AnneMarie McClain

AnneMarie McClain is Visiting Assistant Professor of Education and Africana Studies at Williams College where she teaches courses about anti-bias education and identity socialization. AnneMarie is also an educational consultant for various children’s media organizations and a children’s book author. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Communication Arts) and holds master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Communication Arts), the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Human Development & Psychology), and CUNY-Hunter (Childhood Education). She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Williams College.

AnneMarie’s work centers around identity socialization for children, anti-bias education, and how we can use and design media – and interactions with media – to better promote positive outcomes for kids and their families, especially kids and families who are marginalized. For example, her recent research on U.S. Black families has examined strategies that Black parents report in terms of using media to socialize their kids around race, their representation preferences for their children’s media, and what kind of media content they select after their child has experienced racism. In addition to exploring the media content and strategies (e.g., conversations, media literacy skills) that families, educators, and children themselves can use to foster positive outcomes, she also examines the developmental implications of media and interpersonal messages related to diversity in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status.

As a former public elementary school teacher who taught in Brooklyn, New York, and rural Costa Rica, and who has developed curricula for preschool and elementary school children in the United States, Costa Rica, and Kenya, AnneMarie leverages her developmental and educational lens in every aspect of her work. She applies an asset-based framework to understand the ways in which families, educators, and communities can and do use media to support children. She has worked with hundreds of children and families and their schools as a researcher and liaison for various projects in child development labs at Tufts University, Harvard University, and UW-Madison. She has worked with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to develop practitioner-facing guides to support children’s connected learning across their communities and has also worked with WGBH-Boston as part of a research team, designing a successful, open-source socioemotional development curriculum for elementary school students based on the hit series Arthur. She has presented at national and international conferences, Cartoon Network, America250, and has taught and given lectures at Harvard, UW-Madison, and UC-Boulder.