Biography
Dr. Wintre Foxworth Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education at the University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development. Johnson's community-engaged scholarship lies at the nexus of sociocultural literacy studies, critical race scholarship, and critical pedagogies for and with young children. Her research investigates African American children's literacy practices, racial awareness, and sociopolitical knowledge as well as the nature and impact of centering Black intellectual traditions in early education. Through partnerships in public school classrooms, an urban community school, and summer learning environments such as Freedom Schools, her work illustrates how young children use storytelling, dialogue, artistic expression, and cultural histories to interpret and respond to structural inequities and racialized difference. Her research has received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). In 2022, Johnson's scholarship received the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Language Arts Distinguished Article Award. In 2024, she received the Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education (CPECE) Special Interest Group (SIG) Emerging Scholar Award within the American Education Research Association (AERA). Currently, she is a NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and a Lead Editor of the journal Language Arts. Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Reading Research Quarterly, Urban Education, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, and the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.
