Susan R. Easterbrooks is Professor of Educational Psychology and Special Education at Georgia State University, and head of its Deaf Education program that trains teachers and doctoral students. She is also a core faculty member of the National Leadership Consortium in Sensory disabilities, and Co-Principal Investigator of the National Research and Development Center for Literacy and Deafness, a $10 million project of the Institute for Education Sciences. She is the author of three books and five chapters in deaf education, and has over 45 articles published in the field. She has worked with student teachers for over 25 years. Jennifer Beal-Avarez is the School Improvement Grant Coordinator at the Georgia School for the Deaf. She worked for six years as an itinerant teacher of the deaf with students in pre-k through high school, four years as an early interventionist with the Georgia Parent Infant Network for Educational Services, and two years as a research teacher with an emergent literacy curriculum developed at Georgia State University. She is a member of the Association of College Educators-Deaf/Hard of Hearing and the Georgia Pathway to Language and Literacy online community of practice.
Regardless of how you read, and what you want to read for, I strongly encourage you to consider reading <em>Literacy Instruction</em>. The content of this volume appropriately addresses the complexity of learning to read, and by extension, of teaching students how to read... <em>Literacy Instruction</em> covers a lot of ground in less than 300 pages, for which the authors are to be commended... One of the most significant contributions researchers can make to the field is to empower students, parents, and teachers to make transparent the evidence base for educational practices for students who are deaf and hard of hearing. I am grateful to the authors of <em>Literacy Instruction</em> for pointing us toward that larger dialogue. -- Stephanie W. Cawthon, <em>American Annals of the Deaf</em>