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Bookplate Reception Fall 2018

TPTE celebrates faculty at Provost’s Bookplate reception

On Monday October 22, 2018, Provost Maderscheid and the Provost’s Office hosted the 15th annual Bookplate reception to honor faculty who earned tenure and / or promotion dur academic year 2018-19. In this event, the department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education (TPTE) was well-represented. Stergios Botzakis, Susan Groenke, and Deb Wooten each achieved promotion to full professor, and Anthony Pellegrino achieved tenure and promotion to associate professor. The reception is premised on the idea that each faculty member shares a book that has been important or influential to their work.

For his book, Sterg Botzakis, professor of literacy education, chose the comic book Dork, written by Evan Dorkin. For him, this book was written by one of his favorite comics creators, and, he added “this book was only recently published, but it collected a series that came out when I was in college myself. I liked the mix of his gag strips and other more humor-oriented comics, but after he had a nervous breakdown the series got more autobiographical and serious, which showed me a lot about the potential for what comics can do.”

Associate professor of theory and practice in teacher education, Susan Groenke chose Angie Thomas’ young adult novel The Hate U Give. Groenke noted that her book was special for a variety of reasons. “As a long-time advocate for young adult literature and as an anti-racist teacher educator, I felt Thomas’s book was an appropriate choice. The book focuses on a young black female teen, Starr Carter, who suffers great trauma when she witnesses her best childhood friend get shot and killed by a white police officer. Starr must ultimately decide to use her voice and stand up against the racism and ongoing police violence that ravages her community. The book is very popular with teens–it won a 2018 Teen’s Choice Book Award–and I think we need to pay attention to what youth choose to read when given opportunities to choose. We have an opportunity to listen to youth and to start talking to them about why these books matter to them, and how they–like Starr–can take action to affect real social change in the world.”

Deb Wooten, professor of literacy education and elementary education, selected the fifth edition of Children’s Literature in the Reading Program: Engaging Young Readers in the 21st Century. It is an edited volume that Wooten, Lauren Liang, and Bernice Cullinan published to offer a platform for scholars in the field of literacy to share. Professor Wooten said, “I selected this book for this honor because it features authors who have incorporated the power of diverse children’s literature that takes us vicariously to places and times we can only imagine, making immigrants of us all. This book  is also a valuable source of instructional strategies for teachers to implement with their students.”

Anthony Pellegrino, associate professor of social science education, shared Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Studying the Past by Sam Wineburg. According to Pellegrino, “This book introduced me to the fundamental idea of studying the past as a way to humanize. I first read it at a time when I was craving more than just helping my students memorize names and dates from history. From Wineburg’s studies and experiences, my eyes were opened to the value of perspective-taking and careful consideration of evidence in our work. I’ve since taken these principles to my teacher candidates in our social sciences education program.”

Below is a link to all of the faculty books featured at the reception.

https://libguides.utk.edu/bookplatehonors