Patricia A. Edwards, a member of the Reading Hall of Fame, is a Distinguished Professor of Language and Literacy in the Department of Teacher Education and a Senior University Outreach Fellow at Michigan State University. She is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in parent involvement, home-school-community partnerships, and multicultural, early, and family/intergenerational literacy with a focus on poor and minority children. She served on the International Literacy Association (formerly International Reading Association) Board of Directors from 1998–2001, as the first African American President of the Literacy Research Association (formerly the National Reading Conference) from 2006–2007, and as President of the International Literacy Association from 2010–2011. Edwards also served as a member of the Board of Directors for the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Family, School, and Community Partnerships Special Interest Group (SIG) from 2014–2016 and was elected to serve as its President-Elect/President from 2016–2020.
Edwards has authored two family literacy programs (published in English and Spanish) titled Parents as Partners in Reading: A Family Literacy Training Program (1990, 1993) and Talking Your Way to Literacy: A Program to Help Nonreading Parents Prepare Their Children for Reading (1990) that have garnered national and international recognition. She has also authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books, peer-reviewed articles, and book chapters focusing on home-school-community partnerships, family literacy, and multicultural literacy. She has served on several editorial boards for publications such as Educational Researcher, Journal of Literacy Research, The Reading Teacher, Language Arts, Research in the Teaching of English, International Race and Education, and the School Community Journal. Edwards has received many awards and honors for her research and public service related to families and literacy.
Education
Edwards grew up in Albany, Georgia and graduated from Albany State College (Albany, Georgia) with a B.S. in Elementary Education in 1970. In 1971, Edwards received a M.S. in Elementary Education from North Carolina A & T University (Greensboro, North Carolina). She received an Ed.S. from Duke University in Reading Education in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Reading Education with a minor concentration in Educational Administration from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1979.
Career
North Carolina
After obtaining her master's degree, Edwards worked at North Carolina Central University coordinating the Pre-Student Teaching Program while simultaneously teaching in public schools in Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill. During this time, she explored how to teach in and how to help pre-service teachers learn to teach in a variety of organizational structures (e.g. team-teaching, self-contained classrooms, non-graded classrooms, open classrooms, etc.), in addition to exploring these structures' impact on parents and children.
Louisiana
Upon completion of her Ph.D., Edwards worked at Grambling State University followed by Louisiana Tech University. While at Louisiana Tech, she received a W. K. Kellogg National Fellowship in 1983. The program's goal was to support participants' intellectual and leadership development. As part of the Fellowship, Edwards focused her learning on family involvement in education. She visited many agencies and institutions of higher education throughout the United States and abroad meeting with noted experts in order to explore this topic from a variety of perspectives.
Edwards also volunteered as a parent consultant at a local Head Start center in a small rural northern Louisiana community to investigate how to support parents' efforts to foster their children's educational development. Edwards continued this research in her next job at Louisiana State University. During this time, she developed many of the ideas that would become her program Parents as Partners in Reading: A Family Literacy Training Program (1990, 1993) by working with parents and teachers at Donaldsonville Elementary School located in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, a small rural southern community. The program's goal was to train parents in effective book-reading practices desired by the school. This led to the second program Edwards developed, Talking Your Way to Literacy: A Program to Help Nonreading Parents Prepare Their Children for Reading (1990).