Meet the new faculty members who joined the College of Education this fall.
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores is an assistant professor of curriculum studies and teacher education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Fúnez-Flores received his Ph.D. in curriculum studies from Purdue University. Broadly, his research is situated at the intersections of sociocultural studies in education, curriculum studies, decolonial theory and qualitative methodology. Through critical ethnography, he analyzes and interprets the curricular and pedagogical implications of activist spaces and student movements.
In recognition of his potential contribution to educational ethnographic research, he was awarded the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Minority Dissertation Fellowship. Fúnez-Flores's ongoing research projects are centered on decolonial studies in education, the ontological turn in social and cultural theory and critical hermeneutics.
Catherine Lammert is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education. Since 2021, she has served as anchor faculty in undergraduate literacy teacher education in the College of Education. Broadly, her research focuses on the uses of field-based experiences, practice-based research and interdisciplinary approaches to cultivate literacy preservice teacher adaptiveness.
In 2020, she received the Dissertation Award for Literacy Excellence from the Research in Reading & Literacy Special Interest Group of AERA for her study, "Inquiry, Advocacy, and Practice-Based Research: Transformative Possibilities in Literacy Preservice Teacher Education." Lammert's current research focuses on the ways discourse analysis and topic modeling can support the development of new instrumentation to measure teacher adaptiveness, particularly in relation to preservice literacy teachers' selection of texts for teaching reading.
Cecil R. Short is an assistant professor of practice of blended and personalized learning in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. His research primarily focuses on the skills, knowledge and dispositions needed to adopt blended and personalized learning in K-12 contexts. His interest in blended learning research stems from his own experiences using blended learning as a high school English teacher in Missouri.
Short has served as the co-chair of the K-12 Online Learning Special Interest Group for the Society of Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), as well as the Vice President of Communications for the Teacher Education Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). He was also a guest editor for the 2021 special issue of TechTrends, which focused on P-12 Distance and Blended Learning. He is on the editorial board for a new AECT journal in the field of educational technology called the Journal of Technology Integrated Learning and Teaching.
During the 2020-2021 academic year, Short was awarded the Smaldino and Herring Teacher Leadership Award by the Teacher Education Division of AECT and the Promising Scholar Award by the Journal of Online Learning Research. He also recently received the 2021 Open Education Award from Texas Tech University Libraries. Short is co-author of the highly rated and widely used "K-12 Blended Teaching: A Guide to Personalized Learning and Online Integration."
Other appointments
The Department of Teacher Education also welcomed six part-time literacy lecturers:
- Larry Frier, assistant principal at Austin Independent School District (ISD)
- Tabitha Coffman, principal at Meadow ISD
- Shannon Treadwell, instructional specialist at Southwest Regional Education Cooperative in Deming, New Mexico
- Meredith Jones, dyslexia therapist at Lubbock Cooper ISD
- Jamye Osuna, former literacy instructional coach at Lubbock ISD
- Kally Beatty, site coordinator at Texas Tech's Department of Teacher Education