Cool Friend: Steph Brunner
Cool Thing(s): Spanish Individual Growth and Development Indicators Project and Family Academy
I have known Steph Brunner since 7th grade. She was one of those friends I could always talk to about anything. Like many of my friends from middle school, she was actively involved both in and out of school, and fully invested herself in anything she took on. Two of the teachers she mentions in this interview have instilled in both of us (and many of our peers) a knack for travel and learning about the world around us, from soul and language to culture and geography.
Steph finished her undergraduate degree at Penn State in 2012, and immediately went on to grad school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She hopes to obtain her MA in 2013 and PhD in 2017, both in Educational Psychology with an emphasis in School Psychology. The PhD program is 4 years of coursework (first two years correspond to the master's) and a 1-year internship.
I told Steph I was interested in her research because it involves working with Spanish-speaking children in the United States. I have now spent a year at my first job, where I speak Spanish to both children and adults every day. I realize how challenging English can be for them, just as any foreign language is challenging for most of us.
Floccadelphia: Tell me about the research that you're doing while in grad school.
Steph: The research job that pays my tuition is called the Spanish Individual Growth and Development Indicators (S-IGDI) project. Our research team is working to develop an assessment that measures the early literacy skills of Spanish-English bilingual preschool students. There's a really strong need for an assessment like this, as the Latino population continues to grow and Latino children are the most likely of any ethnic group to lack proficiency in reading on state testing throughout their whole academic career. Also, research has shown that L1 skills (for these kids, L1 is Spanish) transfer to support L2 learning (in this case, L2 is English). If a child is struggling to develop good L1 skills, that obviously makes it even harder for them to develop proficiency in L2. When our assessment is finished in 2016, preschool teachers will be able to use it in conjunction with early literacy assessments in English to track preschoolers' progress in BOTH languages. If the assessment results show that a child is not making enough progress throughout the preschool year, then the teacher can provide intervention services to help that child improve his/her skills in both languages. Basically, the goal is to catch the children who are struggling to develop good early literacy skills early in life and intervene so they are more likely to be on track to become good readers once they get to kindergarten.
Floccadelphia: Where did you develop your interests for Spanish, psychology, and working with children?
Steph: My interested in Spanish originated with Sra. [Loraine] Kovary! She made me love Spanish language and culture so much that I actually entered freshman year as a World Languages Ed major, thinking that I wanted to become a Spanish teachers just like her! OF course, I ended up switching my major to psych, but kept up with my Spanish by getting a minor and by studying abroad.
I've known that I wanted to work with kids since about 2nd grade. When cleaning out my closet last summer before moving to Minnesota, I found lots of old diaries that I kept as a kid. Some of the entries (as a 7 year old) talked about how, when I grew up, I wanted to help kids get smart and love learning. I'm pretty nerdy.
My interest in psych started when I took AP Psychology senior year with Mrs. [Kathy] Hagee It's easy to identify with what psychology is all about because studying it gives you research-based answers for a lot of things that you already believe are true just because you're human. My interest in school psych specifically came about from talking with my mom. She's a speech pathologist for the Wilson School District and interacts a lot with school psychologists. She thought it would be a good fit for me, so I checked it out and talked to some professors and here I am!
Floccadelphia: Is there anything else that you're working on?
Steph: I also do research for a parent education program called Family Academy. This program is for parents in North Minneapolis (where one of the largest achievement gaps in the whole nation exists) and teachers them skills that will help support their children's development. Our belief is that that parents are children's first teachers, and if they can be a source of warmth and support and education early in children's lives, their children are more likely to be ready for kindergarten and to succeed academically, grow up to be contributing members of society, etc. Kids in North Minneapolis, like in many other poor urban areas, are especially at risk for school failure, delinquency, violence, etc. Family Academy is just one way that we are trying to improve lives of kids in the area. Unfortunately, recruiting parents to participate in Family Academy has been really hard, so I've been doing some research about the best ways to motivate families to attend the program. The jury's still out on this one (my research isn't done until the end of the fall), but this is important to consider because if we can't get parents to come t the program, how can we expect North Minneapolis kids to reap the benefits?
