Ruth Vinz

Ruth Vinz is the Morse Endowed Professor in Teacher Education and professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of seventeen books and numerous articles, written over the fifty-seven years of her teaching career. Vinz taught high school English and humanities courses for twenty-four years, where she came to understand teaching and learning as restless cartography, journeying with students through landscapes filled with possibility, promise, and...See more

Ruth Vinz is the Morse Endowed Professor in Teacher Education and professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of seventeen books and numerous articles, written over the fifty-seven years of her teaching career. Vinz taught high school English and humanities courses for twenty-four years, where she came to understand teaching and learning as restless cartography, journeying with students through landscapes filled with possibility, promise, and poignancy. In her thirty-three years at Teachers College, she continues to learn with others through coursework, collaborative (re)search/writing projects, and community engagements. She suggests that her writing is intended as an invitation to others and a reminder to herself of the need to continuously move beyond familiar boundaries and to (re)cognize that we are always in the making, always becoming through a process of learning, un-learning, questioning, and revising ourselves anew. Vinz calculates that she has provided feedback to at least 38,500 students' poems, essays, stories, research reports, and dissertation drafts, from which she continues to learn and be thrilled by the power of imagination, combined with the resources of language, to craft writing into exhilarating and intimate portrayals of our hopes, fears, and dreams. See less