Reading Education is concerned with the promotion of literacy, with specific emphasis on reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Urban literacy issues and research pertaining to children living at the poverty level are of particular interest to many of our reading education faculty. The program of study is designed around the International Reading Association (IRA)/National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) standards that deal with what reading professionals need to know and what they are able to do. These standards emphasize reflective professionals who have proficiency in three broad categories: (1) knowledge and beliefs about reading, (2) instruction and assessment, and (3) organizing and enhancing a reading program.

No matter what your career goals, local or global, we have a program to meet your professional needs.  Our reading graduates are teaching in major school districts, comprehensive universities or college-level remedial/developmental reading programs, serving as clinical supervisors, literacy coaches and/or as reading/language arts supervisors.

Our faculty has been influential in setting the national agenda of improving the success of children living in poverty through research, school and district-wide interventions, consulting, and authoring textbooks for preservice and inservice teachers. Currently, the faculty has been improving instruction in urban schools through projects like the award-winning Memphis Literacy Academy and the federally-funded Memphis Striving Readers Project, as well as working with other school districts across the nation. Books authored by our faculty, such as Technology to Teach Literacy:  A Resource for K-8 Teachers, Teaching Children to Read: The Teacher Makes the Difference, and the Cooter/Flynt/Cooter Comprehensive Reading Inventory:  Measuring Reading Development in Regular and Special Education Classrooms are helping teachers succeed.  The Reading faculty is widely published in a variety of scholarly journals such as:  Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Journal of Latinos in Education, and The Reading Teacher.