News

Professor and Worlds of Words Director Kathy Short was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame. Congratulations!

Forbes Magazine recognizes UA as one of the best employers in Arizona. Employees like Rebecca Ballenger have something to do with it. Ballenger, Associate Director for Worlds of Words, inspires creativity and deep thought in her approach with students and interns. She goes beyond that by building relevant experiences for local school groups visiting the world-renowned international literature collection, as well as hosting workshops for...

Professor Sheri Bauman was quoted in July’s Time magazine article, Inside Instagram’s War on Bullying. An expert on bullying, Bauman calls Instagram a “one-stop shop for the bully” because everything they need is there: an audience, anonymity, an emphasis on appearances, and channels that range from public feeds to behind-the-back group chats. Instagram executives are introducing comment warning, using AI to detect even borderline comments,...

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...