Professional Biography
Dr. JeanMarie Farrow is a postdoctoral fellow in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division. Her fellowship includes working very closely with Dr. Sarah Kavanaugh in exploring Project Based Learning teacher practices as foundational for supporting student-centered and inclusive classrooms.
JeanMarie received her Ph.D. in 2019 with a concentration in Literacy and Learners at Temple University, Philadelphia. Her doctoral research focused on teachers’ supports of early writing components in prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms serving children from impoverished communities. Her research included developing a frame of specific language supports connected to early child writing development.
She has worked and is currently working on research with Temple’s Family, School, and Community Lab. She recently received the 2019 Student Vocabulary Research Award, American Education Research Association Vocabulary SIG.
JeanMarie is an experienced practitioner with over 10 years of teaching experience at the middle school level. She has taught English Language Arts to adolescents and received the distinguished Teacher of the Year Award in 2018 within her district for her dedication to and support of her students. Additionally, as a first-generation college graduate herself, JeanMarie was a part of an outreach program at a local urban community college in which she taught introductory courses in academic reading and writing for students aspiring toward higher education opportunities.
JeanMarie is interested in exploring intersections between classroom practices and student cultures, understanding that students’ beliefs and experiences are an intricate part of the dynamic of the classroom. Quality can only be defined with consideration to and respect of students’ backgrounds.
As part of the Project Based Learning research team, Dr. Farrow leads the quantitative analyses, investigating relationships of teachers’ core PBL practices to better support and enhance teachers’ learning in ways that lead to challenging classrooms that promote student learning, analysis of critical problems facing our world, and connections between students’ identity and societal purposes.
Another facet of her research centers on language. JeanMarie has a deep appreciation for the role of language in the human experience, as well as in the process of learning to read and write, and she is particularly interested in researching interventions that help nurture and develop children’s foundational oral language skills necessary to later literacy. Past research in this area included exploring features of teacher and child interactions in early childhood settings and their relationships to child language outcomes. In one important study, Dr. Farrow and colleagues found that teachers of color had more challenging complex syntax in their interactions with children of color in high poverty schools, and that this challenging talk was significantly related to child vocabulary gains. She continues to explore aspects of language through a sociocultural lens to understand its role in literacy development.
