Judith Green at the "In the Company of Scholars" event in June 2016
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education (GSE) kicked off its Distinguished Lecture Series on May 9 with the talk “Experiencing Learning in a Berkeley Way: Creating a Basis for Your Career” by Dr. Judith Green, Professor Emerita in UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School. Green earned her Ph.D. at Berkeley’s GSE in Language and Reading Development, exploring the relationships between teaching and learning, literacy and knowledge construction. Green established the Distinguished Lecture Series because of her desire to contribute back to Berkeley, where her deep roots in education began.
Green earned her B.A. in History with a minor in speech in 1963, during an interesting and tumultuous time at Berkeley, the center of the Free Speech Movement. She also earned her California K-12 Life Credential at Berkeley with certification as a Miller-Unruh Reading Specialist. After pursuing a specialty in Language and Linguistics at Columbia and an M.A. in Educational Psychology at Cal State Northridge, Judith returned to Berkeley and completed her Ph.D. in 1977.
She has taught for more than four decades across levels K-20 education. She is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Education and co-director of the Center for Education Research on Literacy & Inquiry in Networking Communities (LINC) at UC Santa Barbara. Currently, her research focuses on teaching-learning relationships, disciplinary knowledge as socially constructed, and ethnographic research and discourse studies of the patterns of everyday life in classrooms. As a founding member of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, a collaborative community of teacher ethnographers, student ethnographers and university-based ethnographers, Green explores questions guided by theories on the social construction of knowledge, with a goal to identify principles of practices that teachers (and others) may use to support equity of access for all students.