Deborah Wells Rowe

Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education

Ph.D., Indiana University, 1986

Joined faculty in 1986

In her research, Deborah Rowe conducts long-term ethnographic studies in classrooms aimed at understanding how everyday interactions with teachers, parents, peers, and community members affect what children learn about literacy and how they learn it. This work examines the interplay between culture and the individual. She analyzes the ways children and adults negotiate cultural expectations about what counts as reading and writing for young children and what kinds of learning-to-write/read activities are offered to them at school. At the same time, she explores how children's personal interests and learning strategies shape their choices of activities and participation in writing and reading.

In 2010, she received the International Reading Association's Dina Feitelson Research Award for her article "The social construction of intentionality: Two-year-olds' and adults' participation at a preschool writing center" (2008, Research in the Teaching of English). This award recognizes an outstanding empirical investigation of literacy acquisition.

Rowe is currently serving as co-PI, with David Dickinson, of a three year Early Reading First project, "Enhanced Language and Literacy Success." This work is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education. She and her colleagues are working with teachers and children in 13 public school prekindergarten classrooms to create preschool centers of excellence for literacy instruction, with a special focus on literature-based conceptual learning, emergent writing, and supports for English language learners. As part of this project, she spent a year working at the writing table in one classroom where all the children were English learners. The focus of this project was to observe how children drew on their home language and other communication resources as they learned to write and speak English, and also to track the nature of their interactions with teachers in an English dominant environment. Another current project, involves analysis of data collected in the Write Start! project - a three year longitudinal, mixed methods study of 2- to 5-year-old's writing in two urban childcare centers.

Rowe is currently serving as a co-editor of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and was previously co-editor of the Yearbook of the National Reading Conference. She is a fellow of the National Conference on Language and Literacy and has served as secretary of that organization.

She is the author of a book, Preschoolers as Authors: Literacy Learning in the Social World of the Classroom, and of numerous chapters and research articles published in venues including Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, Language Arts, the Handbook of Writing Development and the Handbook of Research on Writing.

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