Maren Aukerman

Maren Aukerman

PhD
Pronouns: she/her/hers

Positions

Associate Professor

Werklund School of Education, Specialization, Curriculum and Learning

Werklund Research Professor

Werklund School of Education

Contact information

Email

maren.aukerman@ucalgary.ca

Web presence

ResearchGate

Phone number

Office: 403.220.4941

Location

Office: EDT714

For media enquiries, contact

Clayton MacGillivray
Content and Media Specialist

Email: clmacgil@ucalgary.ca
Twitter: @UCalgaryEduc

Preferred method of communication

e-mail

Background

Educational Background

Doctor of Philosophy , Univ. of Calif. - Berkeley, 2004

M.A. , Univ. of Calif. - Berkeley, 2000

B.A. , Williams College, 1992

Aukerman CV

Biography

Already known to teachers at the high school she attended for raising questions about prevailing educational practices, Maren Aukerman began her formal career in education as a bilingual Spanish/English teacher in Arizona, where she taught immigrant children in elementary and middle school.  She completed her doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and at Stanford University before joining the faculty at the University of Calgary in 2017. Dr. Aukerman’s interests include literacy, classroom discourse, qualitative research methods, and re-envisioning teaching to better serve children and democracy.

Professional & Community Affiliations

Maren Aukerman sits on the editorial review board of Reading Research Quarterly and Research in the Teaching of English. She has served as a reviewer for the Spencer Foundation (Large and Small Grants divisions), a faculty representative on the Alberta Advisory Committee for Educational Studies, and as an adjudicator for the National Council for Teachers of English Alan Purves Award Committee. Dr. Aukerman relishes collaborative work with teachers, and has facilitated professional development projects in early literacy, adolescent literacy, and disciplinary literacy (e.g., reading in math and science).

Research

Areas of Research

Scholarly Activity

Dr. Aukerman's scholarly work revolves around the central question of how to make the teaching of literacy more ethical and socially just – a question for which there are no simple answers.  Maren’s areas of research have included how to facilitate high-quality, student-centered talk about text; how emergent bilingual students make sense of text through classroom dialogue; and the affordances of critical literacy and democratic education.  

Interests:
  • Reconceptualizing literacy learning
  • Reading comprehension
  • Dialogic and multimodal literacy pedagogies
  • Child and adolescent sense-making about the media
  • Bilingual/second language literacy
  • Children's responses to literature
  • Emergent, elementary, and middle years literacy education
  • Education for democracy

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
EDUC 46003 SEC 01 S01 Splz'n I Elem Engl Lang Arts 2021

Projects

A multi-year professional learning initiative on dialogic pedagogy: Determining growth in teacher practice and in student oral language, voice, and academic outcomes in a school for immigrant children
Canadian and American Youth Perspectives on Media Related to COVID-19

Awards

  • Ithaca College Department of Education Educational Freedom Lecture Award, Ithaca College. 2024
  • Research in the Teaching of English Best Reviewer Award, 2024
  • Kenneth S. Goodman “In Defense of Good Teaching” Award, 2023
  • Werklund Research Professorship, Werklund School of Education. 2020
  • Dina Feitelson Research Award “to recognize an outstanding empirical study, published in English in a refereed journal.” , International Literacy Association. 2018
  • Faculty Teaching Award, 2013, 2017, Stanford Graduate School of Education .
  • Albert J. Harris Award for “journal article or monograph that makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the prevention or assessment of reading or learning disabilities.”, International Reading Association. 2009
  • Research in the Teaching of English 2023 Best Reviewer Award, 2024
  • National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 2008

Publications

In the News

More Information

Public Engagement: