they took pictures and blogged during the entire trip<\/a>, while her husband, Martin, held down the fort at their Oslo apartment.<\/p>\nWhen Glenn asked students in Norway what they associated with America, they responded \u201cMcDonalds! Paris Hilton! Bad health care and violent schools,\u201d she says. \u201cHaving said that,\u201d she adds, \u201ctheir understandings are also coupled with a real interest and often admiration of what America represents. My mission was to try to complicate their understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n
She brought home a larger lesson or two. Norway\u2019s cultural values \u2013 an abiding love of the outdoors and pride in family life and hobbies \u2013 infuse the way of life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Norway life outside of work has a greater value than work itself, and ironically most Norwegians have a positive attitude about work,\u201d Glenn says. \u201cThey\u2019re not resentful of it because it doesn\u2019t take over their lives. It\u2019s just a part of who they are. And they have the time and the freedom to pursue the other parts of who they are.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know that that happens in the U.S., \u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Glenn\u2019s specialty, young adult literature, is really a mission. An avid reader in her own girlhood, she sees a propensity among high school students, as they become immersed in required reading, to lose their earlier passion for reading. And, because some educators are not as versed in the richness of the growing young adult genre, it\u2019s often dismissed as romance novels or horror sagas. Trash is the word some use.<\/p>\n
But that view is selling the genre short, says Glenn, who has published works about their themes of class, diversity, bullying and conspicuous consumption. \u201cOur responsibility is to teach young readers to be critical readers,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can easily have conversations around author\u2019s craft and literary elements, like setting and tone and character.\u201d<\/p>\n
Love of reading plays into creating real learners in the classroom, and beyond its walls, she says. Rather than engaging in intense mastery test preparation, which she calls \u201csacrificing children to what we believe is some greater good\u201d and \u201cmorally wrong,\u201d she advocates \u201ca classroom community where students are reading and writing and speaking and thinking authentically.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe irony is that if we teach with a passion and allow students to behave as real readers and writers and thinkers, they\u2019re going to do just fine on those tests,\u201d Glenn says.<\/p>\n
Some literature for the young deals with controversial themes that not every adult in a community deems appropriate. \u201cMy students ask me, \u2018Would you let Miranda read this?\u2019 \u201d Such community discussion requires teachers \u201cto have very clear rationales that underpin why they\u2019re teaching particular texts,\u201d she says, even, or perhaps especially, an accepted author such as Shakespeare, who deals with harsh themes. \u201cIf you can articulate the value you see, then you can enter a discussion with the parent,\u201d she advises.<\/p>\n
Young adult titles she believes are strong include \u201cThe Book Thief\u201d by Markus Zusak, a disturbing but poetic handling of a story set during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany; \u201cWe Were Here\u201d by Matt Del a Pena, a counter narrative of a Latino youth \u201cwho doesn\u2019t fit the media portrayal of urban youth we often are privy to\u201d; and \u201cSold\u201d by Patricia McCormick, the story of a 13-year-old Nepalese girl whose desperate father sells her into prostitution in Calcutta. \u201cI love the strength of the character, but I think it\u2019s just beautifully written,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Glenn has one foot planted in the content of her English specialty, but the other is firmly rooted in the methods of teaching that she imparts to her Neag students. How does she combine the two?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe try to live for students the kind of teacher we ultimately hope they will become,\u201d she says. But the second part is \u201cwe want to stop and step back and analyze from a critically aware perspective what we\u2019re doing, why we\u2019re doing it and how we might modify what we\u2019re doing in a classroom of 30 rambunctious 10th-graders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glenn is known as a textbook exemplar of such ideals, responding to emails and emergency calls, not just from her Neag students, but also from alumni teaching in the field.<\/p>\n
Isabel Meagher, Neag BS 2007 and MA 2008, now teaches at Glastonbury High School. She recalls presenting with Glenn and others on issues of race, class and sex in Young Adult literature at a November 2008 conference in Texas. \u201cShe did not take this opportunity to tell us what she\u2019d like to present. Wendy did what all outstanding teachers do: she let go,\u201d treating the co-presenters as colleagues rather than students, Meagher said.<\/p>\n
Glenn was an advisor for Erica Berg, who graduated from the Neag School in 2006 with a bachelor\u2019s, followed by a master\u2019s in 2007. Berg now teaches at Rockville High School in Vernon. \u201cThe pre-teachers joke that we become \u2018Little Wendys\u2019 when we exit the program,\u201d Berg says, \u201cbecause we can\u2019t leave her classes without wanting to teach exactly as she does, with an incredible amount of passion and warmth.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wendy Glenn is a teacher\u2019s teacher and, therefore, a natural to be the new director of teacher education in the Neag School of Education at UConn. Her predecessor, Associate Dean Marijke Kehrhahn, who laid the administrative groundwork for the job, is even humbled by Glenn\u2019s talents. \u201cI\u2019m not a teacher educator, and she is to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":206929,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1855],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2455],"class_list":["post-206928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-neag"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-05 15:58:19","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206930,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206928\/revisions\/206930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/206929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206928"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=206928"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=206928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}