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For more information about Lara Handsfield's work, review her profile.

Lara Handsfield: Development of elementary education students and research go hand-in-hand

By Lauren Huffman

"I think our elementary education majors have a real passion for teaching and learning. I enjoy being a part of that and fostering that." — Lara Handsfield, assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction in Illinois State University's College of Education

(January 25, 2010) As students experience the trials, successes, and failures that are inevitable in the process of becoming a teacher, Lara Handsfield, assistant professor in Curriculum and Instruction at Illinois State University maintains a critical approach to teacher education.

"I'm not going to tell them what to do with their students," Handsfield said. "My job is to introduce them to and help them critique and think critically about a variety of instructional approaches and tools to use in the classroom so that they're going to be able to go out into the public schools and become leaders in their field. I'm trying to position them that way from the beginning."

In her C&I 209 class, Literacy II: Language Arts in the Elementary Schools, Handsfield's pre-service teachers tutor an elementary school student in literacy for 8-10 weeks. For most of her students it is their first major clinical experience, and the first time they've ever been in charge of planning instruction and carrying it out.

Handsfield is grateful for the opportunity to see pre-service teachers develop from not having had any experience at all, into students who are ready to instruct an entire class.

"One of my absolute favorite things is working with pre-service teachers over an extended period of time," Handsfield said. "The changes I see from the beginning of the semester to the end are significant, to say the least."

In addition to seeing her students develop the skills needed to become teachers, Handsfield gets to witness a vital transition from student to teacher.

"I enjoy the collegial relationships I build with the pre-service teachers over the course of a semester. By the end of the semester I feel like we're interacting as colleagues. I find that experience tremendously rewarding. I think our elementary education majors have a real passion for teaching and learning. I enjoy being a part of that and fostering that."

"It's not just a change in the kinds of coursework they do. It involves a change in identity for the students. For me that's exciting, challenging, and incredibly engaging. For my students, it's about learning what it means to become a teacher, and how that is different from being a student."

Handsfield's areas of expertise are literacy and bilingual education. Her research interests center around the intersections of literacy, bilingualism, and teacher education. Her research surfaces in her teaching when it comes to the development of pre-service and in-service teachers and how they come to learn about teaching literacy and working with linguistically diverse students.

Handsfield's own teaching has gone through a development as well. She experiments using collaborative Web sites for communication and collaboration. This use of technology requires her and her students to rethink their ideas of what literacy is.

"Literacy is no longer just reading a book, reading a newspaper, or writing something," Handsfield explained. "It includes new digital literacies, social networking, and online spaces. Children need to know how to comprehend hypertext, for example. Literacy includes things as simple as text messages and everyday texts in the community like shop signs and food labels. Trying to broaden students' conceptualizations of what counts as literacy, and how to bridge between everyday and academic literacies is something I focus on a lot at the beginning of my courses."

Having completed her doctoral work at the University of Illinois in 2005, Handsfield started at Illinois State in August of 2005. Since then, Handsfield has published her dissertation research as well as more recent research on multilingualism, multiple literacy practices, and teacher development.

Handsfield has been able to integrate her research with her teaching while working in the surrounding schools. She has an enthusiasm for literacy instruction and teaching in linguistically diverse contexts, which she tries to instill in her teaching.

"The connection between my theoretical understandings and the pragmatic 'real world' concerns of teachers guides my research, compelling me to examine how theories of language and literacy are embedded in literacy practices and instruction."

She's also been able to work in the graduate program teaching classes in the Reading Master's degree program and the C&I doctoral program. Handsfield's work has been published in a multitude of journals, including the Harvard Educational Review, The Reading Teacher, Language Arts, and the Journal of Literacy Research.