Laura Roop is an educator and author working at the confluence of research and teaching practice. With MDE consultant Steve Best, and NBPTS-certified teacher and consultant Linda Denstaedt, she wrote Doing and Making Authentic Literacies, published by the National Council of Teachers of English in September 2014. Dr. Roop is interested in the development of partnerships for knowledge generation, university-school collaboration, disciplinary literacies, and equitable literacy practice. She has been involved in the National Writing Project since 1985. Before coming to Pittsburgh, she worked at the University of Michigan School of Education as director of outreach and as school-research relations coordinator. From 2009-2012 she followed a cohort of students who had been assessed as being in the bottom quartile from ninth grade through college, designing summer programs and organizing trips and presentations under the auspices of the Algebra Project, a national network founded by civil rights organizer and mathematician Bob Moses.
