Biography

Dr. Wanda M. Brooks teaches in the middle/secondary teacher certification program in the College, the Temple Teacher Residency and the Doctoral Program in Education (Literacies and Learners Concentration). She teaches courses related to literacy theories, research and instruction as well as qualitative research methods. Her research interests fall into two complementary areas. First, to better understand how readers develop literary understandings, she examines the written and oral responses of African American young adolescents to diverse children’s and young adult books. Second, she carries out content analyses of African diaspora literature for youth to further situate and solidify these kinds of texts as representative of a developing literary tradition. She has published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, Children’s Literature in Education, the Urban Review and The English Journal. Currently, Dr. Brooks serves as a co-editor for the Language Arts journal and was recently elected as a board member for the Literacy Research Association. Before taking a university level faculty position, she taught middle grades language arts in several east coast public schools.