COE Faculty Profile

Sheridan Wigginton
Assistant Professor
Division of Teaching And Learning

Education

Sheridan Wigginton received her Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from Eastern Kentucky University in 1995. She earned a Master of Arts in Spanish with an emphasis in language teaching and applied linguistics from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1997. In 2001, she graduated with a doctorate from the University of Missouri-Columbia in foreign language curriculum and instruction. She served as a visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina during the 2001-2002 academic year. She jointed the UM-St. Louis faculty in 2002.

Research

Dr. Wigginton’s research is framed by critical pedagogy and ethnographic approaches to gathering and analyzing information from classrooms and school materials in Latin America. Her work focuses on the transmission of national identity, racial ideology and the pedagogy of racial difference in Latin American school curriculum. Her current research examines the Dominican Republic, with specific emphasis on how the country’s highly racialized relationship with neighboring Haiti has influenced the content of Dominican textbooks. Also, she is now expanding her work into Costa Rica. Her work there explores how the country’s West Indian population, largely of Jamaican descent and residing in the Caribbean coastal province of Limón, is portrayed within school-based discourses of national identity.

Dr. Wigginton’s interdisciplinary research connects to multiple areas of academic study, from literature and culture to political science and comparative international education. The accessibility of her work and the connections that she has fostered within research communities are reflected in her close involvement with the people with whom she works.

Teaching

Dr. Wigginton teaches courses that span both areas of her joint appointment in the College of Education and in the College of Arts and Science. In her role as Director of Foreign Language Teacher Certification, she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in foreign language pedagogy as well as supervises the internship and student teaching experience for students in French, German and Spanish. She has taught a range of courses in Spanish language, applied linguistics and second language teaching methodologies. She is currently developing a class on Equatorial Guinea, the only former Spanish colony in sub-Saharan Africa. The course’s content is drawn from her work as a participant in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute The Literature and Culture of Equatorial Guinea: Pedagogical Perspective.

Representative Scholarly Activity

Paper Presentations

“Dominican Ethnic Politics: The Strange Cases of Angelita Primera and Peña Gómez.” First Conference on Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous Peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean, University of California, San Diego, California; May 2008.

“Books, Bias and Blackness: Images of Identity in Dominican and Costa Rican Textbooks.” 52nd Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, Teachers College Columbia University, New York, New York; March 2008.

“Face the Nation: How Dominican Politics and the Legend of Enriquillo Work to Craft
"El Look Dominicano" Latin American Studies Association, Montréal, Canada, September
2007.

“Poetic Justice: The Dominican-Haitian Divide as Seen Through the Poetry of Blas R. Jiménez.” Dominican-Haitian Representations: Migrations, Citizenship and Human Rights, The City University of New York, New York, New York; February 2007.

“Tracing the Face of Race in the Dominican Republic: Dominican Education Policy and Reform
from Trujillo to Present.” College Language Association, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham, Alabama; April 2006.

“The Color of Citizenship in the Dominican Republic.” XXV Hispanic Languages and Literatures Conference, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; February 2006.

“Myth, Memory, and Dominican Antihaitianism: An Ethnosymbolic Approach to Understanding Dominican National Identity.” Fifth Biannual International Conference of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association.; San Juan, Puerto Rico; August 2004.

Publications

Wigginton, S. (2007). The color of citizenship in the Dominican Republic: Chronicling
blackness through education policy and reform. In A. Morris & M. Parker (Eds.), Celebrations
and Connections in Hispanic Literature, 40-47. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.

Wigginton, S. (2005). Character or caricature: Representations of blackness in Dominican social science textbooks, Race Ethnicity and Education, 8 (2), 191-211.

Wigginton, S. (2006). Hispanidad as ethnic myth and the anti-Haitian nation: An ethno-symbolic approach to Understanding Dominican Identity, PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association, 10, 51-60.

Wigginton, S. (2006). Banning, becoming and being black in the Dominican Republic: How attitudes about blackness are reflected in education policy and reform,” In R. Kirkland & D. Namala (Eds.), Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, 172-179. Carson, California: PCCLAS Secretariat-California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Wigginton, S. (2003). [Review of the book Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola by Michele Wucker]. Journal of Haitian Studies, 9 (2), 181-184.

Wigginton, S. (2000). Interview with Blas Jiménez, PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin American Research Association, 4, 90-92.

Wigginton, S. (journal article in review). Blackness as a barrier to citizenship and education in the Dominican Republic: Situating the example of Dilcea Yean and Violeta Bosico. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice.

Wigginton, S. (journal article under review). Poetry, power and critical pedagogy in the Dominican Republic: The new ethnic curriculum of Blas Jiménez. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.

Wigginton, S. (book chapter under review). The Poetry of Blas Jiménez as a New Ethnic Curriculum: Replacing the Functionalism of Half-Being with Critical Pedagogy. Critical Approaches to Afro-Latin American Literature.

• Bilingual/Bicultural
• Comparative Education
• Critical Theory
• Ethnicity
• Hispanic Education
• International Education/Studies
• Literature
• Qualitative Research
• Textbooks