Dr. Valerie Walker

| Education

Scholarship

My scholarly interests have always been closely connected to what I am teaching. For example, my dissertation was an examination of how teacher candidates in my "Issues of Diversity in Children's and Adolescent Litearture" course responded to characters with disabilities in several adolescent novels and their insights and my reading of Disability Studies theories caused me to "reread" those texts.

Currently I am working on several projects that examine how characters with disabilities are constructed in children's, adolescent, and young adult literature. Students in my "Literacy for the K-12 Teacher" and "Elementary Social Studies Methods" courses are helping me think about these books as we connect them to themes in each course.