Lutrill & Pearl Payne School of Education Professors DiCarlo and Sulentic Dowell Participate in Extensive International Webinar

March 28, 2023

BATON ROUGE, LA - Two Lutrill & Pearl Payne School of Education faculty were invited to participate in an inclusive international webinar, sponsored by Lumivero, an international data and software management corporation that produces products such as NVivo qualitative software. Initially, a representative from the company reached out to Sulentic Dowell regarding Productivity and Publishing, a writing text she co-authored along with colleague, DiCarlo, Dr. Leah Katherine Saal (2013 LSU Alum), Associate Professor at Loyola – Maryland, and Dr. Tynisha D. Willingham, Vice President of Academic Affairs and Chief Academic Officer at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia. The representative was impressed with the text and inquired if the authors would be amenable to sharing their expertise with an international audience of doctoral students, newly-minted PhDs, and novice researchers, explaining that the webinar would be presented by Citavi, Lumivero’s reference management and writing software company.

The writing team agreed and crafted the webinar to specifically discuss strategic, targeted scholarly writing productivity supports that build discipline and writing skill and highlights the strategic thinking that is involved in realizing a successful career producing and publishing as an academic. The Tuesday, March 7, 2023, webinar reached a wide-ranging audience of over a thousand novice scholars from such diverse countries such as Turkey, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Spain, the Philippines, France, South Africa, Ghana, the UK, Zimbabwe, Canada, Sweden, Iraq, and from universities across the USA as well as scholars from Albania, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Jordan, Ireland, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Nepal.

Sulentic Dowell, Director of the LSU Writing Project and Coordinator of the PhD Program in Educational Leadership and who maintains a robust cadre of doctoral students commented, “In my years at LSU, I have observed that scholarly, academic writing can seem mystifying at times. Being a successful academic means that a new scholar becomes productive by translating ideas into research and research into publications, and we were interested in reaching an international audience.” DiCarlo, who is the Executive Director of the Early Childhood Educational Laboratory Preschool on the LSU campus and who coordinates the Early Childhood Teacher Preparation Program, provided, “Each month since the invitation, we were amazed at both the interest and the growing number of participants who were indicating they would join in the webinar. Facing a total of 1029 participants at once was somewhat daunting, but we remained focused on our overall goal of helping novice scholars become productive. The experience was energizing and motivating.”

The Lutrill & Pearl Payne School of Education is a campus leader in terms of doctoral students. Laura Hensley Choate, Interim Director, offered the following quote, “This is exactly the kind of work our faculty should be doing – reaching out to the community and providing resources to novice scholars and doctoral students."