Judith Green
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Judith Green is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Education, where she worked from 1990-2016. Her teaching and research focus on teaching-learning relationships, disciplinary knowledge as socially constructed, and ethnographic research and discourse studies of the patterns of everyday life in classroom.

Questions that she explores in her research and in her classes include:    

  • How do children gain access to school knowledge?    
  • What counts as literacy and learning in school settings?    
  • How is disciplinary knowledge socially constructed?    
  • What opportunities for learning are constructed in classrooms, and who has access to these opportunities?    
  • How does the theory you select shape your research questions, the methods you use, and the claims that you can make about a phenomenon?

As a founding member of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, a collaborative community of teacher ethnographers, student ethnographers and university-based ethnographers, Dr. Green explores questions guided by theories on the social construction of knowledge. The goal is to identify principles of practices that teachers (and others) use to support equity of access for all students. As a co-director of LINC, the Center for Education Research for Literacy and Inquiry in Networking Communities, she works with teachers and researchers to explore how the new advanced technology networks support innovative learning opportunities. Dr. Green and her colleagues have an approach to curriculum and technology in which teachers and students create a virtual and interactive community in which they plan collaborative research across city, state and national borders and share their local inquiry to make global connections.

Dr. Green has been teaching for more than 5 decades across levels of schooling (K-20). She received her M.A. in Educational Psychology from California State University, Northridge (1970), where she learned about child and language development. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she explored the relationships between teaching and learning, literacy and knowledge construction. Her recent research focuses on how classroom practices support access to students across academic disciplines in classrooms and in virtual communities.

See Dr. Green's CV.

Watch Dr. Green give the talk "Education and Technology Partnerships as Intercultural Communities," the keynote talk at the CITERS Conference, University of Hong Kong, 2014.

Watch Dr. Green receiving the 2015-16 UCSB Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award.

Watch Dr. Green take part in an Interview about Interactional Ethnography along with Susan Bridges of the University of Hong Kong.

Watch Dr. Green give the talk "Developing Ethnographic Eyes" as the ICLS keynote at the London Festival of Learning in June 2018.

Learn about the principles of interactional ethnography from Dr. Green and view an example of Interactional Ethnography analysis with Susan Bridges. 

Learn about the ways interactional ethnography supports research in different contexts through an interview by Min and doctoral students at the University of Hong Kong with Judith Green and Susan Bridges. This is a new angle of what does interactional ethnography support you in researching.

Learn about Interactional Ethnography as a logic-of-inquiry: Tracing the levels of analytic scale to understand what is being dialogically and socially constructed with students from a webinar in May 2020.

Learn about Dialogic intervisualizing in multimodal inquiry in a recent journal article with Susan Bridges.

Research in the Teaching of English presents Judith Green discussing Research-based Argumentation.