Amanda J. Godley

  • Vice Provost for Graduate Studies

Key Areas

Graduate student resources • Pitt graduate programs • Pitt professional programs • new graduate/professional program development • support for graduate/professional students • graduate/professional student policies • postdoctoral scholars and associates • graduate student guidelines

Vice Provost Role

As Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, Amanda Godley provides oversight of graduate and professional programs and policies, provides resources for and promotes graduate studies, and works to enhance the experiences of graduate and professional students and postdoctoral scholars across the University. She works collaboratively with schools and programs to develop and strengthen graduate and professional education and to provide all students and postdoctoral scholars with a fulfilling experience at the University of Pittsburgh that prepares them to have an impact on the world. She also chairs the University Council on Graduate Studies and works with the Graduate and Professional Student Government and the Postdoctoral Association.

Professional Biography

Amanda Godley joined the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. In addition to being Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, she is a Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Leading in the School of Education and holds secondary appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program. She is also a faculty fellow in the Center for Urban Education and the Honors College, and a center associate at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC).

Godley’s research is focused on improving instructional quality and equity at the college and high school levels and relates to educational excellence, diversity and innovation. She pursues three strands of research: high-quality classroom discussions, dialect diversity and inclusion in the classroom, and peer review and revision of writing, particularly in urban schools. Her most recent line of research draws from advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to develop computer-based methods and apps for supporting writing development and high-quality classroom talk in high school and college settings. Godley’s research has been funded by the American Educational Research Association, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Dr. Godley is the author of the book Critical Language Pedagogy: Interrogating Language, Dialects and Power in Teacher Education (2018, Peter Lang). Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Educational Researcher, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, Linguistics and Education, and Urban Education. In addition to her scholarship, Godley has led numerous educational workshops for school districts, national professional development organizations, and universities. 

Education & Training

  • PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture, University of California at Berkeley
  • MA in Language, Literacy and Culture, University of California at Berkeley
  • BA in Classics and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, University of Chicago

Representative Publications

  • Olshefski, C., Lugini, L., Singh, R., Litman, D. & Godley, A. (2020). The Discussion Tracker Corpus of Collaborative Argumentation. For Conference Proceedings of the 2020 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.  
  • Jensen, E., Donnelly, P.J., Dale, M., Kelly, S., Godley, A., D’Mello, S. (2019). Toward Automated Feedback on Teacher Discourse to Enhance Teaching Effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Honolulu, Hawaii.
  •  Stone, C., Donnelly, P.J., Dale, M., Capello, S., Kelly, S., Godley, A., D’Mello, S. (2019).  Utterance-level modeling of indicators of engaging classroom discourse. In Proceedings of the 2019 Educational Data Mining Conference. Montreal, Canada.  
  • Godley, A. J. & Reaser, J. (2018). Critical language pedagogy: Interrogating language, dialects and power in teacher education. “Social Justice Across Contexts in  Education” Series. Peter Lang Publishing. 
  • Loretto, A., DeMartino, S. & Godley, A. J. (2016). Secondary students’ perceptions of peer review of writing. Research in the Teaching of English, 51(2), 134-161. 

Research Interests

  • Equity and diversity in education
  • Literacy learning, writing and peer review
  • Urban education
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Educational applications of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

Awards

  • School of Education Dean's Distinguished Mentoring Award, 2021
  • Senior Vice Chancellor for Engagement Partnerships of Distinction Award, 2020
  • Spencer Foundation Mid-Career Grant Awardee, 2016-2017.
  • Citizen Activist Award, Keystone Research Center/Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, 2012
  • National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2005-2007