Judy Sharkey is the John & H. Irene Peters Professor of Education and Chair of the Education Department in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. She is also core faculty in the Women's & Gender Studies Department. She holds a Ph.D. in Language & Literacy Education with a concentration on Bilingual/Multicultural Education.
Broadly speaking, her scholarship addresses some of the pressing challenges raised by the effects of globalization on public education while consistently working multiple dialectics: global-local; diversity-standardization; monolingual-multillingual; and, policy-practice. Within second language and literacy education, her research focuses on teacher/teacher educator learning and development in plurilingual, transmigrant and diaspora communities in the US, Colombia, and Pakistan.Dr. Sharkey's work advocates and advances critical self-reflexive and community-responsive approaches to teacher education, a position that invites and values the knowledge, experiences, and voices of students, families, and community members into the larger project of education in participatory democracies. A self-reflexive approach to this work means holding teacher educators and our programs more accountable for our roles in facilitating and/or impeding teacher and student learning. In recent years this has meant more attention on decentering whiteness in teacher education, naming white complicity and insisting on more anti-racist, community-engaged curriculum and action within teacher education policies, practices, and licensure.