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Laura’s research and teaching aims to explore how we can build urban schools that are both humanizing and intellectually challenging spaces for students, as well as examining the political, economic, cultural, and historical reasons why schools don’t always already feel that way for students.

Her recent work considers how teachers and parents interpret, negotiate, and resist educational policies. This work aims to make visible the role of teachers and parents as policy actors, as well as to examine how school systems can learn from their knowledge and experiences.  Her research has also examined how neoliberalism and racism have shaped educational reforms like high-stakes testing, and how these reforms in turn shape everyday classroom interactions. She has analyzed how teachers in accountability-constrained schools have made space for humanizing and critical pedagogies with their students. 

She is particularly interested in the role of language, both in how we learn from one another and in how we communicate our beliefs, our values, and our knowledges. Her interest in language and interaction is rooted in critical and reconstructive orientations, viewing language as a key means through which teachers and students can both reproduce and transform oppressive social institutions and systems. 

Previously, Laura was a teacher at a public elementary school in Houston, Texas, where she had the opportunity to teach students with a variety of linguistic and cultural assets. At Rhodes, she teaches undergraduate and master’s courses that explore how language and literacy are developed both within and beyond the classroom, as well as courses in qualitative methods and the purposes of public schooling in the United States. As a teacher educator, she enjoys the opportunity to support the ongoing learning of teachers across the career span, from teacher candidates to veteran teachers. She has provided professional development focused on authentic reading and writing instruction, language variation and multilingualism, and teacher mentoring, among other topics.

Recent Publications

Taylor, L. A., & Marchand, A. D. (advanced online). Equity & Excellence in Education.

Taylor, L. A., & Hikida, M. (advanced online). . The Urban Review.

Kelly, L. B., Marchand, A., Taylor, L.A., & Djonko-Moore, C. (2024). Teaching and Teacher Education, 151, 104748.

Kelly, L.B. & Taylor, L.A. (2024).  Reading Research Quarterly, 59(2), 173-192.

Taylor, L.A. (2024). “International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 37(7), 1956-1970 

Taylor, L.A. & Hikida, M. (2023). . English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 22(1), 1-10.

Hikida, M. & Taylor, L.A. (2023).  Urban Education, 58(6).

Taylor, L.A. (2023).  Teaching and Teacher Education, 121. 

Find a more complete list of Laura’s peer-reviewed research on .