Graduate School of Education: 0606zacher.html

Jessica Zacher, who earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education in 2005, has won two prestigious research awards: the Promising Researcher Award in English Education by the Standing Committee on Research of the National Council of Teachers of English, and an honorable mention (the equivalent of second place) in the 2006 Division G Dissertation Award Competition at the American Educational Research Association Conference. The AERA recognized her for her dissertation: “It’s not the color of their skin: Identity politics, literacy practices and multicultural curricula in an urban fifth grade classroom.”

Zacher’s dissertation committee in GSE included Glynda Hull (chair), P. David Pearson, Ingrid Seyer-Ochi and Allan Pred (Geography Department). She also earned a Master’s from the GSE in 2000 in Language and Literacy, Society and Culture.

Zacher recently concluded her first year as a tenure-track assistant professor in Teacher Education and Liberal Studies at CSU Long Beach where she teaches undergraduate courses on cultural and linguistic diversity and on literacy theories. She just began an ethnographic project in a local school district looking at the Open Court language arts curricula implementation from children's perspectives.