Project Title: Fostering Cultural Citizenship through Counternarrative Picturebooks in Teacher Education
Project Description: At this time of national divisiveness in the United States, it is more important than ever for youth to have teachers who can facilitate critical conversations about race, immigration, gender, and other important cultural and civic issues. One way teachers can do so is through high quality picturebooks, especially those that present stories by and about those from historically marginalized communities. Picturebooks are an important area of study in critical literacy and civics education because they are a primary way that children learn the cultural values, norms, and historical narratives of a society. They also often frame community and civic participation in specific raced and gendered ways. In this project, Professor Lucero and her research team will analyze future teachers’ written and oral analyses of counternarrative picturebooks and focus group conversations to understand how structured opportunities to engage critically with these texts can inform their future practices as elementary educators.
Audrey Lucero is Professor of Language & Literacy Education in the Department of Education Studies at the University of Oregon. She is a current co-editor of the journal English Teaching: Practice & Critique. She uses corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze the ways in which pre-service and in-service teachers discuss race, ethnicity, language, and immigration. She also has an interest in critical picturebook analysis. She spent winter term 2025 as a visiting researcher at Lancaster University it the UK. Her recent work has been published in Teaching and Teacher Education; Journal of Language, Identity, and Education; Critical Discourse Studies; and The Reading Teacher, among other journals. She is a member of the Literacy Research Association, the American Educational Research Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Children’s Literature Assembly. You can see all of her publications at GoogleScholar.
In her time at UO, she has worked closely with the Center for Latino/a and Latin American studies, the Latinx Strategies group, the Dreamers Working Group, and the Latinx Scholars First-Year Academic Residential Community.