Feature: Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera

One of my favorite quotes comes from Althea Gibson: "No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you." This quote has resonated with me in how it highlights the importance of community and the need to work together, learn from one another, and uplift each other.  To recognize the community within the LDDL team, we will be posting individual features highlighting outstanding individuals who have contributed substantially to the team's shared goals. I am incredibly excited for this first post, which features an individual who has been integral to building the LDDL lab from the ground up, as she joined the team back when I started at UofSC in Fall 2018:  Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera.

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Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera

Major: Public Health
Expected Graduation: Spring 2021
Future Plans: Optometry
Years on LDDL Team: 2018 - present
Links: Discover UofSC 2019 and SCSHA 2020

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Jaddey Feliz-Cabrera joined the Literacy Development among Diverse Learners (LDDL) team in the fall of 2018. She has been closely involved in the initial establishment of the lab, supporting the growth and training of the team, and developing our work into increasingly meaningful spaces. As a graduating senior in 2021, Jaddey is a remarkably accomplished and capable individual. There is no question that she will be an asset to any environment she is a part of in the future. 

Jaddey has contributed to the lab through a wide variety of activities (partial list at the bottom of this feature), but there are three specific areas that stand out:

1. Project management
2. Navigating spaces of cultural and linguistic differences
3. Scholarly writing  

In the context of project management, Jaddey was an essential contributor in setting up the data collection, tracking, and entry systems for an ASHFoundation Grant awarded to the team (PIs: Lisa Fitton & Marc Goodrich) in 2020. Jaddey not only organized the preliminary systems, but also assisted substantially in problem-solving, noting errors that went unnoticed by the rest of the team. These contributions were invaluable to the functioning of the project, as small errors can have big negative impacts on data quality (and subsequently analyses and interpretation). Jaddey is also an expert in word-by-word language transcription, having spent hours listening and re-listening to audio files obtained from children who participated in study activities. In 2020, Jaddey further demonstrated both her skill in project management and her resilience, as she was a huge force in enabling the re-start of data processing using a secure, remote data management system (REDCap). Jaddey built the initial REDCap interface that is still used by the team today, and often shares essential feedback to improve the system. 

Jaddey is also highly skilled in navigating cultural and linguistic boundaries, where communication gaps restrict engagement between children, families, teachers, and service providers. Jaddey was a core member of a team partnering with the Good Samaritan Clinics (2019) to offer free walk-in bilingual language screenings to families of children ages 3-11 years. She communicated with parents, explaining the purpose and benefits of language screening, and with other interested professionals to advocate for the value of bilingual language development. Jaddey also has been essential to an effort (led by Molly Morgan) to develop a home and family systems questionnaire to support culturally-responsive practice for practitioners working with Spanish-speaking children and their families. She has worked as a key liaison between families, the research team, and schools in sharing areas of concern indicated by family members, core family strengths, and needs for advocacy and education. 

 Her contributions to scholarly writing are similarly outstanding, most notably through work on a manuscript initially conceptualized by Kaiela Campos which she later has assisted in refining. The manuscript, which has been submitted to the 2021 ASHA Convention and that will be under review this summer (summer 2021), focuses on improving understanding of typical and atypical variation in Spanish-English speaking children's responses to a bilingual sentence repetition task. Jaddey has contributed at all levels of this work: weekly meetings, audio transcription, error analysis and coding, cross-checking with careful fidelity checks, literature review, and manuscript writing. Few undergraduates dedicate sufficient time and effort to contribute to research experiences at this level. Jaddey not only has dedicated the time and effort, but also her own rich background experience, knowledge base (which she continues to develop) and her strong intellect to this work. It is an ambitious project likely to contribute valuable information to the education professions.

Additional Work by Jaddey*

• Discover USC presentation proposal and poster in 2019
• SCSHA presentation proposal and poster in 2020
• Literature reviews & reference management: bilingual language development research
• Data entry, cross-checking, and fidelity checks (data management)
• ​Administered standardized educational assessments in Spanish and English to children in PreK-Grade 1 at a local elementary school
• Trained other undergraduate lab members in reliable test adminstration, scoring, data entry, and data management
• Contributed to the development of training content and materials related to cultural responsiveness
• Spanish-English interpreting (in-person and over the phone)

*This is not an exhaustive list. It would not be possible to put onto paper everything Jaddey has done to build (and build up) the LDDL Team.

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We will be posting more regular features to highlight individual contributions within the Literacy Development among Diverse Learners Team. If you have any questions about any team members, please do not hesitate to reach out to me (FITTONL@mailbox.sc.edu)