2024 New Faculty Hires
Patricia Buenrostro, Assistant Professor, Curriculum and Instruction Heading link
Patty Buenrostro (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at UIC. As a native Chicagoan and former secondary mathematics educator, coach and professional development provider for over 20 years, she has collaborated to create counter-cultural spaces that support Black and Latiné students’ positive academic, cultural and political identities. These experiences shape her research interests: student-teacher relationality, teachers’ orientations towards developing students’ collective consciousness, and justice-oriented pedagogies. She is a member of the Sustainable Community Schools’ Taskforce, a joint endeavor between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers’ Union, supporting the development of strong, neighborhood schools in the most under-resourced communities.
Esther Lindström, Associate Professor, Special Education Heading link
Esther Lindström (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education at UIC. Her research focuses on examining and improving instructional practices for students with disabilities, in particular those with extensive support needs. Dr. Lindström is principal investigator on research grants from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the Autism Science Foundation addressing the role of teachers’ knowledge, perceptions, and expectations for reading in their instruction of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Dr. Lindström is associate editor for Assessment for Effective Intervention and an editorial board member for Learning Disability Quarterly and Intervention in School and Clinic.
Rachel Schachter, Associate Professor, Educational Psychology Heading link
Dr. Schachter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at UIC. Her research focuses on understanding teachers’ experiences and how to build from these experiences to bring about meaningful changes in literacy practices and improved reading outcomes for children. Dr. Schachter’s recent research has investigated teachers’ perceptions of instructional supports such as curricula and assessments, the role of coaching in supporting practices, as well as early childhood teachers’ pedagogical reasoning about literacy instruction. She has secured over $9 million in external grants as either PI or Co-I and her work has been published in journals such as Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Harvard Educational Review, Young Children, Early Education and Development, and Reading Research Quarterly. Dr. Schachter received her Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her Ph.D. from the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan and was an Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Ohio State University.