Judy Sharkey is Professor of Education 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 migration and globalization on PK-12 public education while consistently working multiple dialectics: global-local; diversity-standardization; monolingual-multillingual; and, policy-practice. Within language education and policy, her research focuses on teacher/teacher educator learning and development in plurilingual, transmigrant, immigrant and refugee communities. Such work is situated within a linguistic rights framework and seeks to name and dismantle language hierarchies while promoting the value of multilingualism in society. Dr. Sharkey's work also advocates and advances critical self-reflexive and community-responsive approaches to teacher education, a position that broadens the definition of "teacher educator" to include leaders and members of community organizations, youth clubs, and families. Drawing on critical feminist pedagogies and theories across sociology, comparative education, and linguistic anthropology, she uses a range of qualitative methodologies (shared ethnography, narrative inquiry, collaborative participatory action research) in her research designs. Dr. Sharkey has conducted research with colleagues and in classrooms in Colombia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, and the United States. Between 2007 and 2018, she directed two multi-year National Professional Development (NPD) grants funded by the US Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). Combined, the projects served over 200 teachers serving culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse schools in New Hampshire. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico in 2008, hosted by Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes (UAA) and in Ireland in 2022, hosted by the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). In both settings, she explored the role of teachers' linguistic identities in teaching English in multilingual classrooms. Two current inquiries explore the long term and long lasting effects of national language policies in nation-building, national identity, and the education of minoritized populations.
