ages 5-21) determine and envision for themselves despite societal barriers; and (2) culturally responsive literacy pedagogies, or equity-oriented instructional approaches that celebrate and cultivate the freedom dreams/dreaming of Black youth.
Current Work:
Dr. Turner's current line of research blends critical race frameworks and arts-based research methods to theorize and visualize the futurities of Black youth. In this work, she hosts "freedom dreaming sessions" where Black youth creatively compose drawings, sketches, and digital collage to design their own futures, envisioning possible professional work, life goals, and racially-just societies. Based on this research, she is serving as lead editor for a special issue entitled, "Race(ing) to Futurity: Black and Latinx youths' multimodal compositions of future selves and literacies" for the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. To build on and extend her visual scholarship, she recently completed a study of Black undergraduate students' photographic images of persistence during the COVID crisis.
Research Area(s):
- Black youth futures; arts-based methods; culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies; creativity; critical race theories
