UVEI is very excited to welcome Audrey Richardson to our faculty! While Audrey had an adjunct role at UVEI last year, this year she is transitioning out of her decades-long role in public schools to take on the role of our Literacy Educators Program Coordinator and program faculty member. Audrey has been a high school English and ELA teacher, an interventionist, and Instructional Literacy Coach and MTSS Coordinator, primarily at Woodstock Union High School. This year, in addition to her work with UVEI, she will continue her roles as a graduate literacy coordinator and lecturer for the University of Vermont and as the NEXIS Project Coordinator for Partnerships for Literacy and Learning. 

Nurturing “access to life, options, opportunities”

Audrey says that the “literacy bug” hit her when she stepped back into the secondary setting as an interventionist. “This role allowed me to see so much more inequities and richness in kids’ lives that we often don’t get to see because we are working in a larger scope.” Spending so much time with students in small group or one-on-one settings allowed her to form deep relationships with students and highlighted how much their stories and experiences needed to be valued. She was able to do all of this while pushing their literacy learning forward. This is where she felt the most herself, and where her definition of literacy, and equity in literacy, really began to take hold.

This is also where she started to think about literacy on a systems level. “When teaching literacy, it can either be a space where we inhibit peoples’ access to life, options, opportunities, or it can be a space where we can nurture those same things and open it up so people have more choices, free from systemic barriers.” 

“I’m a thinking partner”

When she stepped into the role of literacy coaching and began establishing partnerships with classroom teachers and other educators, the richness of the literacy world expanded even further. “You don’t hear about coaching in the secondary setting as much. It’s almost like an underground secondary literacy world.” The challenge is in ensuring others understand her role: as coaches, we are not there to solve the problem or to do it for them, but rather we work to fully understand the problem and solve it together. “I’m a thinking partner. I might have some ideas or resources, but it’s really about partnering. This collaboration and partnership is a favorite space to be.”

“Bringing people together to make systems more human-centered and functional”

As she continued this work, Audrey became more and more frustrated at the systems level, seeing what was going on and what was missing and not being able to fix it. This was true around the region as she was connecting with other educators in the literacy world. So, she pursued her PhD with a focus on equitable access to literacy learning. Through this work, a whole new world opened up. “This opportunity, stepping out of the classroom and school and seeing how things work in other districts, has allowed me to grow, to see what’s working, identify the support needed to make it better, and partner with others.” 

This work can be challenging. “Systems are complex, and humans are complex. At times we see something that isn’t working for a child, we know that something needs to be better for them, but we aren’t able to act quick enough. We must navigate the space between building sustainable systems and acting on what needs to happen for a kid.” This requires flexibility and deep partnerships with others who are willing to do the work and make necessary changes. “I really like the messy phase, when it feels like we’re failing but really, this is the hinge point. It’s the fun part; when we are bringing people together to make systems more human-centered and functional.”

Audrey resides in Vermont and married into a generational farm family. She has two daughters. You can find her full bio on our faculty & staff page, and she can be reached at arichardson@uvei.edu.