Sabiha Sultana, a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Education was awarded the 2023 James D. and Carol N. Dixon Fellowship. This fellowship supports MA or Ph.D. students with a focus on reading studies and/or the broader field of literacy studies. There is a selection preference for Education Department students involved in Reading Clinic activities.
Sabiha’s research focuses on critical reading assessments, under the guidance of Dr. Diana J. Arya and Dr. Andrew Maul. She earned her B.Ed. (Honors) from University of Dhaka in Language Education and later received her M.Ed. in Bilingual/English as a Second Language/Multicultural concentration from University of Massachusetts, Amherst as a Fulbright scholar. Being an education civil servant, she served as a faculty of education at the Government Teachers’ Training College Mymensingh, Bangladesh and at the education team of a2i programme, Government of Bangladesh.
Currently, Sabiha is working as the Assessment Development and Analytic coordinator at Community Based Literacies (CBL) to contribute to the development of a more culturally inclusive and relevant assessment approach that will benefit school communities and the children that they serve. CBL is an interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multilingual community within UCSB, whose members position themselves as co-thinkers, co-researchers, co-designers, and co-creators with local youth and educators. Their programs aim to collaboratively foster explorations of literacy-driven topics and issues.
Dr. Carol Dixon, one of the individual’s behind this generous fellowship, is a Senior Lecturer with Security of Employment Emeritus in the Department of Education, where she worked from 1973 to 2009. During her tenure Dixon served as Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Education, and co-director of the South Coast Writing Project. As part of her work with SCWriP, she acted from 1987-1990 as the co-director of a three-year Literature Institute for Teachers (LIT), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She also was the co-director of an advanced institute funded by the California Writing Project, the Advanced Professional Leadership Institute for Teachers of Linguistically Diverse Students in 1993-1994, and the Advanced Institute on Literacy in 1996-1998. In 1990, she co-founded the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, a research collaborative of university faculty, graduate student researchers, and classroom teacher/researchers within the greater Santa Barbara area.
