Faculty/Staff

Meredith Skura Ph.D., Yale 
Chair, Education Certification
Dr. Skura has published The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process and Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing and Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness. She teaches courses in Renaissance drama and has held Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), American Council of the Learned Societies (ACLS), and Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowships.
E-mail: skura@rice.edu

Jean Ashmore, M.S. California State University
Ms. Ashmore is the director of Disability Support Services and lecturer for Education Certification.  Her area of expertise is in special education with emphasis on teacher awareness and strategies for improving regular education services to students with various recognized disabilities.  She has special interest in facilitation of student self-advocacy skills and in universal design for instruction for facilitating access by all students, not just students identified as "special."
E-mail: ashmore@rice.edu

Lissa Heckelman, Ph.D., Claremont Graduate School
Director, Education Certification
A researcher and educator with experience in diverse situations, Dr. Heckelman has taught in Australia, Germany, and California, where she worked with high school and adult English and literacy students for eight years. Since arriving in Houston, she has worked in research and evaluation with the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and with the Rice/HISD Model Science Laboratory as a program evaluator. Her research interests include assessment of the teaching and learning process, with an emphasis on understanding how students demonstrate their achievements. She is director of the Rice University Summer School for Grades 8 through 12.
E-mail: heckel@rice.edu

Linda McNeil, Ph.D. ,University of Wisconsin
Dr. McNeil, professor, is a leading figure in national school reform and the author of Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge (1986), and Contradictions of School Reform: The Educational Cost of Standardized Testing (2000), which discuss the tension between educational excellence and bureaucratic control of schools. Her research and work in urban school reform center on the policies and organizational factors shaping teaching and learning. She has taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, was a visiting scholar at the Stanford University School of Education, was a visiting scholar at the Stanford University School of Education and has been a recipient of a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. She is the recent vice-president of the Curriculum Studies Division of the American Education Research Association. She is director of the Rice University Center for Education and was recently editor of the Social and Institutional Analysis Section of the American Educational Research Journal. Her research encompasses curriculum theory, urban schools, school organization and assessment, and educational policy.
E-mail: lmcneil@rice.edu

Anne N. Rinn, Ph.D., Indiana University
Anne Rinn is an educational psychologist with a specialization in gifted and honors education.  Her research focuses on the social and emotional development of gifted adolescents and college students, as well as on the impact of selective programs on gifted students' development.  She has numerous scholarly publications and presentations in the fields of gifted education and educational psychology, serves on several national committees in the fields of gifted education and honors education, has worked as a program evaluator across the country and serves on the editorial boards of Teaching Educational Psychology and Honors in Practice.
E-mail: Anne.N.Rinn@rice.edu

Roland Smith, Ed.D., Harvard
Dr. Smith is associate provost and adjunct professor of education and sociology. Administratively, he has special responsibilities for diversity outreach, recruitment, and retention issues. He also works to advance Rice’s commitment to cultural inclusiveness on the Diversity Task Force. He serves on the Graduate Council, Institutional Review Board (IRB) and coordinates the Mellon Undergraduate Fellows Program. Before coming to Rice, he served as a faculty member, director of the Urban Institute for Community and Educational Initiatives and executive assistant to the president at the University of Notre Dame. Having served on several regional and national boards, he serves as president of the American Association of Blacks in Higher.  Most recently, Houston's Mayor Bill White named Dr. Smith to the Houston Read Commission. His research interests include the culture of higher education, school-university collaboration, diversity in higher education and ethnographic methodology.
E-mail: rbsmith@rice.edu

Carolynne White, M.S.Ed. University of Houston
Carolynne White is a teacher and researcher in the use of technology in education.  She taught and consulted in special education in New Jersey before moving to Texas.  She coordinated Owlink, Rice University's Outreach Distance Education Project, connecting students at four high schools to Rice for an SAT preparation class.  She has designed and provided a teacher's summer training program on the use of computers in education and has taught computer skills to Model Science Lab teachers.
E-mail: cmwhite@rice.edu