Research
Literacy Coaching and Reflective Practice
Students attending either the UB Center or affiliated school sites often arrive 2-3 grade levels below their current grade in the areas of reading and/or writing. Center teachers, who are graduate students in the Literacy Specialist Ed.M. program, identify students' needs in these areas through the process of a diagnostic evaluation. Working with university faculty, the Center teachers decide specific reading and writing skills to be targeted, provide instruction, and prepare a plan for instruction. As a result, we have found that children may show gains anywhere from 1 to 3 grade levels. This process is helpful to the child’s parents and school professionals as well.
Video Case Studies of Reflective Practice and Literacy Coaching
Center teachers record their work with children while teaching through the use of digital technologies. Videos help teachers reflect on their own teaching and the children’s learning to see which aspects of instruction worked or didn’t, to observe a child’s body language, response time and other factors associated with reading and writing. As teachers observe their instruction, using video allows them to do the "reflective piece" of teaching. That is, videos provide time and opportunity to review and revise instruction, and ultimately, to make positive changes in the child’s reading and writing development. We are studying these reflective teaching practices in order to facilitate more effective education for literacy teachers and coaches and more effective teaching for children.
Multimodal Literacies
Multimodal literacy practices refer to the ways that literacy practices draw from multiple systems of making meaning. Traditionally, schools have privileged literacy practices based primarily upon linguistic systems such as traditional forms of reading and writing. However, learners always experience the world multimodally—through audio, visual, gestural, and linguistic modes. The availability of new technologies has precipitated new interest in multiliteracies and alternatives to print-based forms that have traditionally dominated schooling. Progress in digital technology affords opportunity for learners to draw together multiple modes (sound, image, movement, color, etc.). Although new technologies often highlight the combination of modes, new technologies are not essential for teaching multimodal literacy practices. In our current research on literacy and multimodality we investigate the ways that multimodality (whether digital or embodied in the real world), has influence the sociocultural and cognitive worlds of children, youth, teachers, and teachers-in-training. You can also read more about multimodal literacy research at the University at Buffalo New Literacies Group website.
Literacy and Cultural Diversity
We are passionately committed to education for all children from diverse socioeconomic, linguistic, sociocultural, religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. In particular, we are interested in exploring ways that children who at risk of being marginalized or disregarded by schools can become successful academic learners while maintaining their core identities. Our research focuses on how to better serve children who are considered at risk of school failure and how we can effectively instruct and improve their reading and writing ability. We also focus on teachers and how we might effectively prepare teachers to improve children's reading and writing ability. This focus on effective instruction is linked to increasing teachers' awareness of children's cultural worlds and identities so that teachers learn to draw from these backgrounds not as differences to be compensated for but strengths to be incorporated into effective instruction.
Faculty Research Pages
Coming Soon...