Email
bomer@austin.utexas.edu
Office & Hours
Office: SZB 406
Phone
(512) 232-4861
Fax
(512) 471-8460
Courses of Instruction
Fall, 2011. EDC 383F. Curriculum Theory.
Spring, 2012. EDC 385G. Orality, Literacy, and Technology.
Fall, 2012. EDC 385G. Research in the English Language Arts.
Mailing Address
The University of Texas at Austin
Curriculum & Instruction
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712-0379
UT Mail Code: D5700
Profile
Dr. Bomer's research investigates the ways teachers leverage the knowledge and interests that children and youth bring to school in order to grow as readers and writers. He studies how, especially for students from poverty and ethnic and linguistic minorities, this strengths-based way of teaching is important to allow students to develop literate identities and self-efficacy with reading and writing. For example, some children develop strength at writing before they become good at reading, and teachers help children transfer that initial strength toward reading. In other studies, youth bring knowledge of their outside-school uses of reading and writing - church, extracurricular activities, transnational migration - and the teacher helps them study these unofficial literacy practices in order to make connections to the academic kinds of reading and writing demanded in school. These areas of research on student learning also lead Bomer to examine the ways teachers learn to assess and teach from students' existing strengths, the kinds of curricula that can allow space for student knowledge to enter the conversation, and the educational policies that either advance or impede such curricula and instruction.
Randy Bomer is Professor and Chair of Curriculum & Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also directs the Heart of Texas Writing Project. Formerly a middle and high school teacher, he has consulted with urban school districts across the USA. Prior to coming to UT, he taught at Indiana University, Queens College of the City University of New York, and was for five years the co-director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. He is a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Education
Ph.D., Columbia University
Representative Publications
Bomer, R. (2011). Building adolescent literacy in today’s English classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Christenbury, L., Bomer, R., & Smagorinsky, P., Eds. (2008) The Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research. New York: Guilford Press.
Bomer, R., Dworin, J., May, L., & Semingson, P. (2008) Miseducating teachers about the poor: A critical analysis of Ruby Payne’s claims about poverty. Teachers College Record, 110 (12), 2497-2531.
Bomer, R. & Bomer, K. (2001). For a Better World: Reading and writing for social action. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Bomer, R. (1995). Time for Meaning: Crafting literate lives in middle and high school. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Research Interests and Expertise
Writing, politics of literacy, sociocultural theory, curricula in reading and writing