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Lauren Gatti Associate Professor

Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison (2012) Curriculum and Instruction
M.A. Loyola University of Chicago (1999) English
B.A. Lawrence University (Appleton, WI) (1994) English (with certification in Secondary English Education)

Lauren Gatti is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She holds a Masters in English from Loyola University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to pursuing her doctoral work, she taught high school English in and around Chicago for 11 years. In 2013 she was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education). Her book, Toward a Framework of Resources for Learning to Teach: Rethinking US Teacher Preparation was published in 2016 by Palgrave MacMillan.

Gatti currently co-coordinates the English Education program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, teaches undergraduate courses in secondary English education, and teaches graduate courses in Democratic Education and Teacher Education Policy. In 2015 she was awarded the College of Education and Human Sciences (CEHS) Distinguished Teaching Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Urban Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Teacher Education & Practice, English Journal, and Social Semiotics

Broadly, Gatti’s scholarship explores the intersections of teacher preparation programs and policies and democratic education. She is currently engaged in several research projects. The first relates to her work in teacher education where she and two colleagues, Hilary Conklin of DePaul University and Kavita Kapadia Matsko at Northwestern University, have recently conducted a longitudinal, comparative case study investigating two distinctive pathways that prepare secondary teachers to teach in underserved schools, housed within the same university. This research was funded by a Spencer Foundation Small Grant ($49,993).

Gatti’s research also investigates the ethical mandates of teaching all students in the 21st century. She is a senior personnel on the International Consortium for Multilingual Excellence in Education (ICMEE, PI: Kara Mitchell Viesca) where she creates e-workshops aimed to help teachers (via professional development) deepen their pedagogical repertoires related to the teaching of multilingual learners, and also conducts research on how secondary English Language Arts pre-service teachers attend to the learning of the multilingual students in their classrooms.

Finally, Gatti is working on a book project with Paula McAvoy at North Carolina State. This project, Just teacher: Taking the ethical long view in the profession of teaching, explores ethical dilemmas in the profession of teaching and takes, as its foundation, surveys and interviews with teachers from across the country related to the dilemmas they have faced in their particular teaching contexts (rural, suburban, and urban). This project is currently under peer review at Teachers College Press.



Areas of Expertise:

    English Education
    Teacher Education
    Democratic Education

Professional Highlights


Honors and Recognition
2013 Outstanding Dissertation Award for Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) of the American Education Research Association2011 Spencer Dissertation Fellowship finalist (top 10% of all applications)2009 Selected for participation in “Transnational Perspectives in Democratic Education” summer course at the University of London’s Institute of Education2007 Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching nominee. Chicago, Illinois