RACIAL AND SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION

MARYLAND INITIATIVE FOR LITERACY & EQUITY (MILE)

AFRICA THROUGH LANGUAGE AND AREA STUDIES (ATLAS)

Through their Team Project Award, Miranda Abadir from the UMD National Foreign Language Center and Assistant Professor Matthew Thomann of the Department of Anthropology will create a website, called ATLAS, which will increase the understanding of the African continent and its growing global influence. ATLAS will reduce disparities in representation, increase the prominence of African and African American topics of study and encourage more scholarship on Africa by centralizing all UMD research, scholarship, courses, events and student groups focused on Africa.

ATLAS will also host a monthly lecture series and an annual conference on the study of Africa, bringing together interested faculty, staff and students and attracting African thought leaders and scholars to engage with the UMD community.

An Institutional Grant was awarded to Associate Professor Donald Bolger of the College of Education and a team of faculty across campus—including Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) faculty members. These HESP faculty (pictured clockwise) are: Professor and Chair Rochelle Newman, Professor Nan Bernstein Ratner, Assistant Clinical Professor Eliza Thompson, and Clinical Assistant Professor José Ortiz, who is also Director of the LanguageLearning Early Advantage Program.

The researchers aim to increase literacy and shrink achievement gaps in schools. They will use cutting-edge models of professional development and community outreach to transform and integrate practices in education, speech pathology, library sciences, and parent/family engagement. They will contextualize their findings with respect to marginalized communities across race, culture, ethnicity, and language, as well as neurodiverse populations.