Learn more about Audrey Lucero, PhD, Associate Professor of Education Studies through our Faculty Spotlight series.
Hometown: Denver, Colorado
Primary research interest: How literacy educators work with kids to talk about challenging and critical issues such as race, racism, and gender. I’m interested in how teachers use literature to have those discussions with students.
Favorite Book or Movie: So Many! Some notable ones are Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, and The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi.
Hobbies: I love to hike and backpack. I’m a cyclist and I like to do yoga. I love to read—that’s obvious, I’m a literacy educator!
What brought you to the University of Oregon?
I got my PhD at the University of Washington, so I lived in Seattle for 11 years. I really loved the Pacific Northwest, and I didn't want to leave, so I was really glad when this job became available. Another part of the reason that the job was so appealing is that the position I was hired for is focused on both language and literacy, and those are two pieces of my work that I think are really important. A lot of other jobs that were available were really literacy focused, but not thinking about language. And I have historically worked a lot with the Latinx community and with bilingual kids, so I really appreciated that the position included both a focus on language and teacher practice and on literacy. I also appreciated that the program had a critical focus on making change in schools.
What is the focus of your current research?
All my research has been in the area of language within a literacy context. I have focused a lot on child language and the ways that bilingual kids in particular use words and phrases and sentences to communicate meaning, but in my most recent research, I've shifted to looking at how teachers use language to make meaning and to make sense of their world. I've been using a method called critical discourse analysis, where we do really detailed analysis of words that teachers use, and the ways that they use them, and the words that they choose not to use. So we’re really looking at it from the perspective that language not only communicates reality, but it also constructs reality. We make sense of the world through language. The words that we use, and the ways that we use them, are an act of identity that goes beyond just words. I do a lot of analysis of transcripts—video transcripts, audio transcripts, interviews, teacher discussion groups. I'm working right now with a group of 10 teachers who come together monthly to talk about issues of race and racism in their classrooms and how they're dealing with that. We analyze those transcripts to see how teachers talk about these issues how those discourses change over the course of the year that we're working together.
How do you hope your work makes an impact? Why do you think it’s important?
I think I got interested in language partly because my parents are both native Spanish speakers, but they didn't really speak Spanish when we were growing up. By the time they met, they were predominantly English speaking, and my brother and I were never really interested in learning language. When we were kids, we were like, ‘What do I need that for?’ But as I got older, I realized what a missed opportunity that was. As I've gone through the process of learning Spanish and connecting more with that language, and with that part of myself, I think I've come to appreciate how important language is in constructing our identities and our ways of approaching the world.
I think it's important, when we think about education, to attend to what teachers say in classrooms, and how they respond to what kids say in classrooms, especially right now when there is so much control of what teachers can and can't say in their classrooms. It’s important to honor the work that teachers are doing to talk to kids about race and racism in particular, because it's crucial to help kids understand that it's okay to talk about race, and it's okay to notice race and all the things that we have historically not talked about. It’s important to support teachers who are trying these things out and trying to figure out how to help kids talk about this, so that hopefully we become less scared of talking about race and more open to it in ways that make our society a better place.
What message would you like to share with students considering coming to the College of Education?
We have really a lot of courses that address many different aspects of education, so I feel like our students get a very balanced experience. They work with faculty who do work like mine, and they work with faculty who do large-scale quantitative studies, they work with faculty who have expertise in lots of different areas. I think that’s something that's important to keep in mind. We are also an increasingly diverse campus. I work as the director of Latinx Studies at the University, and we now have about 15% of undergraduate students who identify as Latinx. That's pretty diverse for a state like Oregon and I think that's a really cool thing that enriches our community and enriches our university. It’s a more diverse place than people may realize.
What do you love about living in Eugene?
I like that Eugene is a small-ish town so I can bike everywhere. I like that it's an hour from the mountains and an hour from the coast because I love to backpack and hike. The Northwest is just the place where I want to be; I love it here and I like the community. We have our challenges, just like all communities, but I feel like it's a place where people want to try to be better and do better. I think that it’s just a beautiful place to live with lots of great things to do. There’s a lot going on for it being a small city! There's a lot of art, a lot of music, a lot of cultural things happening that I think is cool for a city that’s not very big.