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, Research in the Teaching of English, and the Journal of Literacy Research. 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 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 research focuses on the relationship between talk, child agency, and literacy learning among children/youth and their teachers. She is particularly interested in how teachers engage with children’s non-standard interpretations of text, and how children’s meaning-making can become more honored and valued as a resource within classrooms. Dr. Aukerman’s additional areas of inquiry include sociocultural conceptualizations of reading comprehension; how second-language learners make sense of text through classroom dialogue; the affordances of various genres, modes, and media for shared textual inquiry by child and adolescent readers; and documenting change over time in children’s participation in classroom talk about text. 

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
  • Elementary and middle years education

Courses

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

Projects

Current:
  • Canadian and American Youth Perspectives on Media Related to COVID-19

Awards

  • 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
  • National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 2008,

Publications

In the News

More Information

Public Engagement: