Timothy J. Lensmire
Associate professor
Ph.D., Michigan State University
Literacy education
350C Peik Hall
612-625-2092
lensmire@umn.edu
Office hours: by appointment
Preferred method of contact: email
My teaching, research, and writing are animated by commitments to and hopes for radical democracy. By democracy, I mean what John Dewey called a way of life — a way of life that embodies a generous belief in the possibilities of human nature and that entails the obligation to work to create the conditions that would allow human capacities to develop and flourish. What this means for my teaching is that I embrace and continue to learn about and explore various progressive, feminist, and critical pedagogies in my work with students.
My past research focused on the teaching of writing in schools and how this teaching might better serve democratic ends. As a teacher-researcher, I have taught writing in a third grade public school classroom and written about some of the problems and issues that confront teachers and students in writing workshops. I have drawn on Mikhail Bakhtin and John Dewey, among others, to examine, criticize, and reconstruct our ideas of the teacher¹s role, student voice, and classroom community.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that the problem of the Twentieth Century was the problem of the color-line. We have of course brought this problem with us into the new century. My current research and writing focus on race and education, and especially on how white people learn to be white in our white supremacist society. Grounded in critical white studies, my work contributes to the ongoing effort to figure out how best to work with white students (in K-12 schools and universities, in teacher education, in teacher development) on issues of race and social justice.
Selected publications
Sato, M. and Lensmire, T. (2009). Poverty and Payne: Supporting teachers to work with children of poverty. Phi Delta Kappan, 90(5), 365-370.
Lensmire, T. (2008). How I became white while punching de tar baby. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(3), 299-322.
Snaza, N. and Lensmire, T. (2006). Abandon voice? Pedagogy, the body, and late capitalism. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2(2), Article 3. http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol2/iss2/art3
Lensmire, T. (2003). In the winter. Educational Foundations, 17(3), 69-76.
Lensmire, T. (2000). Powerful writing, responsible teaching. New York: Teachers College Press.
Lensmire, T., & Price, J. (1998). (Com)Promising pleasures, (im)mutable masculinities. Language Arts, 76(2), 130-134.
Lensmire, T. (1994). When children write: Critical re-visions of the writing workshop. New York: Teachers College Press.
Courses taught
- CI 8131 - Curriculum and Instruction Core: Critical Examination of Curriculum in Context
- CI 5145 - Critical Pedagogy
- CI 5410 - Special Topics in the Teaching of Literacy: Politics of Literacy and Race in K-12 Classrooms
- CI 5422 - Teaching Writing in Schools
Featured research and outreach
Revised September 2009
