Joanne Larson is Michael W. Scandling Professor of Education and Chair of the Teaching and Curriculum program at the University of Rochester’s Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, USA. She received her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. Larson’s ethnographic research examines how language and literacy practices mediate social and power relations in literacy events in schools and communities. She is currently collaborating with Rochester community residents on a participatory action research project examining changes associated with transforming a local corner store into a cornerstone of healthy living. Her book Radical Equality in Education: Starting Over in US Schooling (Routledge, 2014) makes the case for beginning with assumptions of equality instead of inequality in education. She is the editor of Literacy as Snake Oil: Beyond the Quick Fix, Second Edition (Lang, 2007) and co-editor with Jackie Marsh of Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (Sage, 2013). Larson's journal publications include research articles in Research in the Teaching of English; Written Communication: Linguistics and Education; Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and Discourse and Society.