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Watch Laurren Gatti Faculty Profile Video

Lauren Gatti is the Edith R. Greer Associate Professor of Education at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Prior to working in higher education, Gatti was a high school English teacher for 11 years. For six of those years teaching, she taught English at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Gatti coordinates the secondary English Education program, teaches undergraduate courses in secondary English education, and teaches graduate courses in Democratic Education and Teacher Education & Teacher Education Policy. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Democracy & Education, Educational Theory, Urban Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Teacher Education & Practice, English Journal, and Social Semiotics. 

Learning to Teach
Gatti’s first book, Toward a Framework of Resources for Learning to Teach: Rethinking U.S. Teacher Preparation (Palgrave McMillan, 2016) was based on her year-long research on how teachers from two different programs—an urban teacher residency and a university-based program—learned to teach in an urban intensive (Milner, 2012) school district. Based on empirical findings, Gatti advances a framework for learning to teach that is based on the idea that novice teachers access a different kinds of resources as they learn: experiential, relational, programmatic, disciplinary, and dispositional. 

Teacher Education Policy
Gatti also studies teacher education policy. Her co-authored book (with Viv Ellis and Warwick Mansell), The New Political Economy of Teacher Education: The  Enterprise Narrative and the Shadow State (Bristol University Press, 2024), critically analyzes how teacher education in the U.S., England, and Norway changed in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Specifically, it interrogates the ways in which teacher education has embraced reforms inspired by an enterprise narrative, a move that valorizes neoliberal innovations and positions university teacher education as stodgy, outdated, and irrelevant. These “enterprise narratives” have very real consequences for teacher preparation. 

Ethical Decision-Making in Teaching
Finally, Gatti is currently writing a co-authored book with social studies educator and educational philosopher Paula McAvoy: Just Teachers: Taking the Ethical Longview in the Profession of Teaching. This inter-disciplinary work (Philosophy and Teacher Education) advances a new theoretical framework for professional judgement. It will be published by Teachers College Press in 2025.