February 2026

Remembering Ernest Morrell

by

Kris D. Gutiérrez, AERA Fellow, Past President AERA, Distinguished Professor and Carol Liu Chair, Berkeley School of Education, UC-Berkeley; and Carol D. Lee, AERA Fellow, Past President AERA, Edwina S. Tarry Professor Emerita of Education in the School of Education and Social Policy and in African American Studies, Northwestern University

Professor Ernest Morrell was a transformative scholar, pedagogue, mentor, and leader who helped to shape and define critical English education, youth participatory and civic literacies, youth participatory action research (YPAR), adolescent literacy studies, and critical media studies across his career. While Ernest was an interdisciplinary scholar, his primary identity was a literacy scholar, situating his expansive view of literacies in deep understandings of teaching and learning, and of youth, teacher, and communities’ everyday practices to examine a range of literacies, including civic and digital. Through his restorative, ecologically situated, youth-centered research, Ernest’s work always challenged and reframed assumptions about youths’ literacies to elaborate youths’ expansive possibilities.

Ernest began his career as a high school ELA and social studies teacher in Oakland, California where he grew up. The work for Ernest was ethical and personal.  He writes:

There is no higher social calling, no work more honorable than teaching critical approaches to the consumption and production of language. Our English teachers, however, face a myriad of challenges that threaten to intervene in the potentially symbiotic relationship between language pedagogy, social consciousness, and individual liberation. The changing nature of literacy, the technocratic demands on the K-16 literacy curricula from an information-based economy …   and external constraints imposed by the latest testing regime leave these educators alienated, ambivalent arbiters of a hotly contested and highly ambiguous discipline. (Morrell, 2005, p. 312)

He talked about the influences of his parents, who were classroom teachers, their engagement in the political movements of the 1960’s and forward.  His focus on the importance of neighborhoods as sites of inquiry for youth was influenced by his reflections on his experiences growing up in Oakland.  For Ernest his research was personal, was an ethical and moral commitment. He writes:

I tell people about being radicalized. I am a child of the Civil Rights movement. My parents went to school with the Black Panthers, but I just wanted to be a playwright. I wanted to teach kids about writing. I became radicalized when I became a high school teacher within a system that was doing great harm to children that I quickly came to love as members of my own family. I also realized that there were some things that we were doing in that one English classroom that I would not mind seeing replicated in other classes. So I had to overcome that, wanting to be a playwright, super shy. My aunt said, “How can you be a teacher? You don’t even like to talk.” I am the shyest person I know. I really am, but it was love! It was love that did it. It was love for my students. It was that love manifested in a sincere concern for what was happening. But it was also a sense of hope that there was something we could do about it. (Morrell, 2015, p. 311)

Ernest’s body of work on youth critical, participatory, and civic literacies has been paradigm shifting for both researchers and practitioners. He brought intellectual respect and attention to the value and promise of racialized youth's astute popular cultural practices as vital to the future of adolescent literacy studies. Moreover, his work (re)positioned youth and communities as intellectual partners in community-driven inquiry processes, where their concerns are respectfully heard, valued, and taken seriously. His ground-breaking work on youth popular culture pushed on notions of multicultural education, as it recognized, acknowledged, and demonstrated a love for youth, Revolutionary Love, as he theorized. His book, Critical Literacy and Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access, Dissent, and Liberation (Routledge, 2008), provides a rich history of critical theory starting with Socrates and Plato.  

We shared with Ernest a commitment to attending to the history of ideas in scholarship.  In a recent exchange about a piece Kris had written about Courtney Cazden and her contributions, he said that he had been in the same headspace. “I’ve been worried about how much of the work is being forgotten and underutilized. If fewer young scholars are making meaningful connections to these luminaries, we are in trouble,” he wrote. 

It was not about replicating foundational work but about learning from it, to locate one’s work in a conversation, and to reimagine new ways of thinking, being, and doing in the academy. This is not surprising, as a careful review of Ernest’s scholarship reveals the significant historical analysis and genealogy he brought to his work, making historical connections from European traditions of critical theory to those of the global south, noting their intersections, synergies, and departures; or making conceptual and historical links between Carter G. Woodson and Asa Hilliard, as another example. These rich historical dimensions and archival threads are important to Morrell’s work and yet these are often aspects of his work that are often not recognized or lifted up.

Drawing on his expansive work with youth in classrooms, neighborhoods, and social institutions, Ernest presented an elaborated understanding of critical literacy, providing method, a rich theory of literacy education and social change— braiding theory, practice, and empirical cases throughout.  (See Chapter 2 of his book, From Plato to Poststructuralism: The Philosophical Foundations of Critical Literacy,) This work elaborated Morrell’s important contribution, Critical Participatory Action Research and the Literacy Achievement of Ethnic Minority Groups (55th Annual Yearbook of the National Reading Conference publication).

As just one example of the empirical evidence of the impact of his collaborations with teachers and youth is the Council of Youth Research which he founded in 1999. He writes:

One teacher is now an ambassador fellow for the U.S. Department of Education, two teachers have started small schools or are leaders of small schools, several of these teachers have published articles based on their classroom practices that have been published in leading journals, and several of the teachers have a book under contract with a major press. Teachers have also received competitive national grants to fund the ongoing work in their classrooms. Finally, the teachers involved in Youth Council have received commendations from the mayor’s office and from the superintendent, and the learning in their classrooms has been documented by administrators, by their own action research (much of it has been published and presented at national forums), and by our own classroom observations. The power of their teaching in the Council is documented in the tremendous success of the student participants. Of the nearly 200 students who have participated in our Youth Council, the overwhelming majority have graduated from high school and matriculated to postsecondary education; but the work of the Youth Council students has also been vetted by national research organizations, by peer-reviewed publications, as well as our own analysis of the quality of the literacy production. (Mirra & Morrell, 2011, p.415)

Ernest’s research was always grounded in interrogating the ecological—political, social, economic—contexts influencing opportunity and development. He writes:

Neoliberal ideology, which argues that the locus for success or failure is always located at the level of the individual, encourages us to look at the academic data and political trends and conclude that inequality is narrowly a cognitive problem of insufficient knowledge and skills on the part of low-income communities of color; as a result, much of the discourse that has emerged in response to this state of affairs has focused on how to ‘improve’ or ‘fix’ students from these communities. Critical theorists counter, however, that disparities in academic and civic ‘achievement’ are instead manifestations of systemic inequality and that the civic knowledge, skills, and attitudes of low-income students of color are routinely ignored or criticized in mainstream civic and literacy education. (Mirra & Morrell, 2011, p. 411)

One of Ernest’s central contributions was being among the leading scholars of critical English education in the United States. Ernest worked at the intersections of new literacy studies, media and cultural studies, and critical theory, creating a foundational literature for generations of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to define and enact critical literacy in K–12, teacher education, and graduate education contexts. Without question, Ernest’s articulation of the theory and practice of critical English education has become so ingrained in how literacy instruction is now understood in the field that it is easy to forget the monumental shift to which his work has contributed.

His work has illuminated a) the role of language and literacy in understanding and transforming social power relations; b) understandings of young people—particularly those from historically minoritized communities—as knowledge producers who critically analyze and produce texts to design new social futures; and c) the value of community repertoires of literacy practice as generators of personal, academic, and social transformation. (See the seminal article, “Toward Equity and Diversity in Literacy Research, Policy, and Practice: A Critical, Global Approach” [Morrell, 2017] as an exemplar). Building on his previous work, his latest book, Critical English Education: Enduring Voices, New Perspectives (2026), co-edited with former students (Professors Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia, Cati de los Ríos, and Jamila Lyiscott, whose collective work is part of Ernest’s legacy), brings together a number of scholars who leverage different critical analytic frames to expand critical English education. A testimony of his impact is the professional trajectories of those he mentored who are now themselves leaders in the field.     

For over twenty-five years, Ernest worked with adolescents and urban teachers, drawing upon youth’s interest in popular culture and participatory media technologies to increase motivation and to promote academic literacy development, civic engagement, and college access.  In each of his academic appointments, Ernest created structures that had longevity and engaged colleagues, students, and community members in partnerships, in creating programs of research that had impact in communities and on the lives of participants. In Morrell (2015), he writes there are three basic questions that drive his goals for learning:

How do we get students excited about learning? 2: How do we develop students’ literate identities? Instead of a focus on reading, let’s think about readers. Instead of attention to writing, let’s think about writers. When I become a reader or writer, when I have that identity, you don’t have to tell me to go read. I am a reader, and that’s what readers do. When reading is something that is decoding, or done just for a test, then you have to drag students to it. How do we make readers and writers out of our students? And third, how do we make reading instruction socially, culturally, and technologically relevant? (p. 310)

Ernest is particularly recognized for his research designs that recruited the cognitive, epistemological, and dispositional skills youth developed from their participation in routine cultural practices in their everyday lives. This included the literacy affordances of youth’s engagement with hip hop, film, and TV as examples.  Below is one fascinating example of how he connected students’ engagement with film and canonical literary texts from across cultural traditions:

For instance, while watching The Godfather and reading The Odyssey, students discussed the portrayal of heroes in Western epics and Western society. They compared Homer's Odysseus to Coppola's Michael Corleone. They also looked to their own society for examples of heroes. While watching A Time to Kill, the students discussed justice in the context of the lives of Wright's Bigger Thomas and Schumaker's Carl Lee Hailey, and they examined their own school for examples of injustice. (Morrell, 2002, p. 75)   

He is among the foremost scholars who made youth participatory action research  a foundational practice in K–12 and teacher education. His approach to YPAR is distinguished by a focus on its sociocultural underpinnings and an emphasis on engaging youth with complex theories of race, curriculum, and pedagogy as lenses to understand and make sense of the world around them. While the emphasis of this work is on youth, it might be better described as IPAR because of its intergenerational character. The YPAR collaborative that he founded at UCLA (the Council of Youth Research) encouraged generations of graduate students, teachers, and students across South and East Los Angeles to leverage their literacy practices toward liberatory social change. As a city-wide qualitative research project, its focus on talking to, deeply understanding, and respecting youths’ practices lifted up youth and their possibilities. Initially started as a partnership with one school district, the work with youth and teachers spread across the city.  Engaging youth in critical forms of research had impressive results, with all participating youth matriculating to college and many becoming teachers themselves.  The resulting UCLA Council of Youth Research engaged generations of youth in critical social thought, sociocritical literacies that privileged youth as designers of their own futures.

Co-authored with Mirra and Garcia, his widely acclaimed book, Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students (2015), elucidated the epistemological and methodological innovations of this YPAR collaborative and is without question the go-to book in the field.  Based on the distillation of more than a decade of methodological intervention with the Council of Youth Research, the work can arguably be considered a precursor to Research Practice Partnerships (RPP). This was generative research designed to meet the needs of youth and schools. In this work, he attended to the implications for what it means to teach and for the pre-service preparation of teachers, as well as conditions for developing intellective communities of practice within the profession. For Ernest, teachers were civic agents (Mirra & Morrell, 2011).  

Recognized nationally for developing powerful models of teaching and learning in classrooms and nonschool environments, his work always engaged youth and communities in the project of educational reform. His article “Critical Literacy, Educational Investment, and the Blueprint for Reform: An Analysis of the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act” (2010) situated the importance of youth pop culture as a literacy practice and literacy as a future, transforming literacy studies by incorporating urban youth popular culture beyond hip hop and documenting the situated literacy acts of youth more expansively.

Professor Ernest Morrell was a highly accomplished and prolific scholar and an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an elected Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, and a co-convener of the African Diaspora International Research Network, to name but a few of his many recognitions. He was the Coyle Professor of Literacy Education, professor of English and Africana Studies, and served as the Director of the Center for Literacy Education in the Institute for Educational Initiatives.

Ernest the Transformational Mentor

While Ernest’s accomplishments were formally and widely recognized, his influence in the field was manifest in the number of junior scholars of critical literacy who were either directly mentored by him or whose research agendas were shaped by his scholarship. Current advances in multiliteracies, media studies, and participatory literacies can all be connected to his contributions.

Ernest’s mentoring practices flattened hierarchies, treating his students as peers in the making. He encouraged his students to see the big picture, to dream big. He continually created opportunities for his students to grow, seeing them as intellectual partners, as co-authors, as co-presenters not only at conferences but keynotes, advisory boards, and community projects, providing them both local and national visibility. Ernest argued that a key form of resistance was through excellence. He served as a model for how to be in the academy and in the world: a talented teacher and caring, generous mentor who challenged his students to read widely and to think deeply about real-world problems of classroom practice, at the same time inspiring his students to ground their work in the people and communities they valued. Through his work and his mentorship, his call to always center youth and their genius echoed throughout all he did, as a teacher, mentor, writer, colleague, and community worker.

Kris D. Gutiérrez and Carol D. Lee

Kris Gutiérrez, A Personal Note: As it was for all who knew him well, Professor Ernest Morrell’s friendship was a gift. We first met in 2000 where he began his foundational work at the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at the then Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA, where I was a faculty member. In 2004, I was thrilled to chair the search that brought Ernest from Michigan State University to UCLA and subsequently chair his tenure committee, as his presence and contributions to UCLA, our students, and the surrounding community were significant. Our relationship, which began as me serving as his mentor at UCLA, endured and spanned several decades of conversations and exchanges of ideas, mutual respect, and a close friendship. He would often say, “Kris, we are family.” Carol and I had the privilege of nominating and endorsing him for his much-deserved election to the National Academy of Education. In December, we began planning a collaborative piece on mentoring. His extraordinary wife and intellectual partner, Dr. Jodene Morrell, and I will finish this piece.

For more information, see the deeply personal obituary for Ernest:

https://www.kaniewski.com/obituary/Ernest-MorrellII

References

Mirra, N., & Morrell, E. (2011). Teachers as civic agents: Toward a critical democratic theory of urban teacher development. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(4), 408–420.

Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2015). Doing youth participatory action research: Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and students. Routledge.

Morrell, E. (2002). Toward a critical pedagogy of popular culture: Literacy development among urban youth. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46(1), 72–77.

Morrell, E. (2005). Critical English education. English Education, 37(4), 312–321.

Morrell, E. (2006). Critical participatory action research and the literacy achievement of ethnic minority groups. In J. V. Hoffman, D. L. Schallert, C. M. Fairbanks, J. Worthy, & B.  Maloch (Eds), 55th Annual Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 60–78). National Reading Conference.

Morrell, E. (2008). Critical literacy and urban youth: Pedagogies of access, dissent, and liberation.  Routledge.

Morrell, E. (2008). From Plato to poststructuralism: The philosophical foundations of critical literacy.  In E. Morell, Critical literacy and urban youth: Pedagogies of access, dissent, and liberation (pp.29–56).  Routledge.

Morrell, E. (2010). Critical literacy, educational investment, and the blueprint for reform: An analysis of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(2), 146–149.

Morrell, E. (2014). Critical action research and the future of English education: A presidential commentary. NCTE Council Chronicle, 24(1).

Morrell, E. (2015). The 2014 Presidential Address: Powerful English at NCTE yesterday, today, and tomorrow: Toward the next movement. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(3), 307–327.

Morrell, E. (2017). Toward equity and diversity in literacy research, policy, and practice: A critical, global approach. Journal of Literacy Research, 49 (3), 454–463.

Morrell, E., Mira, N., Garcia, A., de los Rios, C., Lysicott, J. (Eds.). (2025). Critical English education:  Enduring voices, new perspectives. National Council of Teachers of English.