Yolanda Majors
MCRR Associate Director for Adolescent Literacy & Learning
College of Education and Human Development
Curriculum & Instruction
University of Minnesota
Visiting Associate Professor of English Education
Dr. Yolanda Majors’ teaching experience focused on literacy learning for students from diverse backgrounds spans more than 10 years. As a recent addition to MCRR, Yolanda will lead an effort at the Reading Center to enhance work with K-12 schools to support teachers, particularly those who teach students of poverty, as they learn to effectively teach youth from diverse backgrounds to become competent readers and writers. She will help MCRR create bidirectional relationships between practicing educators in middle and high schools and university researchers and provide a voice concerning the strengths and challenges for African American youth, underserved youth in urban school settings, and struggling students at the middle and high school levels as they work to meet state and national literacy standards.
Yolanda is also an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction
in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Prior to UIC, she was Assistant Professor of Language Education at the University of Georgia. She was a Holmes Fellow, Spencer Foundation dissertation fellow, and postdoctoral award recipient from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. Yolanda holds a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture from the University of Iowa.