Deborah Appleman received her doctorate in English Education at the University of Minnesota in 1986. At Carleton she is the Hollis L. Caswell professor of educational studies and director of Carleton's Summer Writing Program, a three-week program for high school juniors and seniors). She also teaches the English section of Carleton's summer workshop for teachers, the Summer Teaching Institute. During 2003-2004 she served her second year as mentor for Carleton's second group of Posse students from the Chicago area. Professor Appleman's primary research interests include multicultural literature, adolescent response to literature, teaching literary theory to secondary students, and adolescent response to poetry. She was a high school teacher for nine years. She has written numerous book chapters and articles on adolescent response to literature and she co-edited Braided Lives,a multicultural literature anthology published by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Her book, Reading for Themselves: How to Transform Adolescents into Lifelong Readers Through Out-of-Class Book Clubs was published by Heinemann. She is also the coauthor of Teaching Literature to Adolescents with Richard Beach, Susan Hynds, and Jeffrey Wilhelm. Her book, Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, now in its second edition, was published jointly by Teachers College Press and the National Council of Teachers of English and is widely used in methods classes across the country. She recently edited an anthology of her students' work titled From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings Poetry and Prose from Prison and authored Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of English published by the National Council of Teachers of English.

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Anita Chikkatur received her master's and doctoral degrees from the Education, Culture and Society program at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA in Sociology and Education at Swarthmore College, after which Anita taught English at a junior high school in a small town in Japan for two years. Her dissertation research, conducted at an urban public high school, examined processes of racialization as an integral part of creating American national identity, a project being reconfigured as a result of new immigration patterns. Her research and teaching interests include student and teacher perspectives on race, gender and sexuality and issues of diversity and difference in educational institutions.

Cathy Tower Oehmke is a Visiting Assistant Professor. She received her BA from Wellesley College in Psychology and Education, her Master’s Degree in Literacy Education from the University of Maine, and her PhD in Educational Psychology from Michigan State University. In addition to her work at Carleton, Cathy teaches fourth and fifth grades at Prairie Creek Community School in Northfield.

Ann Leming obtained a BA in Psychology/Sociology from Westmont College and a MA in Special Education from the University of Utah. She has been teaching at St. Olaf since 1983. At St. Olaf, she teaches The Exceptional Child course and supervises student teachers each fall term, and teaches in Thailand during spring term. Since 2001, she has co-directed the Spring Semester in Thailand program which is affiliated with Chiang Mai University. In this capacity she directs the service-learning internship program for the program. Professor Leming joins the educational studies department at Carleton each spring term for Teaching Exceptional Students.

Andrea Nixon has a BA in Classics from Colorado College, an MA in Educational Technology Leadership from George Washington University and a PhD in Educational Policy and Administration from the University of Minnesota.  She has worked as an instructional technologist and then as an administrator for over 20 years.  In her current position she conducts educational research at Carleton College and is heavily engaged in institutional-level planning as it relates to curricular and research support.  Among other professional activities, Andrea has been heavily involved in EDUCAUSE, a higher education association for IT professionals.  She has served on EDUCAUSE's Security Task Force - Policies and Legal Issues Working Group, is a former chair of the Advisory Committee on Teaching and Learning, and is currently the CoDirector of EDUCAUSE’s Learning Technologies Leadership Institute.  Andrea's research interests range from student engagement to institutional copyright policies.  To date her research projects have incorporated interview-based case studies, focus groups, and longitudinal survey-based research that employs logistic regression.