Visiting Literacy Research Scholar Symposium

Lorena Escoto Germán is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, raised in the U.S. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English Communication from Emmanuel College and a Master of Arts in English from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She is an advocate for the practice of a culturally sustaining pedagogical approach in education.

Germán has been in various settings of education since 2001. Her extensive experience ranges from extracurricular youth work to community spaces to the traditional classroom, equipping her to offer sound advice on strong teaching practices. Specifically, her classroom experience has been as an ELA teacher from grades 6th through 12th.

In the P-12 arena, Germán has held educational leadership positions in a department, school-wide, and district-wide from designing curricula to improvement strategy. She is the Chair of the National Council of English Teacher’s Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English and she co-founded #DisruptTexts. She also is the Director of Pedagogy at EduColor.

The Davis-Simpson Endowment was established by Anne and Danny Simpson to honor the life of Jean Craven Davis. The Davis and Simpson families have a rich history with Texas Woman's University.

Jean C. Davis completed her master's degree in Nutrition in 1978, and Dr. Anne Davis Simpson served on the faculty in the Department of Reading from 2002-2019. She was awarded the Cornaro Award at TWU in 2015.

Davis Simpson received her undergraduate degree in Elementary Education from Southern Methodist University, her master's in Curriculum & Instruction from Texas A&M, and her doctorate in Reading at the University of North Texas.

Davis Simpson and her husband Danny Simpson actively work to support literacy at the community, state, and national levels.

This endowment was also established to position TWU in a unique way to provide master's and doctoral programs in literacy as one of only two universities in the state of Texas offering a PhD in Reading.