Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise

Teacher education & professional development
Literacy teaching & learning
Urban education
Gender and education

Professional Biography

After working as a classroom teacher and principal in Philadelphia elementary schools for ten years, Dr. Schultz received her Ph.D. in Reading, Writing, and Literacy at Penn GSE. As a postdoctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, she investigated workplace literacy and worked on a project on literacy and identity for young women making the transition from an urban high school to the workplace, funded by the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education. She was an assistant professor for three years at the School of Education at the University of Delaware, where she initiated a project on race relations in a post-desegregation middle school.

In 1997, Dr. Schultz joined the Penn GSE faculty and received the School’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001. She was invited to be a scholar in the first cohort of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for K–12 teachers and teacher educators. Dr. Schultz worked with Penn GSE graduate students to initiate Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education, an on-line journal that brings together educational research, policy, and practice and provides opportunities for public dialogue on urban education. She is the university director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, an organization that works with more than 500 teachers in the School District of Philadelphia. Currently she serves as director of the Center for Collaborative Research and Practice in Teacher Education and as director of Teacher Education. Dr. Schultz was recently appointed as vice chair of the Educational Empowerment Board of the Chester Upland School District.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Schultz’s research is centered on the problem of how to prepare and provide on-going support for new teachers in urban public schools. In order to address this issue, she has sought a deeper understanding of the varied contexts in which people learn in and out of schools, in local and international contexts. Looking to the perspectives of youth, community members, and teachers — voices that are often marginalized and ignored — to inform the programs and policies, her current research projects explore the topics of pathways into teaching, urban teaching, learning, and school reform, adolescent literacy practices, and international teacher education.

She is involved in several strands of research. One project investigates how new teachers learn to teach, while teaching, through pre-service programs before entering the classroom and through alternative programs such as Teach for America. A second project documents multiple stakeholder perspectives on change and reform in a high-poverty school district. Her interest in professional development and international teacher education has led her to work and document professional development with teachers in Aceh, Indonesia, and Lebanon. Finally, her work in adolescent literacy practices has been focused on the relationships between literacy and learning in school, home, and community contexts. Her edited volume with Glynda Hull, School’s Out!: Bridging Out-of-School Literacy with Classroom Practices, provides frameworks for this work. She has written two books primarily for new and veteran teachers that build on her long-term work and research in urban classrooms: Listening: A Framework for Teaching across Differences (2003), which provides a conceptual framework for envisioning teaching as listening, and Rethinking Participation: Listening to Silent Voices (2009), which proposes that teachers deepen their understandings of the functions and uses of silence in classrooms.