The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Assistant professor named Educator of the Year
Lake Erie College educator and assistant professor of literacy Beth Walsh-Moorman recently received an Educator of the Year Award by the Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts.
The recognition was bestowed to Walsh-Moorman at the OCTELA annual conference Feb. 22 for her “excellence inside and outside of the classroom through leadership and advocacy for the language arts and focused efforts to improve learning,” according to a news release.
Walsh-Moorman is involved in literacy programs at LEC and serves as the editor for the Ohio Journal of English Language Arts.
OCTELA said of WalshMoorman at the event, “Beth realizes that digital literacy is constantly changing and today’s teaching climate is demanding. Through her role in OCTELA, Beth is a strong advocate for all teachers, and her enthusiasm is infectious.”
Walsh-Moorman gained attention through her integration of cyber-literacy within the English curriculum across grade levels.
“A lot of my research has been on digital composing techniques, multimodal aspects,” she said. “Lately, in the last year and half, I’ve been focusing on digital source evaluation. I’ve been working with teachers from a couple different districts.”
Her work comes at a critical time when increasing levels of news are disseminated first across the Internet and not always from credible sources.
“We’ve been working to identify potential bias in sources,” Walsh-Moorman said. “The media changes; they may get their information from Snapchat or Facebook or from an actual newspaper. You don’t want to focus on specific skills, but rather a skeptical stance. We’ve been looking at how to develop that stance in students across the grade spectrum.
“It’s OK to question a source’s authority,” WalshMoorman said. “Just because it’s published doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an authority. I think we may have inadvertently trained our kids to look at text as an authority.
“We need to question what potential bias there may be with this text. The earlier they are given permission to question a text’s authority the more likely they are to have the digital skills needed to be more informed and more independent in their own thinking.”
Walsh-Moorman is involved in literacy programs at LEC and serves as the editor for the Ohio Journal of English Language Arts