UNC School of Education

>> Glazier, Jocelyn

At its core, Jocelyn Glazier’s research concerns social justice and multicultural education as related to issues of teacher education.  Primarily qualitative in nature, her research is informed by critical pedagogy, social constructivism and theories of communication, often falling within the tradition of critical ethnography. 

Glazier’s dissertation research included a yearlong study of an Arab/Jewish school in Northern Israel. There she explored the experiences of students and teachers as they engaged in the difficult process of learning about and ultimately understanding one another’s cultures and languages. Teachers College Record and the Harvard Educational Review have published her findings. 

Glazier’s more recent work consists of teacher education research that aids practicing teachers in schools and adds to new knowledge in the field.  In one such professional development project, she assembled a group of secondary English teachers to read and discuss multicultural literature, which they in turn would teach to their own students. Glazier introduced the teachers to discourse analysis so they could explore how they positioned themselves relative to race, ethnicity, gender or social class through their discourse with one another and in regard to the characters in the texts.  Through this close reading and discussion of multicultural texts, and in one-on-one classroom work with Glazier, the teachers in the study became more aware of how their own biases and prejudices tended to privilege certain forms of learning and thus, certain students. Glazier published articles on this research in the Journal for Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Teaching Education. 

Glazier continues to be interested in how teacher educators can better prepare teachers – both pre-service and in-service – to address the needs of their linguistically and culturally diverse students, a topic central to the dramatic shift in North Carolina’s demographics in recent years.  Questions she hopes to pursue in her research agenda at Carolina include: How is it that teachers are addressing the changing demographics within their schools, and what do teacher educators need to do to better support schools and teachers as they experience this change?  In what ways might critical pedagogy serve to empower teachers and students in schools?  In what ways are students influenced in their lives outside of school by critical practices used in school?  And might critical action research lead to change in teachers’ practice and students’ experiences of school, better enabling education to be, as bell hooks has written, a “practice of freedom”?