Victoria Purcell-Gates is the Canada Research Chair in Early Childhood Literacy for the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. She studies the ways in which people within communities value and practice literacy in all aspects of their lives. Her interests also include designing early literacy instruction that builds on young children's linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and social models for reading and writing acquired within their home communities. She is a former president of the National Reading Conference and a member of the Reading Hall of Fame. Her latest book is Cultural Practices of Literacy: Case Studies of Language, Literacy, Social Practice, and Power.
