Catherine Main developed and administers the Blended Early Childhood/Early Childhood Special Education Program, which prepares teachers to work with all children regardless of ability and ages birth to 8 years of age, and the Early Childhood Early Certification Program. She primarily provides in-school instruction for teacher candidates. She teaches courses that emphasize collaborating with families, community members, and professionals for early childhood and special education, teaches primary grade methods courses and student teaching seminars in early childhood education.

Dr. Majors is a former National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research focuses on adolescent and adult literacy, curriculum design and instruction, and multicultural education. She publishes in various journals.

Jeannette's research interest is the language and literacy development of 'at-risk' populations, including students who struggle with reading, immigrant children, and language minority learners.  She has extensive experience with very young children's language development, as well as older students' reading development.

Taking a somewhat non-traditional route to academia, I arrived at UIC in Fall 2004 after teaching mathematics courses ranging from algebra to differential equations for 15 years in a California community college.  At UIC, I hold a joint appointment in education and mathematics and I teach mathematics courses for preservice teachers, elementary math methods, and graduate courses in mathematics education. Then, and now, my research has focused on mathematics education for African American learners and undertaking critical analyses of mathematics education policy to insure that mathematics education is responsive to the needs of these learners. My empirical studies have focused on understanding the salience of race and identity in African American struggle for mathematics literacy. My research takes into account sociohistorical, community, and school forces and draws from culture-practice theory, cultural-ecological theory, critical theories of race, and racial identity development theory. I am currently developing a perspective that frames mathematics learning and participation as racialized forms of experience. This perspective is applicable to all students. You can read about my early work in Mathematics Success and Failure Among African American Youth and my evolving perspective in Mathematics Teaching, Learning, and Liberation in the Lives of Black Children.

Dr. Mayrowetz studies the ways in which organizational and institutional factors influence the creation and implementation of educational reforms. While the reforms that he explores are varied, ranging from attempts to change mathematics instruction to the development of "distributed leadership" in schools, to the placement of students with special needs in general education classrooms, one of the recurring motifs in his work is the effects that changes in general education have for special education students and programs and vice versa.

Dr. Mayrowetz regularly teaches courses on educational policy and education and the law. While at UIC, he also has taught classes on case study research, instructional reform, the foundations of educational administration, and decision making for school leaders.

Dr. Miller's research focuses on the diversity of school districts in the USA through an ecoevolutionary approach to organizations. He studies how the variability in organizational structures of school districts impact curriculum management, especially science curriculum and in particular how district central offices support elementary science teaching through such structures as K-12 departments. He is currently investigating the impact of NCLB on elementary science teaching.

Dr. Miller currently teaches research methods at the graduate level. For undergraduates, teaches courses on education foundations.

My teaching and research interests are largely focused on teacher education and the construction of teacher practice. I am particularly interested in beginning science teachers as they learn to teach in the context of their own classrooms. It is during this induction phase of professional development when new teachers work at connecting knowledge from their formal preparation with knowledge from their teaching experiences.

Beginning teachers learn a great deal in their own classrooms interacting with a diverse student body and wide array of learners. In schools, teachers work at crafting a teaching practice in relation to their students, the school culture and the local community. It is through professional knowledge gleaned from practice that teachers learn to enact "a philosophy of hope and opportunity" that nurtures all students as capable and successful learners.

At present, the profession largely ignores the importance of practice knowledge in crafting teacher identity, and fueling career-long professional learning. My interests focus on exploring practice-based learning opportunities within teacher education, and how this conception of professional knowledge differs from -- and complements -- professional knowledge learned in formal teacher preparation, including university coursework and application-oriented field experiences.

My program of research focuses on scoring issues in performance and portfolio assessments. I have conducted studies related to training raters, designing scoring rubrics, quality control monitoring, improving rater performance, detecting different types of rater errors, devising statistical indicators of rater drift, and understanding rater cognitive processes that underlie unusual or discrepant rating patterns. I have devised rating scales to evaluate complex performances and products, and I have analyzed rating data using partial-credit and many-facet item response theory (IRT) models. My work blends qualitative and quantitative approaches to examining rating processes, illustrating how the interplay of statistical and qualitative analyses can help one develop, monitor, and continually improve large-scale performance and portfolio assessment systems.