Education
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Here we remember and honor Courtney B. Cazden (1925–2025), whose scholarship, mentorship, and moral clarity profoundly shaped the study of language, literacy, and learning. Drawing on our shared experiences as colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends, we reflect on Courtney's enduring contributions to classroom discourse analysis, bilingual and Indigenous education, sociocultural theories of learning, and the pedagogy of multiliteracies. Across the personal and professional reflections gathered here, we recount how Courtney's work consistently foregrounded classroom discourse as a site of learning, identity formation, and educational justice, while refusing false binaries between theory and practice, immersion and explicit instruction, critique and care. We recall her fierce intellectual rigor, her generosity as a mentor, and her insistence that educational research remain grounded in the lived realities of teachers and students. As a founding member of the New London Group, Courtney helped reframe literacy as plural, multimodal, and socially situated, influencing generations of scholarship worldwide. Together, our reflections portray Courtney as a boundary-crossing scholar and ethical exemplar whose dialogic sensibility, political courage, and commitment to collective inquiry continue to shape how we think, teach, and learn. © 2026 The Author(s). Reading Research Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Literacy Association.
Publication Title
Reading Research Quarterly
Publication Date
2026
Volume
61
Issue
2
ISSN
0034-0553
DOI
10.1002/rrq.70100
Repository Citation
Gutiérrez, Kris D.; Luke, Allan; Kalantzis, Mary; Cope, Bill; Michaels, Sarah; and Gee, James Paul, "Remembering Courtney Cazden, 1925–2025" (2026). Education. 53.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_education/53
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Conditions
Gutiérrez, K. D., Luke, A., Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., Michaels, S., & Gee, J. P. (2026). Remembering Courtney Cazden, 1925–2025. Reading Research Quarterly, 61(2), e70100.
