Rate My Professor Mary McVee

Mary McVee is Professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction at the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education, specializing in Literacy Education, and serves as Director of the Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction (CLaRI) since 2007. She earned her PhD in 1999 and MA in 1994 from Michigan State University, and her BA in 1988 from the University of Montana, Missoula. McVee's research specializations include literacy instruction, digital media and learning, multimodality, embodiment and digital literacy, discourse analysis, ethnography, diversity, race, inequality and education, linguistic and sociocultural contexts, qualitative research methods, and engineering education with a focus on disciplinary literacies and engineering habits of mind. Her work explores how elementary school children and teachers communicate engineering design literacies and integrates positioning theory to examine sociocultural perspectives in literacy. McVee has held significant leadership roles, including Chair of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Semiotics in Education Special Interest Group from 2020 to 2022, Chair of the 2022 Positioning Theory Conference, Organizing Committee Member for the Positioning Theory Conference, and Advisory Board Member for the Literacy Research Center and Clinic at the University of Wyoming. She has contributed to editorial efforts as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Literacy Research and as Guest Editor for a themed issue on Disciplinary Literacies, Engineering, and Equity.

McVee has received prestigious awards, including the AERA Division G Mentoring Award in 2025, the University at Buffalo 2022-2023 Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award, the Graduate School of Education STAR Award for Advising in 2021, and the AERA Division K Mid-Career Award in 2007. She was an Invited Member of the National Technology Leadership Summit in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Her scholarly impact is evident in highly cited publications such as "Schema theory revisited" (2005, Review of Educational Research), co-edited book "Multimodal composing in classrooms" (2012), "Positioning theory and sociocultural perspectives" (2011), "Positioning theory" chapter (2018, Theoretical models and processes of literacy), "Disciplinary literacies and engineering habits of mind" (2022, Pedagogies: An International Journal), and the forthcoming edited volume "The Routledge International Handbook of Positioning Theory" (2025). Additional works include explorations of posthumanism and positioning theory (2023, International Encyclopedia of Education) and intersecting engineering and literacies in K-12 education (2021, Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research). Through CLaRI and projects like NSF-funded initiatives for preparing teachers in engineering instruction, McVee advances teacher education and interdisciplinary literacy practices.