Green earned her M.A. in Educational Psychology from California State University, Northridge in 1970, where she specialized in child development and language development. She later completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on the relationships among teaching, learning, literacy, and knowledge construction.
At UCSB, she served as Professor Above Scale in the Department of Education until her retirement in 2016, after which she was named Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
Research
Green's research focuses on teaching and learning, literacy, and the social construction of disciplinary knowledge in culturally, linguistically, and academically diverse educational settings. She is associated with the development and application of interactional ethnography, a methodological and theoretical approach grounded in sociolinguistics and interactional theories of culture.
Her work uses this approach to examine how learning opportunities emerge through everyday classroom interaction and how institutional and social practices shape access to participation and learning.
A central focus of her scholarship investigates classroom discourse, multimodal communication, and the ways meaning is constructed over time across lessons and activity cycles.
Selected publications
Green, Judith L.; Wallat, Cynthia, eds. (1981). Ethnography and language in educational settings. Advances in discourse processes. Norwood, N.J: ABLEX. ISBN978-0-89391-035-8.