Maria José Botelho
Program Coordinator, Language, Literacy, and Culture
Program Coordinator, Reading Specialist
Contact details
Location
Furcolo Hall
813 N Pleasant St
Amherst, MA 01003
United States
About
Professor Maria José Botelho is interested in how K-12 school literacy practices can be reimagined to affirm students’ cultural and linguistic knowledges as well as become tools for cultural re/making and critical engagement. Her three-pronged research agenda, informed by critical literacies, offers some possibilities for this work. Dr. Botelho's research in critical multicultural analysis of children's and young adult literature challenges researchers, teacher educators, and preservice and experienced teachers to reconsider how multicultural children’s literature and other texts are studied in early childhood, elementary, and secondary classrooms.
She also explores the convergences and divergences among critical literacies, multiliteracies, Waldorf language arts, and contemplative pedagogies in the research literature and in Waldorf-inspired and democratically organized public schools. Lastly, her current book project, the third line of inquiry, puts to work ethnographic ways of knowing and doing and critical literacies, which hold great promise for professional learning, to support educators and emerging ethnographers in reimagining the teaching of K-8 English language arts. Dr. Botelho’s research has taken her to Ontario, California, Massachusetts, and Finland.
Professor Botelho teaches doctoral seminars on critical literacies, reading, writing, ethnographic ways of knowing and doing, and writing for publication; master’s courses on language and literacy learning, critical multicultural analysis of children’s and young adult literature, and literacy assessment; and an undergraduate course that critically surveys children’s and young adult literature through representations of Puerto Rican and other Latiné communities.
Professor Botelho has published numerous journal articles, books chapters, and books and, as a public intellectual, has published newspaper guest columns and opinion pieces. Dr. Botelho is under contract with Routledge for two book projects. Her book Reimagining K- 8 English Language Arts with Ethnographic and Critical Literacies practices: Teaching as Text is in the last stages of preparation. Routledge invited her to write a second edition of Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows & Doors.
Dr. Botelho is the Faculty Director of the Five College Doors to the World Project (https://doors2world.umass.edu). This project offers resources that teachers can use to promote multiliteracies through critical engagement with culture as represented in children's literature.
Professor Botelho is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship Award for Excellence in Research of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the recipient of the 2024-2025 Distinguished Community Engagement Award for Teaching of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a fellow of the 2024-2025 Five College Building Academic Leaders in the Humanities – Advanced Track Fellowship.