R. Joseph Rodríguez

R. Joseph Rodríguez is a secondary language arts teacher at William Charles Akins Early College High School in Austin, Texas, and a literacy educator, researcher, and poet whose work centers on culturally sustaining pedagogy and socially responsible literacies. He has taught English and Spanish language arts across public schools, community colleges, and universities, and has served as an assistant professor of literacy and English education at The University of Texas at El Paso. Rodríguez earned a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, a master’s degree in English from The University of Texas at Austin, and a bachelor’s degree in modern languages and literatures from Kenyon College.

He is the author of Youth Scribes: Teaching a Love of Writing, a Heinemann title that offers a framework for building adolescents’ identities as scribes and engaging reluctant writers, as well as books such as Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites, Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations, and the poetry collection This Is Our Summons Now: Poems. A former editor or coeditor of NCTE’s English Journal and founder of the literacy initiative **