Ellie Cotton '24 and Associate Professor coauthored an article published in May 2025 in "Social Education."
Ellie Cotton, a 2024 graduate of the Dr. Jo Watts Williams School of Education and Elon Teaching Fellow, co-authored an article with Associate Professor Lisa Buchanan that was published in May in “Social Education,” the practitioner journal of the National Council for the Social Studies.
Their article centers the picture book “Milo Imagines the World” as an interactive read aloud for young readers and guides classroom teachers through a series of instructional strategies that compliment the book; they also provide a curated text set for teachers who are interested in teaching through a thematic text with “Milo” as an anchor text.
Buchanan and Cotton began working together in Cotton’s first year during Buchanan’s Children’s Literature course and continued to collaborate across Cotton’s next three years at Elon through undergraduate research, Spring Undergraduate Research Forum a research presentation for the American Educational Research Association (April 2024) which highlighted Ellie’s undergraduate research, and their recent article in “Social Education.”
Cotton is now a third-grade teacher in Wake County Public Schools.
“Ellie was all in for her undergraduate research experience at Elon,” said Buchanan. “From her early ideas about her research focus to our co-authorship on this published article, she brought constant energy and original ideas. I watched her grow as a scholar across those four fast years and coauthoring this article born out of a common interest was an honor. To me, this type of collaboration is what undergraduate research and the teacher-scholar-mentor model at Elon is all about.”