Dr. Jennifer Danridge Turner is an award-winning scholar, educator, and mentor and currently serves as Professor in Literacy Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Turner served as a college access counselor in Philadelphia, PA before earning her PhD in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Literacy from Michigan State University.
Dr. Turner's scholarly program centers on three interrelated areas (select publications):
(1) Black young people’s freedom dreaming through arts-based methods
(2) Future-Affirming Pedagogical Practices in Schools
(3) Intersectional Multimodal Research Methodologies
Dr. Turner’s scholarship has appeared in leading scholarly and practitioner journals including Reading Research Quarterly, Teachers College Record, Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, Race Ethnicity and Education, Theory into Practice, Reading Teacher and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
Dr. Turner's research has been supported by the American Educational Research Association Education (AERA) Research Conference Grant; the William T. Grant Foundation Theories of Blackness, Indigeneity, and Racialization in Research to Reduce Inequality in the Lives of Young People Writing Fellowship; University of Connecticut Africana Studies Institute to Advance Equity through Research on Women and Girls of Color Faculty Fellowship; the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation; and the University of Maryland Do Good Institute Fund, among others.
1.Co-authored book with Patricia A. Edwards and Gwendolyn Thompson McMillon, Change is Gonna Come: Transforming Literacy Education for African American Students, received the 2011 Edward Fry Book Award from the Literacy Research Association.
2. Co-edited book with Angela Wiseman and Marva Cappello, Critical Visual Methods to Advance Racial Justice in Educational Research: The Seen and the Unseen, received the 2026 Outstanding Book Award from the Semiotics in Education Special Interest Group organized by the American Educational Research Association.
3. Recipient, Excellence in Scholarship Award for Tenured Faculty, College of Education, UMCP.
Over her 23-year career, Dr. Turner has served on the dissertation committees of more than 140 doctoral students and teaches graduate coursework in elementary teacher education, literacy leadership, and qualitative research methods. She is the recipient of the 2017 Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award and the 2012 Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Education at the University of Maryland.
She has been active in professional organizations, including serving as an elected member of the Board of Directors and as a faculty mentor in the STAR Mentoring program for minoritized junior scholars (LRA); chairing the Semiotics in Education SIG awards committee (AERA); and serving on the Research Committee (ILA). She is also an author and consultant for National Geographic School Publishing/Cengage.