New Faculty

The UCI School of Education is pleased to welcome two new professors to its diverse and internationally recognized faculty.

Michael Hebert

Dr. Michael Hebert is an associate professor in the UCI School of Education and the director of the UCI Writing Project. His primary research interests include the impacts of writing on reading, writing assessment and the development of writing interventions. Dr. Hebert has more than 45 publications, including two influential Carnegie Corporation reports: Writing to Read and Informing Writing. He is also the co-editor of the third edition of Best Practices in Writing Instruction. He has received more than $9 million in grant funding, including a new 2022 Pandemic Recovery grant from the Institute of Education Sciences to test a professional development intervention to enhance reading achievement for rural students in Nebraska. He also received one of the first Early Career and Mentoring Program awards from the National Center for Special Education Research in 2013. He currently serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Educational Psychology. Dr. Hebert was previously a classroom teacher and reading specialist in schools in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, California and the Navajo Nation.

Symone Gyles

Dr. Symone Gyles will join the UCI School of Education in Fall 2023 as an assistant professor. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Goodlad Institute for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington, Bothell. She earned her Ph.D. in Urban Schooling from UCLA. Informed by her experiences as a Black marine scientist and middle school science teacher, Dr. Gyles’ research agenda examines the redesign of the K-12 science curriculum to contextualize learning in the local community, and position student and family community and cultural wealth as valid sources of knowledge in science classrooms. Her work seeks to redefine ideas of who holds scientific knowledge, what is considered scientific knowledge, and who is seen as a science expert. She has published on researcher-teacher collaborations to promote science agency among students and educators, and has upcoming publications examining the restructuring of power through community-based science practices, and the use of communitybased framing to support the teacher production of Next Generation Science Standards-aligned phenomenological framing.