“Dr. Uhry served as a leader in preparing teachers at the Graduate School of Education for over 20 years,” said Virginia Roach, Ed.D., dean of GSE. 

Uhry spearheaded several GSE programs. She served as the chair of the division of curriculum and teaching, director of the advanced certification program in literacy, director of the initial teacher certification program, and coordinator of the childhood education program. She retired from GSE in 2015.

The focus of her research was on understanding how to teach children to read—particularly children with dyslexia. Among her research publications are Finger-Point Reading in Kindergarten: The Role of Phonemic Awareness, One-to-One Correspondence and Rapid Serial Naming (Scientific Studies of Reading, 2002) and Dyslexia: Theory & Practice of Instruction (York Press, 2005), a book she co-authored with a colleague at Columbia Teachers College.

Uhry was also responsible for securing nearly $3 million in grant funds for the Ennis William Cosby Graduate Certificate Program at GSE—a six-course program that prepared educators to teach reading and writing to young children with learning differences. In addition, she was instrumental in Fordham’s elementary education program winning the U.S. Department of Education’s award for excellence in teacher education programs. 

“Joanna was a tireless supporter for both teachers in the field as well as students in New York City classrooms,” said her longtime colleague, Molly Ness, Ph.D., associate professor in curriculum and teaching at the Graduate School of Education. 

‘The First Thing Joanna Did Was Read to Her’ 

Outside of academia, Uhry was a gardener, cook, ceramicist, weaver, painter, and photographer. At home, she directed family plays and movies. She was also a “huge patron of the arts,” said Ness. After classes were done for the day, they’d sometimes watch a symphony or ballet at Lincoln Center together. But the memory that stands out, said Ness, is the day that Uhry met Ness’ daughter. 

In 2010, Ness’ daughter was born at Mount Sinai West, just two blocks away from the Lincoln Center campus. In between classes, Uhry came to the hospital and cradled the newborn in her arms. She was the third person to hold her.

“The first thing Joanna did was read to her,” Ness said. “And that just, to me, spoke to how much she loved reading, preparing young readers, and preparing teachers to infuse classrooms with a love of reading.” 

It was a passion that she passed onto her doctoral students. In phone interviews, they said she taught them the “little things” that shape children’s reading habits, like pointing to words in a book and reading stories out loud. She emphasized equity in the classroom and respecting students’ native languages. And she did it all with a warm—sometimes dry—sense of humor, a patient presence, and a “twinkle in her eyes,” they said. 

“I didn’t know anything about the developmental stages of reading, even though at that point, I had been teaching for seven years,” said Gary Wellbrock, Uhry’s GSE mentee who graduated with a Ph.D. in language, literacy, and learning in 2015. “It was what she taught me that moved me … I became a reading specialist because of her.” 

Lessons in Literacy and Parenthood 

Uhry made her teaching personal. She showed her mentees old-school, grainy VHS tapes of her daughters with their children and explained that the ways the mothers and children were interacting—the babies cooing, the mothers responding to their sounds, their direct eye contact—were examples of important oral language development. 

Cayne Letizia, a middle school English teacher in Westchester County who was mentored by Uhry, said he remembered Uhry’s lesson when he became a father. 

“I always thought reading was just words and letters on a page, but she said the roots of it are in oral language development. So encourage kids to talk and play and touch and point,” said Letizia, who earned a Ph.D. from Fordham in language, literacy, and learning in 2010. “When I was having kids, I was like, oh my God—this really works.”

Uhry cared for her mentees beyond the classroom. Jean Marie Humphries, O.S.U., who graduated with a Ph.D. in language, literacy, and learning in 2013, remembered when a GSE peer had learned that her father had passed away. At the time, Uhry, Humphries, and the young woman were working with students and teachers at a local public school. 

“I can see ourselves sitting in the school cafeteria, over by the side, and Dr. Uhry comforting this young woman, talking with her, and then going through the steps of us taking a cab back to Fordham to really work out everything,” recalled Sister Humphries, now principal of Academy of Mount St. Ursula in the Bronx. “It just spoke volumes to me about the woman Dr. Uhry was.” 

Wellbrock recalled a book she had gifted him: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. The main characters are a mute boy who speaks only in sign language and his pet dog. When she read the book, she thought of Wellbrock—an early childhood educator at the American Sign Language and English Lower School in Manhattan.

“When I heard the news [about her passing], I took the book off my bookshelf and read her note,” Wellbrock said. “Those extra, above and beyond things that you wouldn’t expect of a mentor, but so thoughtful and touching … that’s something I’ll always cherish.”

An Enduring Legacy 

Uhry was born on February 15, 1937, in Charlotte, North Carolina, to Barbara Mosenthal and Winston Trowbridge Kellogg. She grew up in Birmingham, Michigan, and she attended Kingswood/Cranbrook Schools, a private preparatory school in the same state. She went on to attend Brown University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art history in 1959. That same year, she married acclaimed playwright Alfred Uhry, whom she met at Brown.

For many years, she was a grade school teacher at the Calhoun School, a private school in Manhattan that sparked her interest in learning disabilities. She went on to earn two master’s degrees and an Ed.D. in education at Columbia University. Uhry taught students as a member of the faculty at Columbia Teachers College until she joined Fordham’s faculty in 1994. In honor of 20 years of service at Fordham, she received the University’s Bene Merenti medal in 2014.

She is survived by her husband; four daughters, Emily, Elizabeth, Kate, and Eleanor; two sisters, Constance and Emily; and eight grandchildren. 

Contributions in Uhry’s memory may be made to Lewy Body Dementia Association, 912 Killian Hill Rd., SW, Lilburn, GA 30047 or to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, POB 5014, Hagerstown, MD 21741. A memorial service will be held later this fall in New York City. 

The letters JRS may be meaningless to adults, but if a first grader writes them to signify a woman’s dress, it may mean that child is a better reader than one might think.

As Joanna Uhry, Ed.D., professor of education, explains, there is a way for the child’s teacher to help him or her make the transition from “JRS” to “dress.”

“Kids’ spellings are a great interest of mine,” she said. “You can tell so much about what processes they’re using to write and to read.”

Uhry’s work occurs at the time of life when language—that most defining characteristic of humans—begins to make sense. She supervises the Graduate School of Education’s Ennis William Cosby Graduate Certificate Program, which is funded by a grant from the Hello Friend/Ennis William Cosby Foundation.

The nine-year-old program is dedicated to the memory of comedian Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis. It consists of six courses designed to expand the range of strategies used in teaching reading and writing to young children with learning differences.

The foundation was established in 1997 to celebrate the life of Ennis Cosby and to help fulfill his educational dreams. Ennis was studying to become the kind of teacher who could reach all children—even those who struggled to learn—so it was a natural connection to start such a program for teachers, Uhry said. The grant has brought in nearly $3 million since its inception, and its effects have been profound.

“These are teachers who are, by and large, successful, but have children in their classes who are struggling,” Uhry said. “Every year, we work with about 27 teachers from high-needs, urban early childhood, kindergarten, first and second grade classes, and we’ve taught and learned from them.

“There have been about 225 teachers who, in turn, have taught more than 20,000 children,” she continued. “So here are 20,000 children taking advantage of these six extra courses in beginning reading. To look back on that is very exciting.”

The program directly informs Uhry’s own research, which she has detailed in Finger-Point Reading in Kindergarten: The Role of Phonemic Awareness, One-to-One Correspondence and Rapid Serial Naming (Scientific Studies of Reading, 2002) and Dyslexia: Theory & Practice of Instruction (York Press, 2005), a book she co-authored with a colleague at Columbia Teachers College.

The subject attracted her interest early in her career, when she was teaching art.

“I was absolutely fascinated that some of my best art students couldn’t read,” she said. “Somebody could be very expressive in paint or clay and have a big vocabulary when he spoke aloud, but just not be able to read. I asked myself why kids can struggle so much in one area but not another?”

People with reading problems, such as dyslexia, were once thought to be damaged in the part of the brain that handles reading, Uhry said. But it has been established that language is processed in different parts of the brain. So the key is understanding how different connections are made in the 15 to 20 percent of the population that struggles with word-level reading in the early grades.

The highlight for the program, which has 29 students this year, is the after-school tutoring that takes place at Public School 163 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“We wanted to be in a school that was high-functioning, so that when we got there, there would actually be kids for us to tutor and rooms for us to tutor in,” she said. “There are kids who are struggling readers there, but the school is very well managed.”

In her own research, Uhry focuses on finger-point reading, which happens when five- or six-year-old children hear books read to them so often, they learn to repeat the words from memory, even if they can’t map the speech onto the words yet.

“What we found is that some kids can construct spellings themselves by hearing,” she said. “And this helps them with mapping speech sounds onto printed letters in books.”

“For example, if I were going to invent the spelling for a word—take mother—that’s a very complicated word to spell,” she explained. “But if children listen very carefully, they can hear the mmm sound, and mmm sounds like the name of the letter. The letter M makes the mmm sound, so they’re reading mmmmmother, and they’re seeing M, so they know to point there.”

But English is chock full of consonants that don’t sound the way they are used in words, like W, which could be spelled as “doubleyou.”

“Kids do these things that are really rule-based,” Uhry said. “Their rule is when you hear a sound, you find a letter that sounds like the sound. So when you ask them to spell ‘once,’ they’ll spell YNS. The letter Y begins with the sound wha, wha—which is the same as ‘once,’ so the word ends up as YNS. We see this same spelling over and over again in kids who’ve never met each other.”

This is the same logic that will lead a child who looks at a dress to write down JRS.

To the teacher who is not well-versed in linguistics, she said, the reaction might be to teach the child to memorize how to spell “once” or “dress.”

“These kids can memorize a few words, but they don’t understand the phonological structure,” Uhry said. “Eventually you can point to the dictionary and say ‘This is how it is,’ but not with five year olds.”