Join NCTE for a members-only virtual event with authors of the recent NCTE books Building Critical Literacy and Empathy with Graphic Novels by Jason DeHart and Deepening Student Engagement with Diverse Picturebooks by Angie Zapata. Both books provide pathways for selecting and teaching diverse, relevant image-based texts in the classroom. The authors will be sharing information from their books that will be applicable to classroom teachers in particular, though all are welcome to attend.

This event is in meeting format and will include opportunities for engagement as a whole group and in breakout rooms. Each author will lead an interactive discussion based on their text so that educators can ask questions and get advice that will be directly applicable to their classroom.

Tuesday, August 13, 4:00–5:00 p.m. ET

 Please contact profdev@ncte.org with any questions.

Dr. Jason D. DeHart has served at both secondary and post-secondary levels as an educator. DeHart’s research interests include multimodal literacy, such as film and graphic novels, and literacy instruction with adolescents. He taught middle grades English language arts for eight years and continues to work to keep current with trends in education. DeHart’s work has appeared in SIGNAL Journal, English Journal, and The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and he is the author of Building Critical Literacy and Empathy with Graphic Novels from NCTE. He is passionate about literacy, inclusivity, engaged reading, and authentic writing practices.

Dr. Angie Zapata, associate professor of language and literacies education at the University of Missouri, is a longtime teacher, teacher educator and researcher. She engages in collaborative inquiry partnerships with practicing and inservice PK–12 teachers. Her research publications highlight classroom experiences featuring picturebooks with diverse racial, linguistic, and ethnic representation, and how/what translingual and transmodal literacies are produced in these moments. Dr. Zapata’s research is guided by her experiences growing up bilingual in Texas as a daughter of immigrant parents from Perú and deep commitments to center anti-oppressive and justice-oriented language and literacies experiences in the classroom that nurture more inclusive schooling experiences for racialized bi/multilingual/multidialectal children and youth.

Her research and teaching contributions have been recognized through awarding her the Early Career Research Award from the National Council of Teachers of English Children’s Literature Assembly and the National Council of Research in Language and Literacies Mid-Career Scholar. Her service to the field includes serving as coeditor of Literacy Research: Theory, Methods, and Practice as well as the Journal of Children’s Literature. Currently, Dr. Zapata partners with early childhood educators in racially, linguistically, and ethnically complex Missouri classrooms with generous funding from the Foundation for Child Development and the US Department of Education. Her research has been published in journals such Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of Literacy Research, Language Arts, The Reading Teachers, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and English Teaching, Practice and Critique. Her book entitled Deepening Student Engagement with Diverse Picturebooks: Powerful Classroom Practices for Elementary Teachers is part of the Principle in Practice Series published by the National Council of Teachers of English.