Meet Dr. Noah Asher Golden - Assistant Professor, Teacher Education

Three reasons: First, I knew about the amazing research and contributions to professional organizations through Jessica Zacher Pandya’s and Betina Hsieh’s work. Second, I knew that the CED educates excellent teachers (I worked with two university-school partnerships at my previous institution, and my primary teacher partners were both CSULB CED grads). Finally, conversations with colleagues here have made it crystal clear that the CED is grounded in our mission to promote equity and excellence in diverse urban settings. For these reasons, I am honored to be a part of our college, and hope to have many years of collaboration with my new colleagues.

It’s cliché, but I became a teacher because I love kids. This love, coupled with a deep enjoyment of dialogue and textual analysis, led to 15 years of secondary-level English teaching and literacy coaching (with some time at the upper elementary level and substitute-teaching at the junior high level as well) in New York City public schools. Along the way, I was drawn to continual graduate study as a means to better understand both my students’ strengths and the challenges they face beyond the classroom. At the same time, I became more and more involved in the democratic governance of the alternative high school at which I taught, and I shifted into teacher support and education. I love that I will be able to continue all aspects of my previous work as a researcher and teacher educator in the CED.

I’m interested in the identity work that young people do in and out of classroom spaces, and in how we can shape teacher education and teacher praxis to be more responsive to this identity work. By identity work, I specifically mean the ways that a young person desires to be positioned or ‘read’, and the work he/she/they do to be known in these ways. My classroom experience taught me that education must be so much more than skill and competency transmission, and that a focus on identity work is at the core of meaningful critique and analysis (and situated skills and competencies) in literacy education.

As an educator teaching future educators, my goal is to support my students in understanding how sociological understandings, ethical commitments, theory and methodology translate to daily teaching practices. I believe in modeling a constructivist process that values and responds to learners. Within a caring learning environment grounded in respect, compassion, and high expectations, I challenge future educators to question normative assumptions and practices. I work to ensure that my classes are communities of support that foster critical analysis and teacher collective agency: as individuals we cannot transform teaching and learning systems, but working together we can build meaningful learning opportunities.

I hope my students see me as an experienced practitioner who understands the power of multiple forms of inquiry and collaboration to transform classroom praxis. I hope they see someone who is passionate about the work of research, professional partnerships, and teacher education as a central means to expand opportunity through education. Perhaps most importantly, I hope my students see me as someone who listens and is responsive to their strengths and concerns.

I hope to teach my students how to use their disciplines to question and critique the status quo, and to create meaningful learning projects for their future students that encourage similar critical analysis. I hope to teach my teacher candidate students to see their future students as knowledge producers who come to the classroom with many valuable resources. I hope to teach my students to tap into these organic critical literacies and further develop them through multidisciplinary and disciplinary-specific explorations.

I hope to inspire my students to tap into their love of the young people they serve and to ground every learning activity in this love. I hope to inspire my students to continuously strengthen their collective agency to change the schools (and other social systems) we have into the schools (and other social systems) all kids deserve.