HDLS Homepage                                   Contact  Susan                         Return to Members Homepage

Susan Metheny Ph.D. Student,  Educational Linguistics Program Coordinator, CEMELA, 2007 Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies University of New Mexico 87131 susanwm@unm.edu natemaol@unm.edu

The focus of my Ph.D. work is developing a way to evaluate the language of alternative assessment frameworks for children who come from other than mainstream American cultures (Native American children and immigrant children, for example). There is recent evidence that many of these children are being over-evaluated for special education services, and I believe that the assessments used in the evaluations are culturally skewed to reflect deficiencies among these children, so I am working on adapting a visuo-spatial assessment tool to be interpreted in a way that includes metaphor theory to reflect verbal and non-verbal language assessment. I believe that exploring the language of mathematics instruction and development might be helpful to me as I search for an observable and interpretable link between visuo-spatial and verbal language assessment.   The title of my Master’s thesis was: Learning to Label: How Is Special Education Categorization Making it Harder for Kids to Fit In?