Marissa Schweinfurth
Professional Development Coordinator
Education: M.A., Professional Education, Morningside College, 2016; ELP endorsement, Morningside College, 2021
As the new Professional Development Coordinator for JCCL, Marissa Schweinfurth has a number of project areas. First is her core commitment to improving professional development for Iowa teachers. Having taught elementary school for eleven years, she is working towards identifying teachers and school districts’ professional development needs, determining how much time they need for training, and what special areas they need training for (such as flex classrooms). Second, Schweinfurth is playing an active role in bringing back the Young Readers and Writers Conference to UNI. Whereas the original Conference mission was to select children based on their high reading levels, Schweinfurth is reinventing the Conference’s mission by inviting a whole grade level at a time (for example the entire 4th and 5th grade from Irving Elementary, where writing for numerous children is a struggle). The Conference will be held annually in May and will include breakout sessions for hip hop literacy (directed by Literacy Education scholar Dr. Shuaib Meacham), opinion writing, art development, and play writing. In other words, the Conference will introduce experimental literacy approaches that speak to young kids’ interests and literacy experiences.
Schweinfurth is also a Supervisor at the UNI Literacy Clinic where she mentors ten college students a semester, reviews lesson plans, and hosts teacher training seminars. She also serves as an adjunct professor for the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education. Finally, she is working on a JCCL’s UNI Literacy initiative for Iowa teachers. This collaborative outreach effort involves recruiting interested teachers to work on literacy-based projects of their own choosing, and help them present these projects to the Iowa Reader’s Association Conference held every June.
Schweinfurth comes to her position as a former teacher (11 years) who is currently earning her Ed.D. at UNI. Born and raised in Southeast Iowa, she has always been leaning towards being an educator. “Growing up I was always babysitting when I wasn’t playing a sport, so I naturally had a love of working with children,” she said. Her older sister went to UNI to become a teacher, and as she watched the early parts of her sister’s career, she solidified her decision to follow in her footsteps to make an impact on children’s lives. After graduating from UNI in Elementary Education with a minor in Literacy, Schweinfurth was hired as a teacher for the Waterloo school district and made her roots here in the Cedar Valley area.
Working in the Waterloo School District, Schweinfurth became a “collaborating teacher” to several pre-service teachers who attended UNI, which brought her to work with a few professors. It was this collaboration that helped her rethink her long term career goals. She earned her MA in Professional Education at Morningside College in 2016, and then recently took the leap towards beginning her doctorate at UNI. Her career goal is to teach at a college level and help prepare future teachers.