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March 14, 2026Reading Research Quarterly1 citationsOpen Access

Remembering Courtney Cazden, 1925–2025

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KGKris D. GutiérrezALAllan LukeMKMary Kalantzis

Key Points

  • To honor the legacy and contributions of Courtney B. Cazden in the field of education.
  • Personal and professional reflections from colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends.
  • Discussion of Cazden's role in classroom discourse analysis and literacy education.
  • Examination of her influence as a mentor and member of the New London Group.
  • Emphasized the importance of classroom discourse as a site of learning and identity formation.
  • Highlighted Cazden's commitment to educational justice and multimodal literacy.
  • Recognized her impact on generations of scholarship in bilingual and Indigenous education.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Here we remember and honor Courtney B. Cazden (1925–2025), whose scholarship, mentorship, and moral clarity profoundly shaped the study of language, literacy, and learning. Drawing on our shared experiences as colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends, we reflect on Courtney's enduring contributions to classroom discourse analysis, bilingual and Indigenous education, sociocultural theories of learning, and the pedagogy of multiliteracies. Across the personal and professional reflections gathered here, we recount how Courtney's work consistently foregrounded classroom discourse as a site of learning, identity formation, and educational justice, while refusing false binaries between theory and practice, immersion and explicit instruction, critique and care. We recall her fierce intellectual rigor, her generosity as a mentor, and her insistence that educational research remain grounded in the lived realities of teachers and students. As a founding member of the New London Group, Courtney helped reframe literacy as plural, multimodal, and socially situated, influencing generations of scholarship worldwide. Together, our reflections portray Courtney as a boundary‐crossing scholar and ethical exemplar whose dialogic sensibility, political courage, and commitment to collective inquiry continue to shape how we think, teach, and learn.

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Cite This Study

Gutiérrez et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69b4ad9a18185d8a398012d0https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.70100
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