Teresa McCarty

Teresa L. McCarty is an Emeritus Professor. She was the Alice Wiley Snell Professor of Education Policy Studies, professor of applied linguistics, and co-director of the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University. An educational anthropologist, she has been a curriculum developer, teacher, and coordinator of American Indian education programs at the state and national levels. Between 1989 and 2004, she served as professor and head of the Department of Language Reading and Culture, interim dean of the College of Education, and co-director of the American Indian Language Development Institute, all at the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching focus on language education policy, Indigenous/language minority education, youth language ideologies and practices, critical literacy studies, and ethnographic studies of education. A Kellogg Foundation National Fellow and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the International Center for Language Revitalization, she is also past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education, former editor of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, current co-editor of the Journal of American Indian Education, and current associate editor of the American Educational Research Journal and Language Policy. Her books include "A Place To Be Navajo – Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling" (Erlbaum, 2002), "Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling" (Erlbaum, 2005), Ethnography and Language Policy (Routledge, 2011), and "To Remain an Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education" (with K. T. Lomawaima, Teachers College Press, 2006). The latter book won an AERA Outstanding Book Award in 2007.  

In 2010, McCarty received the George and Louise Spindler Award from the American Anthropological Association's Council on Anthropology and Education for distinguished and inspirational contributions to the anthropology of education. During the 2011-2012 academic year, she was with the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, NM as SAR's National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholar. At ASU, she is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Social Transformation and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. She teaches courses: Anthropology and Education, Qualitative Methods, Indigenous Language Planning and Policy, and Ethnography and Language Policy.