My research focuses on the teaching and learning of literary interpretation and writing in under-resourced urban high schools, with an emphasis on the links between in- and out-of-school interpretive practices. I am also interested in ways that digital media – specifically radio production – can be used as frameworks for teaching reading and writing to middle and high school students. Before pursuing an academic career, I taught secondary English at a Chicago public school for ten years. While there, I founded and ran a youth radio program that used digital audio production as a tool to help make writing and analysis relevant and real-world for struggling students, and to build bridges between school and the world outside.

My primary goal as an academic is to help shape the teaching and learning of secondary English teachers and contribute to research that will help students — especially those in urban and under-resourced schools — become independent readers and writers.

Education

Northwestern University, PhD in Learning Sciences

University of Chicago, Master of Arts in Teaching of English

Cornell University, Bachelor of Arts in American Studies

Time at Stanford

Since 2015

Professional Experience

High school English and radio teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, 1997-2009

Recent Publications

Designing Architecture for Engaging Middle and High School Students in Epistemic Practices of Literary Interpretation (aka designing instruction to help kids think about literature)
Levine, S. (2018). Using Everyday Language to Support Students in Constructing Thematic Interpretations. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 20(1), 1–31.
Lee, C.D., Goldman, S., Levine, S., Magliano, J. (2016). Epistemic Cognition in Literary Reasoning. In Greene, J.A., Sandoval, W.A., & Bråten, I. (Eds.), Handbook of Epistemic Cognition, New York: Routledge.
Levine, S., Bernstein, M. (2015). Opening George Hillocks’s territory of literature. English Education, 48, (2), 127-147.
Levine, S., Horton, W. (2015). Helping high school students read like experts: Affective evaluation, salience, and literary interpretation. Cognition and Instruction, 33, (2), 125-153.
Levine, S., Franzel, J. (2015). Teaching writing with radio. English Journal, 105 (5), 21-29.
Levine, S. (2014). Making interpretation visible with an affect-based strategy. Reading Research Quarterly, 49 (3), 283-303.
Levine, S., Horton, W. (2013). Using affective appraisal to help readers construct literary interpretations. Scientific Study of Literature, 3(1), 105-136.

Current Activities

1. Through an NAed/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and Stanford's Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET), I am working with high school ELA teachers to:

interrogate what exactly we think literature is "for"
develop "authentic" questions about literary worlds and authorial choices (authentic questions are questions to which you don't already know the answer or about which you really are curious about what your students might say)
learn and practice emotion-based approaches to textual interpretation
learn to create cultural data sets for students

I am looking at the extent to which this work with teachers influences the kinds of discussions they have with students and the kind of interpretive work students do.

2. I am also using eye-tracking and other technology to look at the kinds of interpretive readings novices and experts make when they read literary texts; I hope to shed more light on how teachers can help inexperienced literary readers engage and enjoy interpretive work.

3. I am reading U.S. standardized literature tests from 1900s until the present to try to understand ways in which educators and test-makers defined and valued literary reading.

Faculty & Research

Sarah Levine

Research Interests

Research Summary