Center for the Scholarship of Teaching < Events < 2007 < "The Sun is Alive": Seeking the Intelectual Lives of Children

Center Events: Speaker Series

Dr. Cynthia Ballenger (Cheche Konnnen Center at TERC in Cambridge, MA)
The Sun is Alive: Seeking the Intellectual Lives of Children
November 10, 2006

Cynthia Ballenger is a public school teacher with both practical and theoretical interests in classroom discourse and teacher research. She has a Ph.D. In Applied Linguistics from Boston University and is a founding member of the Brookline Teacher Research Seminar and a long-time staff member of the Cheche Konnnen Center at TERC in Cambridge, MA. Her current students are 3rd through 6th graders and range from children of college professors to young immigrants from countries where neither they nor their parents had much opportunity for formal schooling.

She has published papers that address issues of cultural difference in language use in early literacy education and in elementary school. Her book on this issue (Teaching Other People's Children: Literacy and Learning in a Bilingual Classroom) is addressed to both teachers and researchers, and focuses on researching language practice as part of the process of teaching in a multi-cultural classroom. Recent work includes an edited volume of teacher research, papers on the uses of language in the classroom in relation to science teaching and learning, and on understanding the sense-making resources that children from the full range of linguistic and cultural communities bring.