Nevada Silver and Blue - University of Nevada, Reno

Student Body
College of Education leads
Literacy Studies
Teaching children to read can be a daunting task. Luckily, budding readers are
getting top-quality support from faculty at the University of Nevada.
The overarching, three-decades-running mission
embraced by five professors in the university’s
College of Education, as part of a nationally
recognized Literacy Studies team, has helped
Nevada become a U.S. leader in reading education
and undergraduate teacher preparation. Now, those
efforts have helped play a key role in bringing 16,000 of the
nation’s teachers to Reno this spring.
From May 2-6, the International Reading Association,
with a general session of 10,000-plus, will convene in
northern Nevada for its 49th annual convention at the
Reno-Sparks Convention Center. Literacy Studies team
member Diane Barone, past editor of the premier research
journal in the field, Reading Research Quarterly, will be a
featured speaker on early literacy.
“It is amazing that we attracted it here,” she
says, noting that IRA officials moved the
convention from Toronto. “It is just a huge,
huge event.”
The National Commission on Excellence in
Elementary Teacher Preparation for Reading
Instruction, in an IRA-authorized study,
recognized Nevada as one of eight U.S.
higher education institutions with
exemplary credentials for preparing
reading teachers. The report praised the
university, which has been leading a
three-year, statewide $26 million
Nevada Reading Excellence Act grant,
for its ability to develop highly
appropriate field experiences in the
schools for its undergraduate education
students.
Barone, local convention chair, says
fellow speaker Nevada Gov. Kenny
Ginny Holmes, Jan Rumball, Robin
Kauffmann, Patricia Franklin, Lisa Keilty,
Kim Warren and Kelley Clare were among
14 students in the first group to receive
the university’s new master of education
degree in literacy studies Dec. 6.
16 Nevada Silver & Blue • March/April 2004
By Pat McDonnell
Guinn will kick off a busy program. IRA president-elect
Richard Allington of the University of Florida and University
of Illinois at Chicago researcher Taffy Raphael, National
Reading Conference past president and IRA teacher
education award-winner, are also convention speakers.
In preparing learners for life experiences through their
reading, the team of Barone and Literacy Studies colleagues
Cindy Brock, Shane Templeton, Donald Bear, and Julie
Pennington, employs a variety of techniques that translate
extraordinarily well to both classroom and one-on-one
tutoring environments.
Elementary school children participate in highly specialized
reading programs at the college’s E.L. Cord Foundation
Center for Learning and Literacy. Bear, the center’s
director, said research-based assessments, such as the