by Brigitt Martin

Eva Boehm, a Ph.D. candidate in curriculum and instruction, is making a career out of empowering reading teachers across the state of Minnesota.

“I’m a literacy ‘networker,’ if there is such a thing,” she says. “I’m interested in helping people meet their teaching goals by connecting them with the right resources at the right time.”

To match educators with the literacy assets they need, Boehm and her adviser, professor Deborah Dillon, co-founded the Literacy Coalition of Minnesota (LCM). The coalition evolved out of a Literacy Leadership Conference that the duo organized in June 2003, which brought together about 100 reading educators and literacy experts from the not-for-profit, college, and university worlds. There, attendees discovered overlap in their programs and realized there was much they could learn from each other.

To facilitate an ongoing exchange of information, Boehm created a directory of conference attendees and their program profiles. Thus the Literacy Coalition of Minnesota was born—the first organization in the U.S. to network literacy-related organizations and literacy experts from the state’s colleges and universities.

“People want to know what others are doing out there,” she explains. “We’re stronger together. The LCM is a forum that encourages partnerships, collaboration, and advocacy efforts in literacy.”

Bonnie Houck, reading specialist at the Minnesota Department of Education, agrees: “There is a great need to find ways of encouraging collaboration and communication in order to remove walls of isolation and open the door to intelligent, purposeful discourse that will move the field of literacy forward. The Literacy Coalition of Minnesota is a very helpful method of addressing these needs.”

A former Ohio middle and high school reading teacher, Boehm switched to literacy consulting shortly after moving to Minnesota. She was president of the Minnesota Reading Association (MRA) from 2006–07, where her primary goal was to strengthen teacher advocacy on literacy policy issues, particularly regarding reading licensures. Boehm also has worked as an adjunct faculty member at Hamline University.

“When I moved here in 1994, there were four state licensures for reading teachers. In the late 1990s they were all revoked and grandfathered for those who already had them,” says a frustrated Boehm. “With colleagues at the MRA, I helped create reading endorsements for K–12 reading teachers that are used by universities to design their programs.”

In September she completed her preliminary exams and began considering literacy advocacy as her dissertation topic. Specifically, she plans to research areas of tension and of possible collaboration between literacy researchers and policy makers and how to coordinate and provide forums to bring together different points of view. Her findings should help build the infrastructure that LCM needs and identify potential areas of collaborative focus.

In May, Boehm was awarded a graduate scholarship award from the Women’s Philanthropic Leadership Circle for her leadership in research, program initiatives, and academic work.

“I want to use the money I received from the Women’s Philanthropic Leadership Circle award to organize a tea where state education legislators, leaders of professional reading organizations, and literacy programs at institutions of higher education will have the opportunity to network,” Boehm says. “I want the legislators to know where to turn and who to call when they’re forming and revisiting policies that are specifically targeted at the literacy needs and rights of Minnesota’s youth.”

PHOTO: Dawn Villella

 

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