Emily C. Rainey - University of Pittsburgh School of Education

Emily Rainey is an assistant professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Pittsburgh, where she serves as the faculty advisor for the English Education MEd program. Rainey researches disciplinary literacy practice, disciplinary literacy teaching, and preservice literacy teacher education. Two big questions guiding her work are 1) What does it mean to teach adolescents to read, write, and learn within and across the many discourse communities of their lives, including the academic disciplines? and 2) How do we best prepare the next generation of middle and high school classroom teachers to support adolescents’ literacies? A former middle school English teacher, Rainey is especially committed to improving the quality of literacy instruction in typically underserved school and community contexts.

Instructional Interests

Literacy preservice teacher education
Qualitative research methods
Writing in the social sciences

Scholarly Interests

Disciplinary literacy
Adolescent literacy
Teacher education

Recent Grants

Principal Investigator (2021-2023). Exploring discourses of literacy scholarship: Topic modeling the field of literacy education. With Scott Storm. Spencer Foundation ($49,644)
Co-Principal Investigator (2019-2024). Analysis of a teaching school model for improving STEM undergraduate teacher education and professionalism (PI: Elizabeth Birr Moje). National Science Foundation ($2,545,060)
Co-Principal Investigator (2018-2020). Promoting disciplinary literacy and learning through multi source text inquiries: An instructional study of middle school learners (PI: Byeong-Young Cho). Spencer Foundation ($50,000)

Featured Publications

Rainey, E.C., & Storm, S. (in press). English teacher interpretive communities: An exploratory case study of teachers’ literacy practices and pedagogical reasoning. Literacy Research and Instruction.
Rainey, E.C., & Storm, S. (in press). Teaching literary literacy. In K.A. Hinchman & H.K. Sheridan-Thomas (Eds.), Best Practices in Adolescent Literacy Instruction (3rd ed.). Guilford.
Rainey, E.C., Maher, B.L., & Moje, E.B. (2020). Learning disciplinary literacy teaching: An examination of preservice teachers' literacy teaching in secondary subject area classrooms. Teaching and Teacher Education, 94.
Rainey, E.C., Maher, B.L., Coupland, D., Franchi, R., & Moje, E.B. (2018). But what does it look like? Illustrations of disciplinary literacy teaching in two content areas. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(4), 371-379.
Kavanagh, S.S., & Rainey, E.C. (2017). Learning to support adolescent literacy: Teacher educator pedagogy and novice teacher take up in secondary English language arts teacher preparation. American Educational Research Journal, 54(5), 904-937.
Rainey, E.C. (2017). Disciplinary literacy in English language arts: Exploring the social and problem-based nature of literary reading and reasoning. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(1), 53-71.