Research Expertise and Interest

writing, educational linguistics, international civics education, multiculturalism, human rights, English teaching, teacher education, teacher action research

Research Description

A member of the National Academy of Education, Sarah Warshauer Freedman studies the teaching and learning of written language, as well as ways English is taught in schools. She has worked with teacher researchers in urban, multicultural settings. For this work, she and her collaborators won the Multicultural Book Award from the National Association of Multicultural Educators for the book Inside City Schools: Investigating Literacy in Multicultural Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 1999). The same book was her second volume to win the Ed Frye Book Award from the National Reading Conference. She had won previously in 1994 for her Harvard University Press book, Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures: Lessons in Reform from U.S. and British Schools. That book also won the Richard Meade Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. Freedman also wrote Response to Student Writing (1987) and edited The Acquisition of Written Language: Response and Revision (1985). Her latest book is Teaching in the First Year (Teachers College Press, 2014). She is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, an associate of the National Conference for Research in the Language Arts and has served as an adviser for many groups, including the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the Children's Television Workshop. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center. She has published an award-winning article on "Teaching English in Untracked Classrooms," and more recently she has studied and written about the role of education in reconstructing societies after genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Her current research, funded by the Spencer Foundation, examines how adolescents develop as civic actors when they grow up in divided societies, focusing on Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States.