Faculty Profiles

Dr. Jenifer Jasinski Schneider

INTERIM DEAN &
Professor, literacy studies

Schneider headshot

Email: jschneid@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Jenifer Jasinski Schneider received her Ph.D. in Language, Literature, and Reading Education from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on children’s composing processes and arts-based approaches to literacy education in which aspects of process drama and children’s literature support students' symbolic development and meaning-making strategies. She also examines the ways in which digital tools affect literate practices.

Through community-engaged projects, and working within designed field experiments, Dr. Schneider’s research addresses the changing set of strategies that students use to compose and communicate through print-based and multimodal texts. As a former Fulbright Scholar in Ireland, Dr. Schneider’s research also includes the study of Irish children’s literature and reading programs, an exploration of family literacy initiatives across different Irish community contexts, and the examination of adult further education and digital literacy training models at the Waterford Institute of Technology.

Dr. Schneider served as the Director of the Suncoast Young Authors Celebration for 20 years, and she is the author of the open-access digital textbook, The Inside, Outside, and Upside Downs of Children’s Literature (USF Scholar Commons). She currently serves on the Board of the Hillsborough Literacy Council.

Areas of expertise:

  • Developing K-12 Students’ Writing Strategies and Written Products
  • Spelling Development and Teaching Strategies
  • Spelling Practice and Tips for Families
  • Children’s Literature
    • Picture books and wordless books to teach writing strategies and develop genre knowledge
    • Using informational texts to integrate disciplinary content
    • Reading strategies for pop-up books and graphic novels
    • Connecting with authors and illustrators
    • Poetry reading for imagery and fluency
  • Visual literacy and movie making with students (writing, fluency)
  • Online Strategies for Teaching Literacy to Children and Adults