Deborah Rowe

Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education

Ph.D., Indiana University, 1986

Joined faculty in 1986

Research Area

Deborah Rowe’s research focuses on understanding how preschool and elementary children learn to read and write in classroom settings. She is interested in preschoolers’ writing and book-related play, multimodal literacy, and cultural, embodied and spatial aspects of literacy learning in classrooms. She has also worked collaboratively with preschool and early grades teachers to develop and study curricula that incorporate drama, dramatic play, and writing as important features of literacy instruction.

Short Biography

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.

Rowe’s current research focuses on preschool writing. Along with her co-PI and Vanderbilt colleague, Carin Neitzel, Ph.D., she is collecting data in the third year of the Write Start Project! – a longitudinal, mixed methods study of 2- to 5-year-old’s writing in two urban childcare centers. For this project, Rowe and research assistants, Kirsten Suer, Emily Bigelow, Sue Ganguly, and Jessica Waugh have collected ethnographic data tracking the preschool writing experiences of 2 cohorts of children across 2 or 3 school years. Co-PI Neitzel has collected systematic, time sampled observations of children’s play in the study classrooms. Working with classroom teachers, Rowe and her colleagues have increased the variety of opportunities for writing in the Write Start! classrooms, and are observing how children’s personal interests affect their choices of activities and ways of participating in writing. The goals of this ongoing project are to increase basic knowledge of very young children’s writing, the ways their patterns of personal interest affect their play and learning at preschool, and to test the impact of different kinds of play-based writing activities on literacy learning through a design experiment. As this work is completed, findings will be used to make instructional recommendations for incorporating writing into preschool literacy curricula.

In addition to her ongoing research, Rowe has previously completed 4 year-long ethnographic studies of early literacy learning with children ranging in ages from 2 years to 5th grade. Research topics have included elementary students’ responses to anchored instruction using film and their uses of drama and dramatic play to compose text. In two previous preschool studies, she focused on 2-4year-olds’ writing.

In addition to these field studies, Rowe has pursued her interest in multimodal, spatial and embodied features of classroom interaction in the "Talking Spaces" project with her colleague, Kevin Leander,Ph.D., and graduate students, Daneell Edwards, LeAnn Seifert and Shelene Waters. This project focused on reviewing cross-disciplinary approaches to analyzing the spatial and embodied aspects of human interaction, and applying them to the analysis of literacy events.

Deborah Rowe is currently serving as a co-editor of the Yearbook of the National Reading Conference and the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. 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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