College initiates Fien Lecture Series as part of search for endowed chair
As part of its centennial year celebrations and in conjunction with its search for the Fien Professorship in Education, the College of Education at the University of Florida is sponsoring a three-part lecture series designed to help keep UF connected to outstanding scholars in the field. The Fien Lecture Series will get under way with a talk by Robert Jiménez at 3 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 26, in the College of Education Terrace Room in Norman Hall.
Jiménez is professor of language, literacy and culture in Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. His research has focused on the strategic processing of competent and less competent bilingual readers and on the delivery of services and language instruction to minority students at risk for referral to special education and those with learning disabilities. More recently, Jiménez has turned his research focus to an ecological framework to examine the literacy of linguistically diverse students.
In his talk in January, Jiménez will present his latest research on Mexican literacy practices. “Literacies Within and Without Mexico” takes a look at contemporary Mexican literacy practices as a consequence of both historical and globalizing influences of people’s thinking about, and uses of, written language in Central Mexico. Jiménez has published his work in several journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, Elementary School Journal, Reading Research Quarterly, The Reading Teacher and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
Established in 1998, the Fien Professorship in Education was made possible in part through a $600,000 donation from businessman and philanthropist Irving Fien. The College of Education combined Fien’s gift with $420,000 in state matching funds to create a $1.02 million permanent endowment for the Irving and Rose Fien Professorship in Education. Richard Allington, the first recipient of the Fien Professorship, joined the College in 2000. The chair opened up when Allington left the College for the University of Tennessee in 2004.
“This lecture series is a wonderful and exciting opportunity for our students and faculty to meet prominent leaders in different fields of inquiry and to hear firsthand about research from top scholars,” College of Education Dean Catherine Emihovich says.
The other two speakers in the series are Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Luis Moll, professor of language, reading and culture in the College of Education at the University of Arizona. Ladson-Billings is scheduled to speak on Friday, Feb. 17, 2006; and Moll, on Monday, March 6, 2006.
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Joy L. Rodgers, jrodgers@coe.ufl.edu, (352) 392-0726, ext. 274
