Heidi Jones

Dr. Heidi Jones

Dr. Jones was an adjunct at SCSU from Spring 2024-Summer 2026 and transitioned to become a full-time Assistant Professor of Secondary Education in Fall 2026. She spent 2017-2026 in urban middle schools as a 7th grade ELA/Reading teacher, interventionist, literacy specialist, and instructional coach. 

She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, Literacy Education, from the University of Minnesota in 2013. While at the U, she taught several post-bac courses in the English Education program, supervised field experiences and student teachers and tutored in the Center for Writing.  

Prior to earning her doctorate, she attended Winona State University and earned an M.A. in Language and Literature (2008) and B.S. in Communication Arts and Literature (2003). She also earned her K-12 reading licensure from Minnesota State University, Mankato in 2018. She currently holds MN teaching licensures in 5-12 Communication Arts and Literature and K-12 Reading.

Dr. Jones chose the urban student teaching option when completing her undergraduate program at WSU, and her placement at Humboldt Senior High School in Saint Paul Public Schools propelled her to continue to work in urban schools. She then moved to Baltimore, Maryland to become a 12th grade ELA teacher in Baltimore County Public Schools. She earned a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study at Yale University in the summer of 2005, and that program prompted her return to the Midwest to pursue graduate studies.

After graduating with her doctorate, Dr. Jones was employed as an Assistant Professor of English Education at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, from 2013-2017, where she taught English Methods, Young Adult Literature, First-Year Writing, Literature of Black America, and supervised student teachers. 

Dr. Jones is a first-generation college student from a working-class background, and her dissertation focused on the lived experiences of white, working-class female English teachers as they navigated the systems and institutions of Education, as well as the shifting family dynamics that occurred as they moved into and through the profession. She has been a member of the Working-Class Studies Association since 2012.

Dr. Jones’s teaching and research interests include: educational equity, critical whiteness studies, first generation college students/working-class studies, classroom ecology, critical literacy, and activist pedagogies, BIPOC Young Adult Literature and secondary literacy interventions within MTSS frameworks.

Select Publications

• Stutelberg, E.and Jones, H. (2023). “Characterizing whiteness: Using critical whiteness pedagogies to teach BIPOC YA literature”: Reckoning with the whiteness of English education: Whiteness pedagogies in English language arts. Teachers College Press, 2023.

• Jesse, T. and Jones, H. (2020). “Manufacturing manhood: Young adult fiction and masculinities in young adult literature in the 21st century: Beyond the blockbusters: Themes and trends in contemporary young adult literature. University of Mississippi Press, 2020.