Dr. Rebecca Powell is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Center for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy at Georgetown College. She currently works as an independent consultant in culturally and linguistically responsive instruction, and serves as an instructional coach for Project PLACE at the University of Kentucky, a federal grant project funded through the US Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition. In this role, she works in both urban and rural schools and supports teachers in their implementation of the various CRIOP elements. Dr. Powell was a primary developer of the Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol (CRIOP), an observation research instrument and framework for guiding teachers' growth in culturally responsive instruction. She helped to develop the CRIOP training manual and for the past several years, has assisted in training researchers across the United States in using the CRIOP observation instrument. Dr. Powell has written or co-edited four other books: Literacy as a Moral Imperative: Facing the Challenges of a Pluralistic Society; Straight Talk: Growing as Multicultural Educators; Toward a Literacy of Promise: Joining the African American Struggle (with Linda Spears-Bunton), and Literacy for All Students: An Instructional Framework for Closing the Gap (with Elizabeth Rightmyer). She has authored over thirty book chapters, journal articles and monographs in literacy and equity pedagogy, and has published in diverse journals such as Linguistics and Education, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, The Reading Teacher, and Teachers College Record. Dr. Powell is a graduate of The College of Wooster and received her M.Ed. degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Ed.D. from the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Susan Chambers Cantrell is a professor of Literacy in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches courses in literacy education. Her research is focused on teachers' professional learning, efficacy development, and instructional change, particularly for underserved students.
