Oscar S. Causey Award: James V. Hoffman

Building Communities of Inquiry

Dr. Hoffman has substantively influenced three areas of inquiry: teacher education, assessment, and international development. His research has been relevant, rigorous, and accessible to educators. The first iconic moment of his work came with the IRA (now ILA) sponsored National Commission on Excellence in Elementary Teacher Preparation for Reading Instruction. This was a serious attempt to compare the practices and outcomes of highly regarded literacy teacher education programs with garden variety programs with a low incidence of literacy emphasis. Using rigorous design, study-designed observational tools, and state of the art statistical methods, the study produced salutary findings for strong emphasis on literacy during teacher education programs. Reflecting on this work recently, Gerry Duffy summed up its contributions elegantly: “It remains a one-of-a-kind study, and is unique in terms of its national scope (8 universities), its length (3 years), and its design (quasi-experimental, with new graduates compared to highly-experienced teachers in the same school).” This study illustrated Dr. Hoffman’s vision, rigor, and persistence. It is still considered “one of the most significant and substantive study of reading teacher education to date.”

Through changing times, Professor Hoffman has been a constant force in the development of community. He has provided vital leadership in the development of CITE-ITEL (the Critical, Interactive, Transparent, and literature review in Initial Teacher Education in Literacy). The project, supported by the Literacy Research Association, is a web-based, continually updated literature review of literacy teacher preparation. Colleague, Beth Maloch, stated, “Jim is creating community around CITE to ready us as a community to respond to pressing policy and practice issues/concerns.” Similarly, Donna Alvermann pointed out that a major feature of CITE’s potential is that Professor Hoffman has invited students and colleagues to “join him in lines of inquiry that span continent, paradigms, and formats,”—a sure recipe for an enduring contribution. Hoffman has been a fierce advocate of progressive models of assessment and a leading voice on the pernicious effects of high stakes accountability systems. His work in the early 2000s documented the negative effects of accountability testing. The work did much, particularly in Texas, to provide evidence that would allow districts and teachers to stand up to the encroaching accountability movement, actually resulting in some reforms of the systems and the assessments. Not only has Professor Hoffman provided a critical lens, he has also effectively led empirically rigorous alternatives. In the late 1990s he and his UT-Austin colleagues developed and documented the positive impact of well-crafted and pedagogically grounded formative assessments in the Performance Assessment for Literacy and Mathematics (PALM) tell a different story, a counter hegemonic story. The legacy of this work can be seen nationally and internationally. Colin Harrison of the University of Nottingham assessed the impact of this work eloquently, “During the period that Dr. Hoffman was an affiliated scholar with the National Reading Research Center (NRRC), he represented his university and the NRRC on a three-year international project on the assessment of reading.” This effort led to the New Paradigms in Reading Assessment, a UK-based collaboration that brought together scholars from the USA, England, Scotland, Australia, and France to develop policy and practice in the field. In the collaborative mode that typifies his practice, Hoffman worked with schools in Texas alongside colleagues and graduate students on what became the PALM project, to develop novel, creative, and formative assessment approaches–approaches that were designed to serve the needs of children as well as those of policy makers. This research was disseminated through two books that were distributed in three continents.

International Development

Professor Hoffman’s pioneering work in international development has been substantial, significant, and transformative. His work spans three continents and illustrates the breadth and depth of his commitment. He has contributed to literacy education across the globe. In South Africa and Malawi, he and his team of research project colleagues—which included researchers, teacher educators, classroom teachers, and local artists—designed and developed over 300 titles of linguistically and culturally responsive reading materials for elementary-aged learners. Hoffman and his team conducted professional development for over 13,000 teachers on how to use these texts in a wide range of classrooms. This professional development work has simultaneously produced empirical research that has been widely disseminated. This work has made a significant contribution to the areas of first and second language development and literacy teaching and learning (e.g., Hoffman, Rogers, Sailors, & Tierney, 2012; Sailors, Hoffman, Pearson, Beretvas, & Mathee, 2010). One of the reasons Hoffman has been able to impact such a wide range of audiences is his acumen for making the complex simple and accessible. David Pearson, a prolific writer and researcher in his own right, says, “Writing with Jim is always an adventure. When I write with Jim, I always learn something about the craft of writing, the quality of his writing (and the inadequacy of my own!). He does not tolerate obscurity (find a better word, Pearson) or abstractness (people won’t understand that idea without an example). He holds his collaborators to a high standard. And we, his collaborators—and our products—are always the better for it. When you can explain complicated ideas to folks who are not in your field, then you’ve become a communicator, and that’s exactly what Jim Hoffman is.”

Mentorship

Jim Hoffman is a recognized leader and mentor in the field of literacy research. After speaking with multiple colleagues, doctoral students, and undergraduates at various stages of their lives, it is abundantly clear that Jim Hoffman is a literacy scholar who not only cares about the rigors of theory and methods, but is also deeply vested in the professional and personal success of his colleagues. His UT-Austin colleague, associate professor Allison Skerrett, offers a telling narrative of just this disposition to encourage colleagues to take up their passions about research: “One powerful example of this happened a few years ago while faculty in our building had been evacuated due to a fire drill. We were all mingling around in front of a building across the street. I happened to find myself next to Jim. He started talking about a recent piece of research he had read related to literacy and transnationalism. Knowing that I identify as a transnational person, and that my research was already focused on diversity, youth, and literacy learning, he made what appeared on the surface to be a casual comment along the lines of ‘I’m surprised that with your background, you’re not all over that research.’ At this point in our relationship I knew Jim well enough to know that he and I had found ourselves in a brief but pivotal moment of mentorship. As my work over the past six years shows, I indeed looked into and grew very passionate about transnational youths and their literacy learning. I am now very much ‘all over that research,’ thanks to the personal and professional blend that is Jim’s scholarly mentorship.” Testimonies like these point to how Jim Hoffman’s career and life as a literacy researcher embodies community building. Another UT-Austin colleague, Diane Schallert summed up this aspect of Hoffman’s legacy: “His approach to mentoring has been to co-design, co-create, and co-invent and work incredibly hard himself to see the project to the end, with grace, energy, and humility, all the while making sure to make room for the creativity of newcomers and to assign credit generously to everyone but himself.” Upon accepting the award at LRA’s annual meeting in 2018, Hoffman expressed his gratitude by invoking the African concept of Ubuntu, ‘I am because we are.’