Research
Traversing the microgenetic (interactional), mesogenetic (institutional) and sociogenetic (society, history) contexts that configure STEM education, my work explores ways to ameliorate its use as a stratifying project of race, class, and gender in schools. In collaboration with teachers, my studies articulate the pedagogical design principles that promote racially minoritized children’s mathematics learning, while also engendering their sense of joy, agency, collectivism, and belonging.
Heterogeneity in STEM
Leveraging children’s everyday cultural practices in
STEM teaching is nontrivial. Funded by a Hellman
Fellowship and Nicholas Endowment grant, this
professional development seminar sought to support secondary teachers in exploring heterogeneity by designing engineering projects that integrate content learning with children’s cultural worlds.
Pedagogical Design
STE(A)M Education
This case study explored principals' perspectives on a STEAM education reform initiative in the middle schools of a metropolitan school district. The study was set in a southern U.S. city with a legacy of racial segregation, gentrification, and white flight from city schools. In sensemaking about the reform, neoliberal ideology dominated school leaders' perspectives. In an exercise in Black specificity, we propose Black Futurity STEAM as an alternative reform imaginary that centers the creative impulses and capacities of Black children and cultural life in disciplinary learning.
Makerspaces
Despite the rise in public library makerspaces, little is known about the grammar of their pedagogies. This study explores the perspectives and pedagogical work of artist mentors working with teens in a large public library makerspace emphasizing STEM, and the visual and performing arts. Through the language of prolepsis and telos, we describe the pedagogical practices of mentors as contracting or expanding the boundaries of what is possible in what counts as making and who counts as a maker.
Children's Mathematics Learning
Social Worlds of Peer Collaboration
Funded by a Spencer Foundation Fellowship, this yearlong ethnographic study explored the use of inclusive pedagogy known as Complex Instruction (CI) in a low-track Algebra class of racially minoritized students. I explored students’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion by peers, and their interplay with dynamics of racial stratification in the math program and community, more broadly.
Perseverance & Problem Solving as Collective Enterprise
While math practice standards describe individual fluency, this study explored children’s engagement in practices from a stance of collectivity. Using pre-Algebra tasks designed for multiple strategies, I explored the relationship between task design, productive struggle, and the processes and outcomes of problem solving.
Liking Learning
This teaching experiment engages longstanding debates over discovery and direct learning, with particular attention paid to children's affective engagement. Designed to compare a teacher’s use of guided and student inquiry in an elementary data and statistics unit, the study compared
children’s fluency in concepts and practices, and affective responses when learning and debating ideas together.