Biography and CV

Carol Booth Olson is Director of the UCI/National Writing Project and an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in American Literature from UCLA in 1977 and was honored as Outstanding Graduate Woman of the Year.

Dr. Olson has edited three books: Practical Ideas for Teaching Writing as Process (1997), the best selling publication of the California Department of Education (1986; 1987); Thinking/Writing: Fostering Critical Thinking Through Writing (Harper Collins, 1992); and Reading, Thinking, and Writing About Multicultural Literature (Scott Foresman Publishers, 1996). In addition, her single-author text, The Reading/Writing Connection, is now in its second edition (Allyn & Bacon/ Longman, 2007). Dr. Olson has also published over thirty journal articles on interactive strategies for teaching writing, fostering critical thinking through writing, applying multiple intelligences theory to language arts instruction, using multicultural literature with students of culturally diverse backgrounds, and more.

In 1994, Dr. Olson and three UCI Writing Project teacher researchers won the first annual Caddo Gap Press Award for California Education Research for a study of the impact of teaching multicultural literature on the writing of ethnic and linguistic minority students. She was the recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award from the UCI Committee in Teaching Quality for 1996 and 1997 and received the Outstanding Contribution to Reading Award from the Orange County Reading Association in 1999. In 2007, Dr. Olson received the Alan Purves Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for the article in Research in the Teaching of English deemed most likely to impact educational practice for an eight-year long study in Santa Ana Unified School District.

“Children are always the only future the human race has; Teach them well.”Olson_CV