Faculty Profiles
Janet K. Outlaw
Assistant Professor of Instruction, Literacy Studies
Email: jkoutlaw@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Janet K. Outlaw is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Literacy Studies at
the University of South Florida. She is a three-time graduate of NC State University,
where she received her Ph.D. in Teacher Education and Learning Sciences with a concentration
in Literacy and ELA. She served as a leadership team member for Wolfpack WORKS, which
provided early-literacy-specific professional development for beginning K-2 teachers
across 15 high-need districts in North Carolina. She is also a former elementary and
high school teacher, having taught in both rural and urban school communities. Her
areas of expertise include teacher education, dialogic pedagogy, community-engaged
literacy, children’s literature, and early literacy, with an emphasis in discourse,
comprehension, and writing.
Dr. Outlaw’s teaching and scholarship synergistically focus on community-engaged literacy
teacher education. From a participatory ideology, she explores dialogic pedagogy in
primary ELA through multicultural children’s literature. Within those dialogic spaces,
she is interested in the ways teachers co-construct knowledge with children through
discourse, reader-text interactions, and writing practices. She supports teachers
in creating ELA curricula with student funds of knowledge, to facilitate a dialogue
of cultural plurality and knowledge diversity in early literacy communities. Applying
critical participatory research methodologies, she examines how dialogic literacy
communities can empower children to reimagine and rewrite their future worlds.