Margaret Sheehy

Margi Sheehy brings experience as a middle and elementary school teacher and college composition and literature teacher to bear on her current work. Her twenty years of teaching, research and service extend from early grades through adulthood and extend geographically, from western, mid-western, to eastern states. Currently, Dr. Sheehy is developing models of supplemental literacy instruction in secondary schools.

Dr. Sheehy received her PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture from The Ohio State University and her master’s degree in Reading from Montana State University-Billings. At Ohio State (and because of her diverse experiences as a teacher in different contexts) she became interested in Human Geography and searched for a theoretical framework for understanding what it was about specific locales that made some practices possible but others not. Such a framework seemed necessary for social change to be planned and implemented at any level, from the single classroom to district-wide curriculum. The results of this research are documented in her book, Place Stories: Time, Space and Literacy in Two Classrooms (Hampton Press), a co-edited book with Kevin Leander, Spatializing Literacy Research and Practice (Peter-Lang), and in articles published in Reading Research Quarterly, Written Communication, and Pedagogy, Culture and Society. The reading program at Montana State University-Billings set Dr. Sheehy on a life-long interest in knowledge building in academic disciplines. Dr. Sheehy’s two research interests are now merged in a research project supported with a $1.4 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences. Dr. Sheehy and her colleagues are developing supplemental secondary literacy instruction in informational reading and argument writing.