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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 teacherĀ¹s
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
Nathan Snaza and Timothy J. Lensmire. (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
August 2008 |
