Dr. Amy Vetter is an associate professor in English education in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she teaches undergraduate courses in teaching practices and curriculum of English and literacy in the content area, and graduate courses in youth literacies, teacher research, and qualitative research design.
Her areas of research are literacy and identity, critical conversations, and the writing lives of teens. Her research examines how teaching and learning occur within a social, historical, and cultural context. Specifically, She studies the implications of the social construction of learning within an identity framework. By identity, she means “self-understandings” or the ways in which people “tell themselves and then try to act as though they are who they say they are” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 3). Learning how to read and write, for example, is a social process that involves taking on behaviors and discourses that are associated with readers/writers. Thus, her work focuses on scholarship about learning as an identity process (Lave & Wenger, 1992) within literacy education and teacher education. This theoretical orientation has led her to conduct research about students’ identity work and how teachers facilitate students’ membership into literacy communities. This focus stems from her own background as a high school English teacher. After figuring out that a tidy set of literacy strategies did not work for all of her students, she set out, through multiple teacher research projects, to make sense of and articulate the complicated relationship between identities and literacy learning.
Dr. Vetter has developed a scholarly record that underscores the significance of classroom interactions for impacting the development of reader/writing identities and teacher identities, the role critical conversations play in identity work within secondary and undergraduate classrooms, and the importance of learning from youth’s writing identities. Additionally, she has generated a practice-oriented scholarly record that has direct, practical implications for ELA teacher education, and for literacy instruction in K-12 settings. As a result, she writes and publishes in venues for researchers, teacher educators, and practicing English language arts teachers. Since her arrival at UNCG, she has published articles in English Education, Journal of Literacy Research, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, English Journal, Qualitative Research in Education, Teacher Education Quarterly, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Changing English, Journal of Teacher Education and The Urban Review. She presents regularly at the National Conference for Teachers of English and the Literacy Research Association Conference.
Amy completed her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas Austin. Her major area of emphasis was Language and Literacy Studies, with a certificate in Women's and Gender Studies. Before her job in higher education, she taught all levels of tenth and twelfth grade English in Austin, Texas. She co-directs a young writers’ camp at UNCG in the summer and co-facilitates the Triad Teacher Researcher Group in various schools across the county.
Amy lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband and two daughters. When she’s not in the classroom, you’ll probably find her running, cycling, hiking or reading a book.
Her areas of research are literacy and identity, critical conversations, and the writing lives of teens. Her research examines how teaching and learning occur within a social, historical, and cultural context. Specifically, She studies the implications of the social construction of learning within an identity framework. By identity, she means “self-understandings” or the ways in which people “tell themselves and then try to act as though they are who they say they are” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 3). Learning how to read and write, for example, is a social process that involves taking on behaviors and discourses that are associated with readers/writers. Thus, her work focuses on scholarship about learning as an identity process (Lave & Wenger, 1992) within literacy education and teacher education. This theoretical orientation has led her to conduct research about students’ identity work and how teachers facilitate students’ membership into literacy communities. This focus stems from her own background as a high school English teacher. After figuring out that a tidy set of literacy strategies did not work for all of her students, she set out, through multiple teacher research projects, to make sense of and articulate the complicated relationship between identities and literacy learning.
Dr. Vetter has developed a scholarly record that underscores the significance of classroom interactions for impacting the development of reader/writing identities and teacher identities, the role critical conversations play in identity work within secondary and undergraduate classrooms, and the importance of learning from youth’s writing identities. Additionally, she has generated a practice-oriented scholarly record that has direct, practical implications for ELA teacher education, and for literacy instruction in K-12 settings. As a result, she writes and publishes in venues for researchers, teacher educators, and practicing English language arts teachers. Since her arrival at UNCG, she has published articles in English Education, Journal of Literacy Research, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, English Journal, Qualitative Research in Education, Teacher Education Quarterly, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Changing English, Journal of Teacher Education and The Urban Review. She presents regularly at the National Conference for Teachers of English and the Literacy Research Association Conference.
Amy completed her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas Austin. Her major area of emphasis was Language and Literacy Studies, with a certificate in Women's and Gender Studies. Before her job in higher education, she taught all levels of tenth and twelfth grade English in Austin, Texas. She co-directs a young writers’ camp at UNCG in the summer and co-facilitates the Triad Teacher Researcher Group in various schools across the county.
Amy lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband and two daughters. When she’s not in the classroom, you’ll probably find her running, cycling, hiking or reading a book.