Angie Zapata
- Associate Professor
Dr. Angie Zapata, associate professor of Language and Literacies Education at the University of Missouri, is a longtime teacher, teacher educator and researcher. Through collaborative inquiry partnerships with practicing PK-12 teachers her research highlights classroom literacy experiences featuring picturebooks with diverse racial, linguistic, and ethnic representation, and how/what translingual and transmodal literacies are produced in the classroom. Dr. Zapata’s research is guided by her experiences growing up bilingual in Texas as a daughter of immigrant parents from Perú, her time as a bilingual classroom teacher, and her deep commitments to center anti-oppressive and justice-oriented language and literacies experiences in the classroom that nurture more inclusive schooling experiences for racialized multilingual children and youth.
Her research and teaching contributions have been recognized as a recipient of the Early Career Research Award from the National Council of Teachers of English Children’s Literature Assembly and the National Council of Research in Language and Literacies Mid-Career Scholar and as the 2024 National Council of Teachers of English Elementary Educator and the Early Childhood Teacher Educator awardee. Her service to the field includes serving as co-editor of Literacy Research: Theory, Methods, and Practice as well as the Journal of Children’s Literature. Currently, Dr. Zapata partners with early care educators in racially, linguistically, and ethnically complex Missouri classrooms with generous funding from the Foundation for Child Development and the U.S. Department of Education. Her research has been published in journals such Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of Literacy Research, Language Arts, The Reading Teacher, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and English Teaching, Practice and Critique. Her book entitled Deepening Student Engagement with Diverse Picturebooks: Powerful Classroom Practices for Elementary Teachers (2023) is part of the Principle in Practice Series published by the National Council of Teachers of English.
Primary Investigator, Foundation for Child Development | Project Title: Teacher and Researcher Collaborative Inquiry as Ongoing Professional Development: Improving Early Childhood Experiences In Racially, Linguistically, and Ethnically Complex Missouri Classrooms
Primary Investigator, Family, Community, and Emergent Literacy Birth-K | Comprehensive Literacy State Development Program | U.S. Department of Education
Affiliations
- Co-Founder, Missouri Language and Literacies Center
- Faculty, Language and Literacies for Social Transformation
Areas of Expertise
- Language and Literacies Education
- Early Reading Education
- Literature-Based Instruction
- Translingual/Transmodal Literacies