Renata Love Jones

Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, Boston College
M.A.T. in TESOL, University of Southern California
B.A. in Psychology, Berea College

Bi/Multilingual and Multidialectal Literacy Development
Upper Elementary and Disciplinary Literacy Development
Metalinguistic and Critical Language Awareness
Sociocultural and Learning Science Perspectives
Classroom Discourse and Dialogic Pedagogies

Renata Love Jones is an assistant professor of language, literacy and culture in the College of Education & Human Development’s Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education.

Jones’s research broadly explores literacy education and development for racialized and multilingual children. Her work begins with a primary assumption that multilingual children’s meaning-making both leads to and stems from engagement of complex literacies, ways of being and repertoires of practice across sociocultural spaces. Through mixed and interdisciplinary methods, she interrogates curriculum, instruction and teacher professional learning for the ways that they reflect — or counter-culturally sustaining, critical and expansive ideologies and pedagogies.

Jones’s recent scholarly endeavors include involvement in I.E.S. grant-funded projects that explore language-based reading and writing curriculum approaches with multilingual children. She has specifically investigated the notion of metalinguistic engagement as a pedagogical approach to developing metalinguistic and critical language awareness in third through fifth-grade classrooms. This scholarship has highlighted the ways curriculum and educators can leverage the ways that children draw on their communicative cultural capital in order to be sociolinguist-readers who investigate, unpack and critically employ language across elements and purposes.

At Georgia State, Jones teaches literacy courses in the B.S.E. program including ECE 3600 and 3601. In addition to her work with pre- and in-service teachers, Jones taught language and literacy in ESL, EFL, dual immersion bilingual and urban education K-12 contexts both nationally and abroad for more than a decade.

Jones has been published in academic journals such as Reading Research Quarterly and ECNU Review of Education. She is actively involved with national literacy and teacher education organizations, including the Literacy Research Association, International Literacy Association, National Council for Teachers of English, American Educational Research Association, American Association of Applied Linguistics. Jones was a recipient of Boston College’s Donald J. White Teaching Award, Dissertation Fellowship and the inaugural Maria Estela Brisk Award.