| Dr. Susan
Florio-Ruane (Ed.M., 1974; Ed.D., Harvard 1978) Dr. Florio-Ruane is Professor of Teacher Education. She served as a Senior Researcher in the MSU Institute for Research on Teaching from 1977-87. In that role she co-coordinated the Written Literacy Forum, a collaborative research project bringing together the insights of campus-based ethnographers and educational psychologists, with those of elementary and secondary school teachers of writing. During her time in the IRT, she also received funding from the National Institute of Education for a study of "Schooling and the Acquisition of Written Literacy." From 1987-1993, Dr Florio-Ruane coordinated the Learning Community Teacher Education Program and lead the reform of its pre-service literacy curriculum. In connection with that work, she pursued an active program of research on Learning to Teach Writing. Her paper on what beginning teachers need to know about "The Social Organization of Classes and Schools" won the 1990 Division K Research in Teacher Education Award of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She is presently principal investigator in a study of "Autobiographies of Education and Cultural Identity: Preparing Teachers to Support Literacy Learning in Diverse Classrooms," funded by two Michigan State All-University Research Initiation Grants and a small grant from the Spencer Foundation. Currently, Dr. Florio-Ruane was President of the Council on Anthropology and Education from 1994-96, where she also served as program chair for the 1993 and 1994 annual meetings. She served as one of the 1993 Program Co-Chairs for the annual meeting program for the American Educational Research Association's Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education), and was a member of the Distinguished Dissertation Research Awards Committee for AERA's Division G (Social Context of Education). She is an experienced researcher who teaches ethnographic research methods and analysis of discourse at the doctoral level. She also teaches masters and undergraduate-level courses in literacy education and has and written widely about ethnographic and sociolinguistic research, literacy education, and the preparation of teachers. She was an External Evaluator of the federally-funded National Center for Research on Writing at University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University and now serves on the advisory board of the Teachers College Press Practitioner Inquiry Series. Susan Florio-Ruane has published in many books and journals including: the American Educational Research Journal, the Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the Elementary School Journal, the Journal of Curriculum Studies, and Research in the Teaching of English, the International Journal of Teaching and Teacher Education, and English Education. She also recently authored the inaugural entry on the anthropological study of classrooms and schools for the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education and is a contributing author of Literature Works, a literature-based language arts/reading series for children (grades k-6) published by Silver, Burdett and Ginn. She is currently completing a book (with Julie deTar) entitled, Conversation and Personal Narrative: Transforming Teacher Learning about Literacy and Culture to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum later this year. Her research interests include teacher education, autobiography, culture and literacy; analysis of educational discourse, teacher/researcher collaboration in studies of education and culture, and the teaching and learning of literacy.
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