Goldstick Family Scholar
The Goldstick Family Scholar provides leadership to the annual Goldstick Family Lecture Series on Communication Disorders, identifying and inviting a leading scholar in the field to address a public audience and meet with faculty and students about their lines of related research.
Michele Schutz, Ph.D.
Michele Schutz, assistant professor in the Department of Special Education, is the fifth faculty member to be named the Goldstick Family Scholar since the program began in the early 2000s. Schutz earned her Ph.D. in Special Education from Vanderbilt University. She previously taught high school students with disabilities and worked as a transition specialist connecting students to postsecondary opportunities.
Schutz's scholarship, teaching, and public engagement are centered on helping individuals with extensive support needs transition from high school to employment settings. Her research aims to bridge a significant gap for students with disabilities in rural communities as they age out of high school and transition to other settings. Schutz's work in the field promotes collaboration between community partners, faculty, college students, families, and individuals with disabilities to improve awareness, knowledge, and support for individuals with disabilities. Her work often engages individuals with extensive support needs, giving them a voice in the discourse about their support and services.
Past Goldstick Scholars
Cheryl Light Shriner
Dr. Light Shriner has had cross disciplinary training and she approaches the preparation of teachers and other future professionals in a similar manner across all age ranges and settings. She has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with a Concentration in Special Education/Severe Disabilities. She is also a Board Certified Behavior Analyst-Doctoral Level (BCBA-D) which indicates that she has substantial training in applied behavior analysis. She also has training in augmentative and alternative communication, systematic instruction within special education settings, educational psychology, and therapeutic recreation. She has expertise working with individuals: 1) with limited communication and social skills, 2) who demonstrate challenging behaviors, 3) with autism, 4) with moderate to severe intellectual or developmental disabilities, and 5) with physical or multiple disabilities. Dr. Light Shriner promotes collaboration between community agencies, faculty, college students, families, and individuals with disabilities in order to improve awareness, knowledge, and supports for these individuals.Hedda Meadan
Hedda Meadan, PhD, BCBA-D, is the Snyder Distinguished Professor in the Department of Special Education and Child Development at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a former Goldstick Family Scholar, and a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Hedda’s areas of interest include social-communication skills, challenging behavior of young children with autism and other developmental disabilities, and intervention methods to enhance these spheres of functioning. Hedda and her colleagues have developed a parent-implemented intervention program designed to improve the social-communication skills of young children with disabilities who have minimal expressive language. Two of her current research projects focus on using technology to support service providers/therapists and families of children with disabilities. In the first project, telehealth is used to coach service providers/therapists and family members from a distance on evidence-based strategies to promote children's social-communication skills. The second project aims to develop an app to help identify the function of and address the challenging behavior of children with and without disabilities.Michaelene "Micki" Ostrosky
Dr. Michaelene M. Ostrosky’s educational background and research focus on early childhood special education with a particular interest in inclusion, social emotional competence, social interaction and peer relationships, challenging behavior, and communication delays and disabilities. Through her work Professor Ostrosky strives to promote caring, inclusive communities where all children are accepted, and differences are celebrated. As a former teacher of young children who were deaf and blind, Professor Ostrosky is committed to making research accessible to practitioners and family members through her writing and presentations.Jim Halle
For more than 35 years, he has been involved in research related to the communication and language development of children with disabilities. This program of research has focused on examining both the social communication of young children with significant intellectual disability and the ecological factors that facilitate and discourage communicative growth. He has also worked on developing interventions to encourage more effective and efficient communication by these children.
Recent projects include assessing current dictionaries of prelinguistic forms used by children with severe disabilities to communicate and the functions (e.g., request, protest, comment) these forms serve for the children. In addition, he investigates the effects of listener (un)responsiveness on the dictionary of forms. An exciting area of inquiry is communicative repair. For many children, their signals are ambiguous, and listeners often misunderstand their intent. A primary focus of investigation is how these children "repair" their communicative acts when their first effort is misunderstood. We have found that they often engage in challenging behavior as a repair strategy because such behavior recruits the attention of adults or results in the intended outcome. Our effort is to teach alternative means of repair that serve the same function and do so more efficiently and effectively than their current forms.