Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise

Literature written for children and adolescents
Early childhood education
Emergent literacy

Professional Biography

Dr. Sipe has been a sole-charge teacher and principal in a one-room school in Newfoundland (two years); the head of a team of four teachers in the primary unit of a private school in New Jersey (four years); an instructor in a program in reading and study skills for entering freshmen at Temple University (two years); and a program coordinator responsible for in-service and professional development, supervision, and development of programs for a school board in Newfoundland (13 years). He came to Penn GSE in 1996 as an assistant professor and was given tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2002. In 2009, he was promoted to professor.

Dr. Sipe has received awards and fellowships, including the 1991 Teaching Excellence Award, Department of Education, Province of Newfoundland; the 1996 Martha King Scholarship, The Ohio State University, College of Education; the 1997 Outstanding Dissertation Award, College Reading Association; the 1997 Student Outstanding Research Award, National Reading Conference; the 1998 Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award, International Reading Association; the 1998 Promising Researcher Award, National Council of Teachers of English; the 1998 Salzburg Seminar Presidential Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania; the 2001 Early Career Achievement Award from the National Reading Conference; the 2005 Teaching Excellence Award from GSE; and the University of Pennsylvania’s 2007 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2008, he won the Edward B. Fry Book Award for Outstanding Contributions to Literacy Research and Practice from the National Reading Conference for his book, Storytime: Young Children's Literary Understanding in the Classroom. During his sabbatical year (the calendar year of 2009), he was a distinguished visiting professor at the Ohio State University; a fellow of the International Youth Library in Munich; and a recipient of a fellowship from the Kerlan Collection of children's book manuscripts at the University of Minnesota.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Sipe's research interests center around literature for children and adolescents. He is interested in the ways children talk about and respond to books in the classroom and in their developing literary understanding. His special interest is in picturebooks, the ways in which young children interact with them, and the use of literary theory to illuminate these interactions. Other areas of interest include assisting teachers in refining and extending their literary critical abilities; the ways in which literary understanding and aesthetic awareness merge with and support emergent literacy; how children and adults co-construct interpretive communities and form implicit definitions of literary competence; how culture, ethnicity, and gender are related to children’s literary responses; and the ways in which literature for children reflects, inscribes, or subverts cultural norms.

Dr. Sipe’s current projects include research into children’s responses to page breaks in picturebooks, which are carefully constructed so that each page spread is followed logically by the next. Another area of interest is the peritextual features of picturebooks—that is, all those elements that “surround” the story (dust jacket, front and back board covers, endpapers, title page, dedication page, and publishing information); Dr. Sipe is studying both the uses that authors and illustrators make of these elements and the various ways in which children respond to them.

His book entitled Storytime: Young Children's Literary Understanding in the Classroom (2008) is based on the body of his research and lays out a theory of the literary understanding of children in their first years of schooling, using this theory to extend and broaden the current views of what constitutes comprehension in literacy teaching and learning. In cooperation with primary-grade teachers, he is also developing a curriculum for primary-age children that links visual literacy and aesthetic development with reading and writing. He has also co-edited a recent book called Post-Modern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality. His latest projects are (1) to study the design elements of international picturebooks and (2) to conduct textual research on the successive drafts of a children's book manuscript, in order to trace the writing process of one children's author. He is North American editor-in-chief of the journal Children's Literature in Education.