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Director

Francie Alexander is an industry leader in the fields of Early Childhood Education, Literacy, and Intensive Intervention for striving reading and math students. Francie provides inspirational and informative leadership on topics from early and adolescent learning to brain development and its influence on childhood and teenage learning. She works closely to listen to and learn from key school districts across the U.S. in order to lead Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s efficacy efforts.

Director

Gina Cervetti (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an associate professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at University of Michigan’s School of Education. The focus of Gina’s work is on science as a context for language and literacy development and, in particular, on how students can build knowledge and language to support future reading through their experiences in content-rich, inquiry-based science instruction. Gina is also involved in work on academic discourse and vocabulary acquisition in science and on how curriculum materials can best support teachers’ practice and teacher learning. Following her doctoral work in educational psychology at Michigan State University, Gina worked for several years as a postdoctoral scholar and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, on the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading (Seeds/Roots) program. Gina led the literacy team in its conceptualization and development of integrated science-literacy curriculum units for students in grades 2-5.

TextProject’s Board Director P. David Pearson is the co-principal investigator for Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading and a faculty member in the Language and Literacy Program at University of California, Berkeley, where he served as Dean from 2001-2010.