Sarah Freedman

University of California, Berkeley

Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School

Sarah Warshauer Freedman is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley where she was also affiliated with the Human Rights Center. She served as founding faculty directed the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy and the Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE) Credential and MA program. Her research focuses on how students who are most underserved by US schools and universities learn to write and how teachers learn to teach these students. As a Senior Fellow at Berkeley's Human Rights Center, she also has studied the role of schools around the world in helping young people recover from mass violence and in helping them navigate divisions in their societies. Freedman is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, has three times been a Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and has been a Resident at The Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation. Her books include The Acquisition of Written Language (edited), Response to Student Writing, Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures: Lessons in School Reform from the United States and Great Britain, Inside City Schools Investigating Literacy in Multicultural Classrooms (with Elizabeth Simons, Julie Kalnin, & Alex Casareno), Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy and Learning (edited with Arnetha Ball), and The First Year of Teaching: Classroom Research to Increase Student Learning (edited with Jabari Mahiri). Awards for her books and articles inclulde the Richard Meade Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the Ed Fry Book Award from the National Reading Conference, the Multicultural Book Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and the Alan C. Purves Award (NCTE).