Noffke, Susan

Susan (Sue) Noffke often reminded people that her hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, was also the home of the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy, the disgraceful ‘anti-communist’ pursuer of independent thinkers and activists. With her father, a unionist, working in the local mill, Sue's frame of reference was always shaped by the need to resist the thuggery of institutionalized violence and the imbalance of power it represented. As a middle school teacher (1972–82) in the Tomah and Monona public schools in Wisconsin, she was an active unionist (as well as local softball player) and took on the task of union bargaining, building her understanding of both her sister and brother teachers and district education politics.

From school teaching, Noffke went into academic work. In this world, Noffke is best known for her focus on educational action research: writing, teaching, doctoral supervision and projects with teachers and communities. From the mid eighties to June 2013, she worked in university settings, part-time as a teaching assistant in the teacher education programme of the University of Wisconsin–Madison while she worked towards her doctoral degree, then at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1989–93) in their teacher education programme and from 1993 to 2013 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A key focus for her teacher education work was in social studies teaching, which she was able to use as a platform for facilitating student teachers' work in urban schools and their communities and working with local district teachers on social studies curriculum over a number of years. She had a lifelong passion for children's books, using them to raise explorations of social and economic injustice through attention to social issues covered in her collection of books (now donated to the Urbana Free Library). Anti-racist education was a particular focus for thinking, reading, teaching and action on schooling, teacher education, social studies and curriculum theory; action research was a vehicle for following that concern through in multiple projects—with students, teachers, parents and communities.

Often, only those directly involved knew of such projects, although some reached formal publication in journals. She wrote with teachers to critique the cultural bias of standardized tests, lobbied with teachers whose children had to put up with blocked sewers at their school and helped organize the essay competitions which encouraged elementary students to write about (in)justice in their daily lives for Martin Luther King Day. Nine years of dialogue, co-research and hard work in a school district showed up in classroom materials in schools and materials for teaching social studies in teacher education. The long-term social studies curriculum themes chosen by these local teachers reflect their concern for students as knowledge makers, alongside their teacher-researchers: historical thinking, problem-solving, citizenship and social justice. Such service to teachers and their students was a hallmark of Noffke's commitment to teachers: helping to support them to become critical practitioners through curriculum development, working with communities and engaging in action research projects on current issues. There are many more untold tales of such commitment.

Working in a university thus gave Noffke an important base for her informed activism, working with local school districts and their communities as well as her classes, both undergraduate and graduate. She loved working with colleagues, including former students, building a large network across the globe, from Korea to Colombia, Mexico to Seattle, Liverpool to Cambridge and Cape Town to Melbourne. Her graduate class in action research was a place for local teachers and international scholars to find one another and their own projects. These students were welcomed into her family home regularly. She loved teachers and teaching—a job that was, in her view, a site for intellectual and daily practical challenges. It is this focus on teachers and their work that underpinned her interest in action research that makes a difference in terms of human dignity and justice.

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