Old Main, Room 112 P.O.

Box 2000 Cortland, NY 13045-0900

Phone: (607) 753-4307/4308 Fax: (607) 753-5978



English Department

4.30.14
To whom it may concern,
I have known Courtney Brown for a year now. I started to get to know her as a student in my Reading and
the Teaching of Critical Literacy course last Fall. In this class, students learned about the social, cultural, and
political foundations of literature. They learned about the kinds of critical lenses they could help
adolescents apply to their interpretations of texts in order to understand the work of writers within cultural
contexts. They learned how to design reading instruction that connected with the deepest identity needs
and questions of adolescents.
Courtney came into this class having already spent much time in the field as a teacher. At the time, she was
working with students in a BOCES school. She also had a tremendous amount of military experience. In the
midst of juggling these responsibilities, she read deeply, embraced every opportunity to dialogue with her
peers, with me, and with course readings from high school and middle school teachers. She was a delight to
have in class because of the practical experience with working with adolescents that she brought and also
because she was clearly a reflective practitioner. She is a teacher who had been collecting questions,
questions that she freely raised as she began to dialogue about her practice with others. She loved to bring
student work from her teaching to class, to take ideas from our class discussions and enhance her teaching,
and then to report back with what she had tried. She was fully present and alive in class, listening and
participating wide eyed as she waited for the next insight to hit her. When she shared, her intellectual
curiosity and constant research that she was doing on her own each day was strikingly apparent. Her
wisdom helped all of us understand the work of reading, of collaborative inquiry, and of deconstructing texts
meaningfully with adolescents from more angles.
At the end of the semester, I asked the students to construct their own pedagogical frameworks for strong
multicultural and critical, adolescent literacy centered teaching. I also asked them to engage the process of
backwards planning to design a power-packed unit, that would not only help students improve as readers
and writers but also improve as successful communicators in any kind of cultural context. By that time,
Courtney had secured a job at Cortland BOCES High School. She was working with a group of students in a
developing reading class. We spent hours as a class mapping out their essential questions, breaking down
the features of their chosen texts, delineating the concepts of the critical lenses that would help students
understand the larger cultural significance of the texts, establishing productive reading strategies for
students, and designing long and short-term learning objectives that aligned with Common Core Standards.
It was both grueling and imaginative work and required tremendous persistence to fit all of the pieces
together coherently in a way that would be accessible and meaningful for adolescents and their literacy and
identity projects.
Courtney chose to work with Malalas autobiography on her fight for literacy in Pakistan and with Mark
Zusaks The Book Thief, the literacy story of a young child in the midst of the Holocaust. She decided to
engage her current students in writing their own literacy autobiographies, exploring all the real world
implications of the reading and writing skills they had been developing within specific literacy events in their
lives. In the process, she positioned students to learn how to take up the position of ethnographers and to
study the relationships between their reading and writing skills and the range of identity options available to
them and others.
Her unit, in which she fleshed out in 60 pages of careful lesson planning deep reflection for her teaching
rationales, was a wonderful example of her incredible intellect and creativity on behalf of adolescents. She
later let me know how well her students had responded to it, students who in general have not succeeded in
school contexts. In her words, the unit I wrote in your class turned out AMAZING and my students,
colleagues and administration LOVED it! :) I have some awesome student work I would love to share with
you...and hopefully that conference if we get to go! I have invited Courtney to apply with me and to share
her unit plan and teaching with other teachers at NCTE this next Fall.
Courtney is the real deal. She has total passion for students and for teaching, and she is willing to go to all
lengths to design power packed instruction that inspires adolescents to connect meaningfully through
reading and writing about literature with their peers, and with people, cultures, and communities outside of
their comfort zones.
If you would like to talk further, please dont hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Dr. Sarah Hobson
Assistant Professor Adolescent English Education
SUNY Cortland
115C Old Main
Cortland, NY 13045
607-753-2230
sarah.hobson@cortland.edu