Degrees
BA, English Literature Fordham University, 1981
MA, Medieval Literature, Wesleyan University, 1983
Ph.D. Curriculum Theory, University of Rochester, 1989
Contact Information
email: pmsalvio@hopper.unh.edu
email: pmsalvio@gmail.com
Office: 6 Morrill Hall
Paula M. Salvio is a Professor of Education in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. In addition to serving as a faculty member in the Doctoral Program in Education and an associate faculty member in the Masters Degree Program in Reading, Professor Salvio has served as Program Coordinator for the Doctoral Program in Literacy and Schooling (1999-2002).
Professor Salvio currently teaches courses in curriculum theory, literacy and qualitative research methods. She teaches a range of students – teacher candidates (undergraduates and post -BA students working towards certification in elementary, middle and high school) masters students (practicing K-12 public school teachers), as well as doctoral students who plan to teach teachers and pursue research in education.
Additionally, she has served as Guest Editor and Section Editor for the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. Currently, she serves on the Board of Editors for the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy and reviews essays for Anthropology and Education, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Curriculum Studies and Curriculum Inquiry. She also serves as the Nominations Chair for the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and has served on various committees for the American Educational Research Association, Division B: Curriculum Studies.
Research Areas
Dr. Salvio studies the ways in which the rhetoric of performance is used by professional and student writers to express what is half-spoken in culture and society. She is especially interested in the rhetorical practices writers use when their emotional lives call out for full expression, but they feel at a loss for words. Toward this end, Dr. Salvio focuses on the role that aesthetic practices such as theatre, photography and the visual arts play in mediating expression.
In the spring of 2006, Professor Salvio co-edited a collection of essays on psychoanalysis and education with Gail M. Boldt entitled Love’s Return: Psychoanalytic Essays on Childhood, Teaching, and Learning (Routledge Press, 2006). Bringing together the work of educators, curriculum theorists, and clinical psychoanalysts, and drawing upon autobiographical and narrative case studies, this collection examines the collision of love and learning, and investigates the ways in which such intersections are provoked, repressed, and denied. Contributors to this volume turn to psychoanalysis to explore questions of love in all of its varying permutations – ambivalence, sexuality, hatred, desire, projection, and loss – in order to demonstrate how the social ramifications of such work are critical to the ways teachers are currently being prepared for life in the classroom.
Her recent scholarship combines autobiography with biography to portray the teaching life of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Anne Sexton. This work concerns itself with images of women who teach writing in ways that defy normative notions of what it means to be a ‘good’ teacher. Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance will be released by the State University of New York Press, April, 2007
Current Research
A new book project on what Dr. Salvio refers to as the ‘public pedagogy’ of surrealist World War II photographer, Lee Miller.
Dr. Salvio is currently working on a new collection of essays that explore the half-spoken psychoanalytic presence of the work of D.W. Winnicott in what has been described as the ‘expressivist’ tradition of teaching writing.
