News

Through a combination of project-based learning and strong mentoring, from both professionals and university students, Project POEM prepares visually impaired students for STEM fields, where they are sorely underrepresented.

Dr. Kortenkamp, astronomer, is pictured here leading an exercise that creates a solar system model. Each participant represents a planet and walks away from the stationary sun to demonstrate the order of the...

In order to make classroom experiences successful in interesting youth in STEM careers, students must be able to view the content as personally meaningful and connect it to real-world concerns. Developing a sense of purpose may increase students’ motivation to learn by helping them to see how the knowledge they gain in school will be useful in the future to make an impact in the community. Lia Falco, in...

The Common Core State Standards and their variations influence K-12 curriculum, particularly in the teaching of literacy, across the U.S. and internationally. Funded by the UA’s language resource center CERCLL, Kathy Short worked with the Common Core State Standards exemplar list to pair those recommendations with global fiction and nonfiction. Short also found...

We often think shouting is the way to get our voice to carry, but evidence of whistle languages around the globe prove otherwise. Whistle languages were developed specifically for the efficiency of communication between people over distance. On the island of La Gomera, one of the smallest of the Canary Islands, ‘el silbo’ is one such ancient whistling language. A large community used ‘el silbo’ to get sometimes-urgent messages across the...

The Center on Literacy and Deafness is a multi-university Center funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences. The UA research team includes Shirin D. Antia, M. Christina Rivera, Jennifer Catalano, and Janna Dunagan. Their collaborations work toward the identification of instructional variables that influence Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children's learning of...

As powerful geographic information systems and technologies revolutionize planning and operations in the military, the University of Arizona has launched a project to encourage ROTC students and student veterans to pursue careers as scientists and engineers with the U.S. Navy. Led by the College of Education's Sara Chavarria, an interdisciplinary team has launched "NAVy Intelligence through Geospatial Applications and TEchnology," or NAVIGATE...

What if the arid southwest could yield crops that were profitable and drought friendly? The College of Education’s Sara Chavarria is collaborating on the Sustainable Bioeconomy for Arid Regions (SBAR) project led by University of Arizona professor Kim Ogden on the mass production of new biofuels and bioproducts in the Southwestern U.S.  The five-year grant of up to $15 million from the U.S. Department of...

The Indigenous Teacher Education Project (ITEP) is a 4-year project in partnership with the Gila River Indian Community, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Tohono O'odham Nation, and Tucson Unified School District to strengthen the learning experiences of indigenous students by addressing the need to increase the number of Indigenous teachers serving Indigenous students, schools, and communities. The project is led...

In this study, Blaine Smith closely examines 10th-grade students as they collaboratively create multimodal projects connected to literature in multilingual ELA classes. Findings from this project will advance the field in understanding how students’ literacy-learning is revealed, and how it travels and transforms across different modalities in digital environments. The outcome will also aid English...

DeMarcus Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies & Practice, is the principal investigator on a new project supported by the Smith Jr. Faculty Award which explores Black students experiences in predominately Latinx schools. Students are constantly bombarded with messages about race and other aspect of their identity (e.g. socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and many others) from a variety of...