Lara Handsfield, PhD

Dr. Lara Handsfield completed her Ph.D. in language and literacy education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2005. She is currently a Professor of Elementary, Literacy, and Bilingual Education in the School of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University. Lara’s research critically examines comprehension instruction in multilingual classrooms, how teachers negotiate multiple and conflicting pedagogical demands in their work, and implications for student and teacher identity construction. Her work has been published in an array of academic and professional journals, including Reading Research Quarterly, Language Arts, the Journal of Literacy Research, The Reading Teacher, Research in the Teaching of English, and Linguistics in Education. She is the author of Literacy Theory as Practice: Connecting Theory and Instruction in K-12 Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2016) and co-author of The Complex Development of Preservice and Inservice Teacher Identities Across Space and Time (Peter Lang, 2020). In 2021, she was named an ISU University Outstanding Researcher.

Recent Scholarship

Handsfield, L. J., & MacPhee, D. & Paugh, P. (2024). Misrecognition, the “Science of Reading,” and the ongoing struggle for the legitimate discourse of the field of reading education. In G, Stahl, M. Mu, P. Ayling, and E. B. Weininger (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Bourdieu in Educational Research, 192-209. Bloomsbury Press.

Handsfield, L. J. & Crumpler, T. P. (2023). Scaling and scalar analysis as a framework for research on teacher learning. The New Educator, 19(4), 349-367, DOI: 10.1080/1547688X.2023.2269250

Handsfield, L. J. & Valente, P. M. (2021). Pedagogies of closeness: Humanizing small group comprehension instruction. Language Arts, 98(4), 201-207. https://library.ncte.org/journals/la/issues/v98-4/31156.

Handsfield, L. J. (2016). Literacy theory as practice: Connecting literacy theory and practice in K-12 classrooms . Teachers College Press.