Julianne Norman serves as a Technical Advisor for RTI’s School-Related Gender-Based Violence (SRGBV), School Climate, and Social Emotional Learning-related projects and research activities. Under USAID/Uganda’s Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity (LARA), Ms. Norman contributed to the creation of the Journeys Handbooks, which focus on the role school community members, students, and teachers have in building a positive and support school climate and preventing school-related gender-based violence. Journeys was fully endorsed by the Uganda Ministry of Education and Sports, which adopted it as policy and a mandatory program for all primary schools in Uganda.
In 2017, Ms. Norman won an RTI Professional Development Award providing her internal research funds (IR&D) to develop and pilot the use of Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interview (ACASI) as a platform for collecting data on children’s experiences of gender-based violence in and around school. She served as the Principal Investigator for this study and led a team of researchers to expand this work. The team’s research provided early evidence of ACASI to reduce response bias, improve accuracy of self-reported data on experiences of violence and protect the confidentiality of children who disclose sensitive information regarding victimization.
Ms. Norman joined RTI in 2015 and currently provides project management support for the USAID-funded Read Liberia Activity, serves as the SEL Technical Advisor for USAID’s Tusome Pamoja project in Tanzania, and is the Project Manager under the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Implementing the Science of Teaching grant that drives research and dissemination of best practices in foundational literacy and numeracy at-scale.