Amber Rowland

Amber Rowland, Ph.D. is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Kansas, Center for Research on Learning and the Achievement and Assessment Institute. She is a Courtesy Associate Professor for the Department of Special Education and an Affiliate Researcher for the FLITE Center. She specializes in collaborative, practical and engaging adult professional learning with an emphasis on evidence-based practice and powerful integration of technology. She is particularly interested in the use of conversation in learning and is constantly pursuing methods for tapping into the collective capacity of educators through virtual coaching, virtual communities of practice, and the use of VECTOR, a virtual professional learning model that she and colleagues developed. 

She has been Co-Principal Investigator on multiple projects funded by NSF, OSEP, and IES. Current grants include Project VOISS and Project iKNOW http://projectiknow.org, $2.5 million each through OSEP studying how extended reality and artificial intelligence can help middle school students with Autism and learning disabilities learn and practice social competency skills and how best to support educators who implement and support student generalization of learned skills to the classroom. She is also Co-PI on another $2.5 million OSEP project called APLM WRITE, https://kucrl.ku.edu/aplm-online which includes a professional learning dashboard system designed to support middle school coaches, educators, and their students with disabilities as they learn to write. 

Her experiences range from Kindergarten to the college classroom where she has taught at multiple levels, both face-to-face and online. She has served as a technology integration specialist, project manager for the Technology Rich Classroom, Title IID initiative in Kansas, an instructor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas, Co-Director of the Literacy Network of Kansas, Co-Director of the Advanced Learning Technologies (ALTEC) Division of CRL, and the director of multiple federal, state, and local initiatives.

Dr. Rowland travels to local, state and national venues and conferences working with educators on digital-age instruction and the general integration of technology to support all learners, especially those who struggle. In 2008, Amber was recognized as one of the 20 emerging leaders in education technology by the National School Boards Association “20 to Watch” initiative and in 2016, she was recognized as a Kansas University, Woman of Distinction. In 2020, one of the articles her team wrote won the Technology in Action Article of the Year within the Journal of Special Education Technology and in 2021, the Kansas Striving Readers project that she helped secure and manage won the Literacy Legacy Award from Storytime Village in Kansas.