Erin Flynn

Erin Elizabeth Flynn is an Associate Professor in Educational Studies at the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan. Dr. Flynn was previously an Associate Professor of Child, Youth, & Family Studies at Portland State University. A former State Pre-K and Head Start teacher in Chicago, Dr. Flynn’s research investigates the emergence of storytelling in early childhood, aiming to leverage the meaning-making priorities that children have cultivated in the home and community in the service of language learning in the classroom. Through a program of research focused on language learning in culturally and linguistically mixed early childhood classrooms, Dr. Flynn disrupts the dominant discourse about economically marginalized children as “unready” for high level learning in kindergarten and beyond. Drawing on intersecting theories of language drawn from socio- and critical linguistics, she combines Systemic Functional Linguistics, translanguaging, and transcultural approaches to describe the culturally-shaped and varied patterns children draw on to story experience. Flynn’s research interests include learning from teachers’ own ‘knowing ways’ - the embodied and place-based knowledge teachers have cultivated in the classroom in the interest of better tuning teachers’ attention to language with particular attention to recognizing, appreciating, and extending the everyday linguistic diversity present in publicly provided schooling.