Dan Stockwell, PHD

BIOGRAPHY

Before joining the Department of English at CSUB in 2023, Dan Stockwell spent eight years teaching high school English Language Arts (ELA). After completing a bachelor’s degree in English Language Arts Secondary Education in 2011, Dan taught high school ELA in Greenville, South Carolina, and completed his master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction in 2014. While teaching full time, Dan also worked as an adjunct instructor at Anderson University in South Carolina, where he taught reading courses for preservice teachers in the evenings. During his time as a high school teacher, Dan was a mentor teacher for four teacher candidates from local universities. These teacher candidates worked with Dan for an entire semester, and under his guidance, taught his classes and received daily apprenticeship from him. These experiences sparked his passion for working with future educators and ultimately led him to pursue a Ph.D. at Clemson University. While at Clemson University, Dan taught literacy and research courses for preservice teachers as a graduate student teacher of record. During his time at CSUB, Dan has served as the chair of the English Education Advisory Committee, which is a cross-departmental and cross-institutional advisory committee that collaborates to prepare college students for their future careers as educators in Kern County and beyond. Dan is the English Club advisor, for which he occasionally runs sessions of the table-top role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Dan is also the English Major with Credential Emphasis Program Advisor, and in this role, he serves as a mentor for English majors at CSUB who plan to become secondary ELA teachers. Dan serves the profession as a member of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Secondary Section Steering Committee. His areas of specialization are critical literacy, disciplinary literacy, and English education. Dan’s research focuses on how secondary ELA teachers can provide critical literacy pedagogy, even in restrictive teaching contexts. Dan’s research has been published in NCTE’s English Journal (2024), in the California Association of Teachers of English’s California English (2025), and in his book Teaching for CHANGE in the ELA Classroom: Integrating Social Justice and Critical Literacy for Grades 9-12 (2025).